6 curiosities about memory (according to science)

We all know what memory is and what it is for.However, not everyone knows how it works and what its peculiarities are, beyond storing the information that surrounds us.

In this article we will briefly explain how such information is stored, in order to understand the curiosities that characterize it and make this function a mystery that has not yet been fully resolved.

Curiosities about memory: how does it work?

In order to understand the singularities that human memory entails, it is first necessary to know how it is works, or what elements or steps it follows from when we perceive a thing until a memory is formed about it. she.

Memory is that function of the brain that is responsible for encoding, saving and retrieving all the information acquired in past moments. Depending on how distant that past is, memory is divided into short-term memory or long-term memory.

This memory is possible thanks to the synaptic links that exist between neurons, which connect repetitively to create neural networks. Also, the

hippocampus It is the main brain structure related to memory, so its deterioration or injury will cause numerous problems in it.

However, there are many other systems related to memory and each one of them has special functions depending on its characteristics. These systems include certain regions of the temporal cortex, the central zone of the right hemisphere, the parietotemporal cortex, the frontal lobes and the cerebellum.

Knowing that there are different steps when it comes to creating memories, it will be easier for us to understand what curiosities our memory entails. Since these can occur both when encoding external information, and at times when our brain stores it or when we try to recover or evoke a memory.

6 curious facts about memory

Due to the complexity of the systems that involve the creation and recovery of memories, memory buries numerous curiosities. both in relation to its own functioning and in relation to diseases or syndromes, which alter it in many ways unexpected.

1. Our brain creates false memories

Not everything we remember is true or has happened in real life. The false memories they consist of the recovery in the memory of an event or situation that never really existed.

If we go back to the steps that memory follows to create a memory, the first of all is to perceive and encode external information. When these external stimuli are too many or too intense, our brain can suffer an overload, and the association processes are altered, creating false memories.

The same happens when we talk about traumatic situations or experiences, the creation of false memories are a defense strategy of our mind to protect us from memories that can affect us in a way harmful.

Therefore, a false memory cannot be considered a lie, since the person who is recounting said experience blindly believes that it happened that way.

2. The Mandela Effect

Closely linked to the previous point is this curiosity of memory known as mandela effect. In the case of the Mandela Effect, these false memories that we talked about earlier are shared by a large part of the population.

The best example to explain it is the one that gives it its name. In the year 1990, when Nelson Mandela was finally released from prison, it caused a great uproar in a large part of the population. The reason was that these people were sure that Nelson Mandela had died in prison, They even claimed that they witnessed the moment in which his death was reported on television, as well as his burial. However, Mandela died 23 years later from a respiratory infection.

Therefore, this effect describes the phenomenon in which a large number of people remember, almost in a way exact, an event or events that never occurred as such or that does not coincide with what is dictated by the reality.

3. cryptomnesia

The phenomenon of cryptomnesia It is the one by which the person recovers a memory from memory but nevertheless does not live it as a memory, but as an original idea or experience.

In this case, the person believes they have had an idea for the first time, the result of their creativity and imagination, but they are not aware of it. that it is actually a memory hidden in memory that you may have already thought about before or that you have seen or read in some other place.

4. hypermnesia

The capacity for hypermnesia. or hyperthymesia, is to remember or recover from memory a number of memories far greater than those that most people can access.

People with hypermnesia show great speed when it comes to encoding, saving and retrieving what surrounds them; so they are able to remember any situation or experience with an amazing amount of detail and information.

However, it is necessary to point out that this hypermnesia or ability to store a large amount of information is restricted to autobiographical memory. That is to say, to the memory that stores all the aspects or situations that we experience throughout our lives.

5. The brain only stores what is important and the mind creates the details.

A study conducted at Harvard University, led by professor and psychologist Daniel L. Schacter, revealed that each and every time our brain retrieves a memory, it is modified.

This means that our brain only stores important information or information with emotional content, but the rest of the details of what was lived are not stored, being added and invented later by our mind.

The objective of this phenomenon is to avoid overloading the memory with unnecessary details in order to house the greatest amount of relevant information possible.

6. Memories depend on context and emotions

Learning and storing memories depend in large part on how and where, just as they depend on how we feel.

This means that depending on where we are, it will be much easier for us to recover memories of situations experienced in that same place.

With emotions it works in the same way, depending on our state of mind, memory will tend to rescue memories in which we experienced those emotions.. That is to say, when we are happy or happy it is easier for us to remember situations in which we were also happy.