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If I don't write something down, it usually doesn't happen.
Both my notebook and iPhone are full of memos and reminders of little things I
have to do and things that need to be followed up on. Every now and then I can
get lucky and remember something small or specific.
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Remembering to remember is more complex than we might think.
This type of memory is known as prospective memory and it is essential to our
everyday lives. Prospective memory is our ability to remember to take a certain
action in response to specific future events.
An article
was recently released in Psychological
Science that explains how prospective memory is processed in the brain. The
study was conducted at Washington University in St. Louis. During the test,
participants were asked to press one of two buttons to indicate whether a word
on a screen was part of a particular category. They were also asked to press a
third button when a trigger word appeared. The difference between the two
request showed the two different types of prospective memory.
There are two
distinct brain activation patterns that appear when using prospective
memory. The top-down brain process, which is supported by the prefrontal
cortex, is used when the participants had to remember a syllable like "tor".
This means that the participants had to sustain their attention and monitor for
the special syllable throughout the entire task. In the real world, this would
be reminding myself to bring my gym bag by constantly reminding myself not to
forget it.
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The other part of the experiment tested a whole word such as
"table". When participants were asked to remember this word, a different set of
brain regions were activated and a sustained activation was not identified.
Instead of using the top-down brain processes, the word acts as an
environmental cue that prompted
participants to make the appropriate response. This manifests itself as me
leaving the gym bag by the door so I don't forget it. This requires much less
brain power than top-down prospective memory.
"These findings suggest that people could make use of
several different strategies to accomplish prospective memory tasks," says
McDaniel, the psychological scientist heading the study. More research will be
done on prospective memory, specifically on how it changes with age. In the
meantime, I'm going to stick with my current strategy of writing things down so
I don't have to remember.
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Re: Don't Forget to Remember
