You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

a perfect picture
Eidetic (photographic) memory is when we can recall something perfectly
after only a brief glance. We marvel at such a feat in adults, but many
children display this ability nat ur ally. In the early nineteenth century, the
tests of G.W. Allport in England and E.R. Jaensch in Germany found that
children aged be tween 10 and 13 could answer detailed questions about
pictures they had looked at for only 35 seconds, including, for example, the
number of stripes in a picture of a zebra. There have been surprisingly few
studies of eidetic memory since that time, but it is suggested that between
eight and 50 per cent of children under the age of 11 possess this eidetic
ability. Psychol ogists think that its loss (usually during adolescence) may
be due to the emphasis placed on verbal skills during education.
memory and aging
T
he claim that our memory will let us down when we get old is a myth. It is
not at all inevitable that we will suffer memory loss as we approach our twilight

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years. However, what is inevitable is that the speed at which our brain processes
and stores our memories will change. This is the principal reason why older
people tend to do less well on timed IQ tests than younger candidates. But, if
older people are given more time to complete the exercises, the average results
tend to be the same as those for the youngsters.
Part of the reason why the brain’s processes slow down as we age begins
with the slowing down of our circulation. In old age, a lifetime of wear and tear
takes its toll on our heart and arteries, so that it takes longer for oxygenated
blood to reach the brain in the quantities needed for peak performance. The
neurons are highly sensitive to reductions in oxygen supply, which cause them to
have less energy. If the neurons have less energy, the levels to which the
dendrites become excited when we consolidate or retrieve memories are
reduced.
Under normal, healthy circumstances, the ability to recall our long-term
memories does not change throughout our lives (although our short-term
memory may show some depreciation). This is because the levels of RNA
(which controls the manufacture of proteins in brain cells, resulting in larger
synapses and better consolidation of memories) increases in our brain as we age.
In fact, many scientists now believe that social stereotyping is one of the
factors that may contribute to forgetfulness in older people. Because we expect
that our memory will deteriorate as we get older, we unconsciously place greater
significance on the items or occasions that we actually do forget in daily life
(while in youthfulness we used to simply let such instances of forgetfulness
wash over us). This in turn makes us anxious that we are becoming old and less
mentally agile. Of course, anxiety really does impair our powers of memory, so
as soon as we become worried about aging and loss of memory we may indeed
become the archetypal “forgetful grandparent”, in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, whatever else you remember, be sure to remember this – having
confidence in the indestructibility of your memory is, more often than not, half
the battle to a permanently brilliant ability to remember.