This view
of memory creates some problems. For one thing, closets can get crowded. Things
too easily disappear. Even with the biggest closet, you eventually run out of
space. If you want to pack some new memories in their-well, too bad. There’s no
room.
Brain researchers
have shattered this image to bits. Memory is not a closet. It’s not a place or
a thing. Instead, memory is a process.
On a
conscious level, memories appear as distinct and unconnected mental events:
words, sensations, images. They can include details form the distant past – the
smell of cookies baking in your grandmother’s kitchen or the feel of sunlight
warming your face through the window of your first-grade classroom.
On a
biological level, each of those memories involves millions of nerve cells, or
neurons, firing chemical messages to each other. If you could observe these
exchanges in real time, you’d see regions of cells all over the brain glowing with
electrical charges at speed that would put a computer to shame.
When a
series of cells connects several times in a similar pattern, the result is a
memory. Psychologist Donald Hebb uses the ophorism “Neurons which fire
together, wire together” to describe this principle. This means that memories
are not really “stored.” Instead, remembering is a process in which you encode
information as links between active neurons that fire together. You also
decode, or reactivate, neurons that wired together in the past.
Memory is
the probability that certain patterns of brain activity will occur again in the
future. In effect, you re-create a memory each time you recall it.
Whenever
you learn something new, your brain changes physically by growing more
connections between neurons. The more you learn, the greater the number of
connections. For all practical purposes, there’s no limit to how many memories
your brain can encode.
There’s
a lot you can do to wire those neural networks into place. That’s where the
memory techniques described in my blog come into play. Step out of your crowded
mental closet into a world of infinite possibilities.
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