Ignoring Stuff Is Good for Your Memory

[flamingdem]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/ignoring-stuff-is-good-for-your-memory/?wt.mc=SA_Twitter-Share

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So, when scientists say that you can keep a certain number of things in working memory, these individual things can be of varying size, complexity, and importance. Either way, working memory is small but really important.

Working memory

What is working memory? Working memory is your brain’s dashboard. It’s the place you can temporarily put information while your brain decides whether or not it is worth the effort to put it somewhere more permanent, like your long-term memory.

As it turns out, different senses have different dashboard capacity. This means that how much you can remember seems to depend on whether, for example, someone says something to you or shows something to you. Because of this, it is important to look at different types of working memory separately.

To make matters even more complicated, each and every person has a different ability to keep things in working memory. These individual differences in working memory capacity are important because they have been shown to strongly predict things like intelligence; more working memory capacity generally equals more intelligence.

But, why are some people able to keep more in their working memory than others?

Ignoring stuff

Lucky for us, new research by a team of scientists at Simon Fraser University has shed light on why some people may be able to keep more things on their brain dashboards than others.

The research team, led by psychology professor John McDonald and doctoral student John Gaspar, learned about differences in visual memory by recording people’s brain waves and tracking how they paid attention.

At this point you might be asking, why are we talking about attention? Well, attention and memory are inextricably linked. By paying attention to an object, you increase its representation in the brain and make it easier to remember.

[Make7]

1. Welcome to my Ignore List. ( n/t )

[font style="color:#ffffff; background-color:#ffffff;"]This is not intended as a factual statement.[/font]

[flamingdem]

2. hey!

[DamnYankeeInHouston]

3. I ignore grown up's names to remember kids' names.

For thirty something years I memorized class lists, sometimes multiple classes, and then erased them in June.