The next time you can not remember some information, this is because your brain is shaken. Here's what you need to know about it.

Information retention depends on person to person and its attention

If you randomly say the numbers 1593657292759384310479, how many of these numbers can you remember from the first? According to scientists, you will only have seven numbers and it depends on our working memory.

Our working memory in the brain is not so great, but it's important as the fact that we need to be aware of how much information we can keep at once at it.

Information retention depends on person to person and its attention. The more attention we attach to some information, so we will easily remember it. The next time you do not remember some of the information, this is because your brain is distracted and therefore forgotten, and these three things have a significant role to play.

1. A magical number

Scientists say you will be able to remember about seven numbers. More precisely, a study from the 1950s, called the "Magical number seven, plus or minus two", suggests that the capacity of our work memory is between five and seven, although some scientists argue that this capacity is only about four digits.

If we read this number one, five, nine, three, each of the numbers is counted separately. You will be able to recall more numbers if you pair them and read fifteen, ninety-three, seventy-five, seventy-two. This increases the number of digits you will remember.

When scientists say that we can keep a certain number of data in the working memory, these individual data can be of different sizes, complexities and relevance. However, the working memory is not large but it is really important.

2. Working memory

Working memory is something like a control panel of our brain. This is the place where the information is stored temporarily until the brain decides whether it is valuable to store it more durable and thus becomes a long-term memory.

It is shown that different senses have different capacities of the control panel. This means that how much you can remember depends on, for example, whether someone told you something or showed you it. For this reason, it is important to look separately at different types of working memory.

In addition, each person has different ability to retain data in the working memory. Individual differences in memory capacity are important because they predict intelligence. Higher memory capacity generally means greater intelligence. Why can some people keep more data in the working memory than others?

3. Ignore things

A new study by scientists at Simon Fraser University has sparked more light on why some people can keep more data on the brain control panel than others. Differences in the visual memory by brainwave were studied and by monitoring how many people pay attention to something.

Attention and memory are inextricably linked. By paying attention to some information, his representation in the brain increases, making it easier to remember.

But doing something easier to remember is just one aspect of attention. Paying attention means ignoring all information that disturbs attention. And there are a lot of people here.

People with low capacity of working memory can not ignore the confusing data that impedes them. This shows that it is not about how important the information we can think of, but it's about how good we are in ignoring irrelevant data.

The human brain has a different process of focusing attention on important data and suppression of the irrelevant. It's not about how much data we can keep in the brain, but how much we can throw out. Next time, do you find it hard to remember the phone number or some picture blurring your smart but distracted brain.

• 22 Nov, 2017
• 1083 views