Visual Memory-How We Used to Remember Things

We are constantly processing new information everyday. Our senses are always experiencing new things. Some of these things we barely remember others are etched in our brain for a long time. There is much to learn about the process of memory. New things are being learned about our brain and how our memory works.

I wanted to learn more about how our brain remembers. In the process I learned about a group of people who like to spend their time testing their memory. They actually attend competitions around the world to compete against each other. They work on teaching themselves new ways to remember and then they get very proficient at that method. These memory masters spend their time learning to memorize things that the average person would never want to do. For example they may memorize the order of a shuffled deck of cards, or tables of random numbers. They may memorize names of strangers or information from the phone book. These people are quite amazing and show us that our brain's ability to memorize is significant. This was amazing to me because I can still have a hard time remembering a name or a phone number.

It can seem almost impossible for these "memory master" to memorize at the level they do. Scientists wanted to study their brains to see if these people had something extraordinary in their brains. They scanned these subjects while they were practicing their memory techniques. What they found was very interesting. The navigation center and the part of the brain that deals with special memory was stood out in these scans. It wasn't that these people had something special about their brains. It was that they had developed and were using a different part of their brain.

Historically we have used our brains differently in the past. Orators from ages ago could recite long speeches. Scribes from the middle ages could memorize long written texts. They did not have access to the tools we have today that allow us to externalize our memory. We have computer hard drives, cell phones, tablets and many ways we can store information without having our brains remember it.

The ancient Greeks discussed a type of visual memory called the "memory palette". This worked by creating a place in your mind where you could place images of things that you wanted to remember. The crazier or more bizarre the image the more likely you will be to remember it. Instead of remembering poems or speeches word for word, they memorized a series of images. Each image referenced what they wanted to communicate. They memorized topic by topic instead of word for word.

Increasing our memory and the ways we remember can take a lot of effort. Are these skills that are being lost today because it is so easy to use something outside of our brains to keep information? There can be a lot of value to developing our memory. The "memory masters" have shown us that we are just as capable today of remembering the way they did in the past. How many of us are willing to put the effort into learning it?

We can learn to have great memories. In general, we remember what we pay attention to. We remember what is meaningful to us. When we learn how to take a piece of information that may not be significant to us and we can transform it and identify a visual image with it so that it stands out in the midst all of the information that flows in and through us every day. Our brains are wired to remember through visual images. By attaching an image to what we want to remember our visual memory can serve to help us remember who we are and how we grow.

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