Do you remember?

It’s a familiar feeling – you walk into a room to get something and you instantly forget why you’re there. The human memory is a strange thing. Why are we able to remember details from years past yet we can’t recall the name of that lovely café we found earlier today? Here are 10 amazing facts about your memory.

1. It’s essentially limitless – How much can we actually remember? While it is incredibly hard to quantify something that is seen as being limitless, in a response to a reader of the Scientific American Mind in 2010, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, said that our memory falls into the “several petabyte range” which equates to “2,000 years-worth of MP3 song files”.

2. Scent helps you remember -  Human memory is so complex that it can associate scent with certain events or situations. This means that a smell can trigger the memory in your mind that’s associated with the scent. Why does this happen? Well, it’s all down to the hippocampus part of your brain. The hippocampus is responsible not only for the formation of new memories, but it also interacts with your sense of smell. This explains why whenever we smell sun cream, we instantly think of holidays.

3. You can have false memories – Memories aren’t always reliable and this is especially true when it comes to our childhood memories. Often we mistakenly believe that we have a first-hand memory of something from when we were small, only to later find out that we’re recalling a story that was told to us. This fact presents a host of difficulties, especially for the legal system. A case in point? A paper published in Psychological Science revealed that researchers were able to convince 71 per cent of participants that they had committed a crime as a teenager, while in reality none of them had ever had police contact during their teenage years. Scary.

4. You need to make it work – We’re more likely to remember information that we have to work at. For example, researchers from Princeton University and Indiana University discovered that printing study notes in an usual and hard-to-read font promoted better memory recall from study participants. Researchers concluded that making our brains work with the hard-to-read fonts encourages “deeper processing strategies” which result in easier memory recall.

5. Forgetting also helps – According to popular belief, repetition is the key to good memory recall because it keeps what you’re learning ‘fresh’ in your mind. However, researchers from UCLA found that the opposite was true. According to Robert and Elizabeth Bjork (a husband and wife research duo), you need to forget a new piece of information before you remember it in order to make the memory stronger. So basically, the more a new memory fades before you try to recall it, the more your ability to recall that memory improves over time. Confused? Us too.

6. Your emotions play a part – In order to figure out what memories are important, your brain ranks them in terms of the emotional intensity you attach to them. This means that things you have a strong emotional reaction to, like the birth of a child, is easier to recall than your weekly shopping list.  

7. Memories are scattered – You’d be forgiven for thinking that memories are stored in one part of your brain, but actually memories are processed in a host of different parts of the brain. For example, your visual memories are stored in one place, sounds in another and tastes in another part.

8. Your memories start early – Yes, believe it or not, we start making memories when we’re in the womb. Dubbed ‘foetal memory’ researchers from the Netherlands found that short-term memory was present in foetuses from 30-38 weeks old. The researchers used sound and found that the foetuses remembered the noise every time it was replayed. They were even able to recall the sound four weeks later.

9. Fast information? Not so great – One of the biggest luxuries of our time is being able to quickly look up anything we want to know via the internet. ‘Google it’ as the saying goes. However, according to recent studies, being able to access information so conveniently makes us less like to remember it. Why? Well our brain likes to work in order to remember things, so it tends to switch off when it knows it can find that information again by typing it into a search engine.

10. Storytelling helps – Want to remember something easily? Try telling a story around the information/event you’re trying to remember. As humans our brains are built for creating stories, and by incorporating important information into a story, you’re making it much easier for your brain to recall it. This is why a mother can always remember the events that occurred on the day her child was born, for example.