Memory

The November issue of Men's Journal magazine features a brief article by Laurel Berger titled Boost Your Memory. In the article Berger begins by sharing a memory trick used by Ron White, who is the winner of this year's USA Memory Championship. When remembering the names of people he just met, White focuses his attention on an outstanding feature of each individual and makes a violent or gory mental association between the person's name and that specific feature. This causes the amygdala, a structure in the brain, to send out an amplified response. According to Melina Uncapher, a scientist at the Stanford Memory Lab, "an excited amygdala increases the probablilty that the hippocampus, which presses the 'record' button in your brain, will pick up the signal and register the memory permanently." In 2002, British researchers, using MRI technology, came to the conclusion that "superior memory was not driven by structural brain differences" and that anyone has the ability to enhance their memory retention either through the use of memory-improving drugs which may have harmful side effects or through a lifestyle which includes eating healthy, regular exercise, and 7 hours of sleep each night.

According to Chapter 6 in our textbook, memory is "an active system that receives information from the senses, puts that information into a usable from, and organizes it as it stores it away, and then retrieves the information from storage." Ron White's trick is to get the information stored in his long term memory which is where information is kept permanently. Information must be encoded in related meanings and concepts in order to store it in long term memory. The "gory" associations that Ron White makes mentally as he meets crowds of people help him store their names in his long term memory. White then uses the visual cues from their outstanding features to enable him to retrieve their names from his long term memory.