Most of us are overwhelmed
by seeing how far technology has gone and the great things that we can do with
it. Just forty years ago, people could not imagine that we are going to have
such things as cell phones, portable computer, to say nothing of iPod’s,
iphones, touchpads and similar gadgets. However, you would also be very
surprised to know how many of those inventions were made. For example, the
person who had the idea of wireless was in some cheap telepathy show when the
idea of transmitting information without wires came to his mind. The same can be said about computer memory. If
you study it more thoroughly you will definitely see a lot of similarities with
our Homo sapiens memory.
Lots of inventions that
humans made come from observation of natural laws that have existed in the
world from times immemorial. A lot of those came by studying human body and
mind too. Firstly, we get information to our brains through our five senses and
this information initially goes to our short memory. In terms of computers,
this corresponds to RAM or Random Access Memory. Our brains decide how fast to
process the information that reaches us to long term memory or simply delete
it. Information is held in RAM as long as our pc’s are open.
If we compare our long term
memory to that of computers we may say that hard disk memory could correspond
to our long term memory. It is good that the further we go the bigger capacity hard
disks are produced. Unfortunately I doubt if they will ever match to capacity
of our brains. I do believe that if we learnt to manage our memories well we
could really remember incredible amount of information and for a long time too.
It is interesting how our brains
are able to select which information to save and which one to delete. Computers
are not that intelligent. We are masters of those. We tell them what to
remember or to delete by pressing ‘save’ button or not doing that. If you
thoroughly study the subject you will notice that our brains are much more
complex than our computers. So, our memories are much more advanced that those
of our pc’s. The only problem is we do not know how to use them (our memory
effectively). The science of mnemonics will definitely help us to do it.
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