Improving Memory

Memory is a very important tool to our everyday lives. Without memory, we would not be able to function very productively. You can look at someone suffering with Alzheimer’s disease and see the effects of the inability to make new memories, as well as lost and confused memory. According to what I have read in the textbook, the foundation of our speech and learning is our memory.

In general, there are three types of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Sensory memory, by definition, is the preservation of information in its original sensory form, for a fraction of a second. This means that when you smell, touch and/or see anything, the impression of the occurrence will last for a couple of moments. This gives you an extra bit of time to recognize, or realize, what you are experiencing. Visual stimulus tends to be a series of afterimages. If you have fast consecutive visual movements, it seems to turn into one connected stream of light, even though it is only a solitary point. The brief sustaining of this sensory information is thought to be more of an echo, than true memories but the matter is debatable. Sensory memory goes into short-term memory. Your senses take in the information and it goes to short-term where you have to remember by uninterrupted repetition.

Short-term memory is a limited capacity storage that holds unpracticed information for approximately ten to twenty seconds. The short-term memory is only useful if you can rehearse the information uninterrupted until it can be reme mbered easily. This is demonstrated by the fact that if you have to remember an address or phone number, you have to repeat...

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... paragraph in the margin and studying according to that. When the instructor spends extra time on an area in class, or seems to go back and repeat something, it is most probably important. Pay close attention to the verbal cues. Flash cards are a good idea to use as well. When you make the flash cards you are using selectivity because you are writing down what is important to focus on.

I am sure there are many more ways of improving memory and study. These are the methods I use and I know they work for me. Based on what I have read, many others benefit from the described methods. When it comes to memory, it seems obvious that there is so much more to it, than what is known now. Memory is being researched on a continuing basis. Anything we know about memory now could even be irrelevant in the future, due to this extensive research and any new findings.