Why do we forget

All of us have probably found ourselves in a situation when remember too late about our friend’s birthday. We may also have forgotten (not once) about exact time of a meeting or to pay some of our bills. It also sometimes happens when a name of a person we meet at a party just gets stuck somewhere in our subconscious mind or we do not remember how a certain object is called. We often try to excuse ourselves for that blaming those things on hard work, absence of sleep and rest and also stress. I could go on and on, but let us better look at why all of these things happen. I do not mean to give you all possible scientific answers, but just a few ideas for you to chew on. The above mentioned excuses are often true, but there are also other factors causing us to forget. Here are a few of those:

High blood pressure

High blood pressure or hypertension is not disease that only elderly people have. Quite often this acute problem is called trouble of modern times. There has been done a research in USA where 30 thousand participants were tested on the causes of memory loss. The results show that those who suffer from high blood pressure experience a lot of memory problems and their abilities to remember decrease as the time goes by. If you have a high blood pressure you should take care of your diet, lose weight, do exercises and not ignore sound advice that your doctor gives you. 

Long trips by plane

Long trips by plane, that last longer than 4 hours can have a direct impact on your forgetting. And if you fly regularly the consequences can be even more serious. A lot of people start complaining about their memory after long flying. It can be caused by tiredness, change of time zones and also stress. 

Lack of vitamin B12

Do you lack vitamin B12? Doctors say that it is essential to keep our neurological function. Lack of vitamin B12 can cause long term changes in cognitive abilities, memory loss, dementia and other health problems connected with forgetting. 

Menopause

According to scientific research (done in US) around fifty percent of ladies at the start of menopause also start experiencing memory problems. The scientists found the connection between the fever and memory gaps. The more ladies suffer from fever, the poorer their memory becomes. There could be other explanations for that, but connection between menopause and memory loss does exist. 

Problems with thyroid

If you suffer from hypothyreosis you can become more forgetful. You may experience weakness, tiredness and memory problems under this condition. This disease is more common for women than men over 40 years of age. 

Pregnancy

It appears that pregnancy can also influence your memory. Quite often it can be difficult to remember even the telephone numbers of those who are close. This is not a prevailing tendency, but increase in memory loss during pregnancy period has been observed. 

Alcohol

Too big amount of alcohol may injure that part of our brains that is responsible for ‘recording’ of memories. Therefore, a healthy way of life is the best way to keep your memory running properly.

Watching pornography

A recent study shows that watching online pornography can cause severe memory problems. This fact needs to be investigated more thoroughly, but as intensive sexual images do impact on our brains this addiction maybe a very serious threat for our memories (mostly men).

Ok, these are some of the things that cause both men and women to forget. Some of them may apply only to one sex, while others fit for all. Let us be aware of these facts and take care of our memories. Good luck in doing so!

Memory loss a myth or reality

I hope you have seen a lot of movies that portray a character who has lost memory (The notebook, Unknown, Bourne series, Memento and many more). We do sympathize with such characters, get involved in the movie and wish them well. However, memory loss isn’t some fictional stuff. It happens in real life with real people. In movies directors or script writers intentionally create characters that would later regain their memories in order have a happy end type of movie. In life, things get a bit more complicated. Can a human memory disappear and then come back again? When does that happen? What determines that? Maybe it is a disease?

How our memory works and what it depends on

Scientists that research processes of memory distinguish a few chains of it: memorization of information (encoding), its’ preservation (storage) and ability to recall (retrieval). All of these chains are closely interrelated; complement each other by forming unity. When one of them is disarrayed, the entire memory process can fall into disarray. At the moment, it is still thought that what a human remembered, it is stored for his entire lifetime. The majority of information passes on to a level of ‘undigested’ psychical processes and consciousness retains only those that are relevant at the moment. 

Various scientists notice that daily events are remembered in a different way than those which are very painful and traumatizing. Those scholars claim that events which damage human psyche are stored separately from daily ones. Unlike usual reminiscences of daily events, reminiscences of damaging origin are unalterable, difficult to tell, automatic and not connected with other reminiscences. They often sink into subconscious psyche level and are forgotten. Until these reminiscences not realized they stay in the lists of not remembered and at the same time not forgotten memories.

Dissociative amnesia

Dissociative amnesia is memory  loss when important past events are forgotten and it is not possible to find any other medically tested proved reasons for the loss of memory and its’ scope is too big for commonplace forgetting. Scientists that study memory have noticed that dissociative memory disorders happen more often after an early psyche traumatizing event or a few events in childhood (that are depend on violence: rape, physical abuse, danger of death and etc.). It is noticed that children who had undergone painful experience and grew up in normal conditions after that often experience hyper amnesia, which is unhealthy memory strengthening. They can clearly, exactly and in detail remember violence they had experienced. Prolonged crippling situation or slow long term violence often determines appearance of big memory gaps, primitive psychological defense mechanisms such as self denial, association with the aggressor. Then other dissociative disorders are often formed.

Dissociative disorders used to be described as hysteria or hysteric neurosis. They are expressed in disarray of normal remembering of past memories, integration or personality identity. Unconscious painful memories often erupt by threatening dreams, unexpected visions and similar phenomena. They determine formation of specific behavior and appearance of unusual and hardly explainable appearance of certain body senses.

Mental clinics of Harvard university has done a research regarding physical, sexual and psychological violence experienced in the past and its’ connection to dissociative disorders and amnesia. 148 women (18-60 years old) participated in research. 83 percent of them had experienced physical, 82 percent sexual and 71 percent psychological violence. Despite the form of experienced violence all patients partly or completely had forgotten those painful experiences. It means they showed signs of amnesia. It has also been noticed that the earlier violence was experienced the deeper amnesia had developed. Most of the women that participated in the research remembered painful past experiences when they were alone at home, although at that time psychiatric and psychoterapic aid was provided for them. Some of the patients recalled the traumatic experience during practice of psychotherapy. Most of the patients admitted that they tried to find proofs of evidence regarding the returning memories about violence experienced during childhood. 

The research only confirms sightings of Austrian psychotherapist Z. Freud that we, unconsciously know how to defend against painful and traumatizing past memories by applying various means: by pushing them somewhere to subconscious mind, to negate them, reject and belittle. Or we sometimes try to fully live through our painful experience. And then forget and no longer have those nightmares. Unfortunately, that does not always help. 

Memory tip for 8th of May 2011

Today I just wanted to give you a few thoughts on why we forget the information we really want to remember. I have mentioned a few days ago, that we often forget the biggest part of information we learned within the first hour after learning and we tend to forget less and less as the time passes by. This could be the first reason of forgetting. 

The second reason could be that you did not pay enough attention for remembering the stuff you tried to learn. Attention is number one thing that you need for training your memory. 

It is also possible that you did not ‘push’ the information to your long term memory and it merely stayed in your short term memory for some time and later was deleted by your brains as unnecessary. 

Most probably you did not rehearse the information you learned. It is also a fact that we forget information which we do not revise and rehearse from time to time. You don’t have to do it very often, but a revision of anything you learn is always necessary. 

And it is also possible that information was very difficult and you failed to use association, imagination and your sensors for learning it effectively. 

Read my previous post:

Continual studies are very important for developing your memory