• Question: how does the human memory work?

    Asked by miri22 to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi miri22,

      For me, it works very badly at times! I’m always forgetting things, especially when I go food shopping!

      I really don’t know how the memory works. I know there are two types, short term (like when you try to remember a number) and this is quite limited in the way amount it can store (most humans can only remember 8-12 individual numbers before forgetting the pattern). The long term memory is where important details from the short term memory get transfered to for longer term storage.

      When people have head injuries they can damage their memory, either damaging the access to long term memory (amnesia) or damaging the transfer to long term memory, which prevents you from learning anything new but allows you to remember what you already knew before teh accident!

      Interestingly, we used a similar idea to produce the memory systems on computers, with hard disk memory being the long term storage, but there is short term memory (called RAM) which is used for holding information the computer needs at that instant.

      That’s all I have on memory, as far as I can remember at least 😉

    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hey miri22,

      I don’t really know too much about human memory but this is what i do know:

      There is actually this thing called the memory Olympics where people can remember 100’s of number and recite chapter from books all from memory. They have exactly the same memory capacity as we do they have just trained themselves using certain techniques, which in the past were actually widely used, but they just kind of fell off the radar. So we can train ourselves to have a better memory!

      there is an easy way to test how good( or bad) your memory is by using a digit test. So if you were shown a number and asked to repeat it by saying one number a second then most people average around 7 numbers +/- 2. so give it a go! How many numbers can you remember?

      I also know that we cant always trust our memory. Police investigations find that witnesses regularly change their testimony based on what they have been told after an event. So there was a really famous case about a bomber and they were trying to find out where this guy had been. They spoke to a shop assistant and asked him and he said yes he had been in the shop that day. They asked if he had bought a certain type of shirt and the shop assistant said he was sure that he had not. So they let him and asked him to come in again to go over his statement. Again they asked if he had bought this type of shirt and the shop assistant said definitely not. weeks later the shop assistant rang up and said the he was wrong and he can remember the guy buying the shirt. Now the shop assistant is sure that he is right but the police don’t know if he was right before or right now? So there is a major problem with using witness testimony for convictions. But the same thing happens all the time. We invent memories or alter memories and cannot tell the different between true and false ones. i think that pretty weird!

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