Hacking your brain to enhance memory

#brainhacking #neuroscience #brain #brainscience #personaldevelopment #memory

© 2024 Zoryna O’Donnell

This article was first published by The Maverick Paradox Magazine on 21/06/2024

“There is no such thing as a good or bad memory, there is just a trained memory and untrained memory.” – Jim Kwik

We are born with a gift which becomes more valuable to us with every year we live – our ability to remember. Without this gift it would be impossible to develop language (or any other) skills, relationships or our personal identity.

So, what is memory? How does it work and how can we train it to become even better?

In psychology, memory is defined as the faculty of encoding, storing and retrieving information from the world around us. The three important categories of memory  are sensory memory, working memory and long-term memory.

Our long-term memory contains information which is stored in the brain for longer periods of time (from minutes to years) and exists outside our immediate consciousness. It contains facts as well as impressions, emotions, actions and much more - there is no limit to how much information our long-term memory can hold; it is potentially life-long.

According to Northwestern University psychology professor Paul Reber, our brains have the capacity to store up to 2.5 petabytes of data. It is the equivalent of three million hours of TV shows - or about the same storage as nearly 2,000 of 512GB iPhones (one of the largest sizes currently available). And yet we forget things all the time – names of new people we meet, scheduled appointments or important facts, especially now that we rely so much on Google as an external memory aid with some unpleasant consequences for our memory.

You can free yourself from this dependency and retrain your brain to sharpen your memory and to boost your mental performance for years to come.

Here are some of the brain hacks you can use to achieve this. …

Please read the entire article here. [ https://themaverickparadox.com/hacking-your-brain-to-enhance-memory/ ]

Image credit: LMPC.