Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten why you were there, or want to speak but suddenly realize you don’t know what to say? The the human brain it often balances many inputs, thoughts and actions, but sometimes it seems short. So what actually happens when we forget what we just thought about?
Understanding why we forget first requires an understanding of who we are memory it works — and dispels some myths about the concept.
“Memory is not just one thing,” Susanne Jaeggiprofessor of psychology at Northeastern University, told Live Science. “There are very different aspects of memory, and they are also related to different ways of understanding.”
In this case, it is important to know two different types of memory: long-term memory and working memory. Long-term memory is a broad, multifaceted group of memories that includes knowledge, experiences and skills that are stored in the brain for long periods of time – from hours to lifetimes. On the other hand, ideas in working memory come to mind only seconds or minutes at a time.
Related: ‘Short-term emotions’ can warp people’s memories just seconds after events, research suggests.
Working memory is like a “sketchpad for critical thinking,” Earl K. Millerprofessor of neuroscience at MIT, told Live Science. Each piece of new information, internal communication and ways of thinking about working memory, and certain characteristics of working memory may explain why we forget those thoughts.
First, the working memory has very little power. There has been some debate about what a boundary is and how to set it, but psychologists speculate that people can only hold four to Seven “chunks” of information – such as letters, numbers, words or phrases – in their working memory over time. Instead of attending to all of these “pieces” at once, the brain bounces from one thought to another, making it easy to get lost in the moment, Miller explained.
Second, the brain quickly deletes unnecessary items from working memory to make room for new information. So unless those short-term memories are transferred to long-term memories (a process called consolidation), they soon leave the brain’s memory.
Because the brain can’t really multitask, Miller said, it has to “juggle” different thoughts as our working memory revolves around different thoughts. That requires effort and attention, which is monitored by the brain’s prefrontal cortex, an area involved in complex learning, decision-making and reasoning. If attention is focused on just one of those memories or is diverted somewhere new, the brain loses memory of earlier memories.
“It throws one of those ‘balls,’ and that’s why you forget things,” Miller said.
The brain may “drop the ball” on working memory while asleep or distracted by alcohol or other drugs. Age is also a factor; Miller says that working memory performance peaks in a person’s 20s and begins to decline during middle age.
But for those who constantly struggle with thoughts that slip through their minds, Jaeggi and Miller have some evidence-based advice.
To stop forgetting so many things, Miller advised against multitasking. “When you think you’re doing a lot, what you’re doing is eating,” he said, and juggling makes you forget a lot.
Jaeggi gave some advice on what to do when the memory was gone.
He said: “Change of context can help. That means going back to the room you were in before, or recalling your memories. These points of context can give the brain more power that who need to go back a few seconds in working memory and retrieve the memory before it is completely gone.
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