40 Amazing and Interesting Facts about Memory | Amazing Facts 4U
- A piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand amazingly contains 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses all communicating with each other.
- The brain has about 1 billion neurons.
- Research has shown that the human brain starts remembering things from the womb from 20 weeks gestation onwards.
- In fact, people don’t recall any memories from their earliest years of life, usually before age 3 or 4. This is known as infantile amnesia.
- Amazingly the average brain registers about 50,000 thoughts per day and 70% of these are believed to be negative.
- In fact, each time a memory is recalled or a new thought occurs, a new connection is created in the brain.
- The amazing fact is that the storage capacity of the human brain is virtually limitless. Neurons combine through synapses exponentially increasing the brain’s memory capacity to around 25,00,000 Gigabytes which is equivalent to remembering TV programs running continuously for more than 300 years.
- Experts believe that you can hold about 7 items in short-term memory for about 20 to 30 seconds.
- Our attention spans are getting shorter. In 2000, the average attention span was twelve seconds which is now down to eight seconds. That’s shorter than the attention span of the average goldfish which is nine seconds.
- Short-term memory happens as a result of chemical and electrical impulses in the brain in contrast to more structural changes that are associated with long-term memory.
- The hippocampus is a horse-shoe shaped area of the brain that has an important role in converting information from short-term memory into long-term memory. Amazingly memory is unaffected even if the right or left side of the hippocampus is damaged.
- Sleep has an important role in memory as the brain consolidates memories during sleep. Sleep also aids the storage and retrieval of long-term memories.
- The fact is memory gets broken up into bits and pieces and stored in different parts of the brain. When the memory is to be recalled, it gets reconstructed from the individual fragments.
- It is believed that an adult can remember 20 to 100 thousand words.
- Anterograde amnesia is the loss of the ability to form new memories while retrograde amnesia is losing the ability to recollect past memories, although the ability to create new memories remains intact.
- In fact, memory does not decay. Everything is stored in there but, without rehearsal, memories become harder to access as our ability to retrieve them is affected.
- Your long-term memory shuts down during sleep. That’s why you often dream about something you just saw and why dreams fade quickly once you wake up. Dreams aren’t being recorded into long-term memory.
- In fact, when a recall is easy, learning is low. When something comes to mind quickly, i.e. we do no work to recall it, no learning occurs. When we have to work hard to bring it to consciousness, we learn.
- Your memory can associate a scent with a certain event or occurrence. A smell can trigger the memory in your mind associated with it as the hippocampus is also associated with scent.
- It’s a well-known fact that feelings play an important role in remembering things. In a state of emotional splash memory sometimes can calls things, forgotten a long time ago.
- Information that has long become inaccessible can still be revived. Indeed it is then relearned more quickly than new information.
- Forgetting actually helps you learn as less relevant information becomes inaccessible and we are naturally left with the information that is most important to our daily survival.
- Memory thrives on storytelling. The more things you can link together into a narrative, the more readily you’ll be able to recall them later on.
- The color most easily remembered and recalled is chartreuse which is like a bright yellow with a tinge of green.
- Many cities have changed their fire trucks from red to a yellow-green color to make them more visible.
- Anytime you are given a picture, graph, video, infographic, or other visual elements to demonstrate new information, you are much more likely to commit that information to memory.
- There is such a thing as “false memory”. We can’t always tell the difference between our memories and our imagination. Emotions, motivation, cues, context, and frequency of use can all affect how accurately you can remember something. Our memories may have changed, but they all feel very real to us.
- Walking Through Doorways Causes Memory Lapses especially when you enter an unfamiliar environment. This is called an “event boundary” which separates what happens in one room from what happens in another.
- TV if watched for more than 2 hours is likely to damage your memory. It also increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s later in life.
- In fact, caffeine doesn’t maintain memory performances, it only increases alertness.
- People who do long flights associated with crossing many time zones are at risk of brain damage and memory problems due to jet lag. This, apparently, is the result of stress hormones that damage the temporal lobe and mamory.
- Yawning in fact causes the brain to mobilize awakening and refreshing it. Yawning lets more air in bringing your body to a state of readiness. An amazing fact is Alexander the Great remembered all of the names of his soldiers. There were approximately 30,000 people in his army.
- Amazingly Mozart was able to play and write down all of the notes from a song he had heard just once.
- Winston Churchill in fact knew by heart almost all of William Shakespeare’s works.
- Bill Gates can remember hundreds of different codes of the programming language that he designed.
- Diane Van Deren, one of the world’s top ultra-runners, didn’t start running until a seizure crippled her ability to form new memories. She has the psychological advantage of never knowing how much distance she still has to run.
- Around 33 people have been recorded to have Hyperthymesia, a condition that allows people to remember every detail of their lives. They can recall almost every personal event in their lives and the exact dates.
- Highway hypnosis is a mental state in which the person can drive a truck or automobile great distances, responding to external events in an expected manner with no recollection of having consciously done so.
- Grand Master of Memory is awarded to people who are able to memorize 1,000 random digits in an hour, the order of 10 shuffled decks of cards in an hour, and the order of one shuffled deck of cards in under 2 minutes.
- Amazingly brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery.
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