Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

When you were a student, what were you most afraid of seeing in your textbook? I believe that some of the students' answers are "recite and dictate the full text".

We always sigh that there are too many things to remember, but there is never enough brainpower and time. When we stay up late to review before exams, fantasizing about having some kind of metaphysics or "memory bread" can help us become "quantum speed reading geniuses".

Memory always makes us love and hate, but there is no need to worry. Although there is no such test artifact as "memory bread" in the world, there are ways to improve and improve memory.

Is photographic memory real? In retrospect, have you ever met such a classmate in your life: he seems to have an unforgettable ability, and reciting is as easy as eating the "memory bread" of do A Dream.

Photo Source: animation "do La A Dream" the author once met such a student. According to her description, when she was in junior high school, she could recite half of a political book during a lunch break. During the exam, the content of the book was imprinted on her mind like a photo. You can even read it back and forth. After hearing her description, everyone felt very envious.

Is this photographic memory really common?

If we want to know the answer to a question, we must first understand the process of memory formation-how do we remember things?

Generally speaking, memory consists of three stages: coding, storage and retrieval. You can think of the brain as a library, which can be divided into three regions: the hall is called "instantaneous memory", where all the information received from the outside world is gathered to wait for further instructions. Some memories stay here for a while and then leave. Some memories are favored and left by the brain, thus entering the other two regions-the "short-term memory" library and the "long-term memory" library. Now let's take a look at how valued information is left behind.

Have you noticed the label at the bottom of the spine of the library? It usually consists of one letter plus four or six digits, but don't underestimate this label. With it, people familiar with the library can efficiently and accurately locate the target from a dazzling array of books. This is the important point of coding.

Image source: pexels similarly, the brain encodes the information to be stored and labels it uniquely. When different people see the same thing, they will form different codes and different labels, which are called "psychological representations" in cognitive science.

Psychological representation includes the original processing and psychological processing of information.

For example, if you get good grades in the exam, your parents reward you with a gift you've been waiting for for a long time. When the brain encodes this message, the shape and color of the gift, the joy of receiving the gift, the expression of the parents, and so on come to mind at the same time.

In addition to these simple and direct messages, some deeper messages will also appear: for example, you are determined to continue to study hard, or to cherish this hard-won gift, which are all psychological representations after coding.

Once the coding is completed, the information can officially enter the library of the brain. Then we move on to the second stage of memory: storage. Some messages are sent to the "short-term memory" museum, and some messages are sent to the "long-term memory" museum. Whether this process can be completed well or not is closely related to the type of memory, personal memory ability and brain health.

The third stage is extraction. The process of racking one's brains to recall sentences in a book during dictation is the process of memory retrieval by the brain. We all have this experience, some knowledge points in the examination room can not remember, the more nervous, the brain seems to be more blank, but not long out of the examination room to remember. This shows that there is no problem with memory storage, but there is something wrong with the retrieval in the examination room.

Why is there something wrong with the extraction process?

There are two reasons: first, it may be the first stage of memory-- the coding is not detailed enough, just like when organizing a document, the simpler the document description is, the harder it is to consult afterwards. Second, perhaps because of excessive tension, people secrete a hormone called cortisol when they are nervous and anxious. A small amount of cortisol can promote learning and improve attention, but a large amount of cortisol can seriously affect memory formation and retrieval. Therefore, if you encounter this situation in the examination room, you might as well put down your pen and take a deep breath for 1 minute to calm yourself down and continue to answer the question.

After understanding the three stages of memory, let's go back to the original question: does photographic memory really exist? Before we answer this question, let's do a little experiment. Now, please take a closer look at the following picture, 10 seconds later, brush this page up, and then read on.

Now, answer the following questions:

How many patterns are there in this picture? What are the differences? What's their color? What's the order?

If you memorized this picture consciously just now, you may be able to answer it, but if you don't memorize it deliberately, I believe you can answer one or two by "impression". However, when you looked back just now, what was the "impression" in your mind?

In technical terms, the memory that you will find that it is still there when you extract it fast enough, even if you don't pay attention to it, is called instantaneous memory. Because instantaneous memory is closely related to vision, hearing, taste and so on, it is also called sensory memory. It is also thanks to the fact that you can answer questions without danger when your mind is distracted in class when the teacher reminds you to repeat the last sentence.

Sensory memory has a large capacity and can contain a lot of information, and sensory memory preserved by hearing (also known as audio-visual memory) will retain more information and longer time than sensory memory preserved by vision (also known as image memory). However, whether it is image memory or audio-visual memory, its existence time is actually very short, can only last a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds. When we want to use sensory memory for systematic recall, it is often too late.

In this way, this kind of sensory memory is not the photographic memory we are looking for.

In fact, "photographic memory" also has a professional name, called posthumous image. Unlike the blurred images we remember by sensory memory, according to people with this ability, the images in their memories are as vivid as the original images and seem to be "outside the mind" rather than "in the mind". Not only that, it can last for minutes or even days.

Posthumous images are more common in children aged 6 to 12 years old, and only about 5% of children have this ability, and the older the age, the lower the incidence. Psychologists speculate that the disappearance of this ability may be related to the development of children's formal computational thinking or language skills, and as children continue to develop language and expression skills, the ability of residual images will deteriorate accordingly.

Speaking of which, I can only regret to tell you that this kind of photographic image memory is actually very rare, at least when you grow up.

Source: "telling teenagers about brain Science"

Author: Yan Tianyi

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The copyright belongs to the original author

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Origin Reading (ID:tupydread), author: Yan Tianyi

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