Posted by alexandra_k on January 1, 2015, at 18:15:20
In reply to Re: What is causing my memory loss? » SLS, posted by Phillipa on January 1, 2015, at 17:40:58
what kind of memory loss?
cognitive psychologists like to distinguish 3 phases of memory... encoding. storage. retrieval. memory problems can arise from problems with one (or more) of those stages...
encoding problems can be due to problems with concentration / attention / rehearsal.
depends a bit on the kind of memory... this is still (to the best of my knowledge) rather a murky area... but there are different kinds of memories and people can have problems with one of these areas but not others. memory of skill (e.g., remembering how to hit a tennis ball). semantic memory (e.g., remembering story kinds of things). episodic memory (a sort of emotional picture memory e.g., remembering where you were / what you were doing when you first heard about the twin towers). picture memory (e.g., remembering the shopping list).
the process of encoding and / or storage and / or retrieval can be different for all of these...
i like to think of memory as being like a muscle. encoding (in particular) takes (sometimes, at least) considerable conscious effort. to go over and over stuff... to get it 'stuck in there'. if we don't use it... it atrophies.
my mother keeps on about how her memory is bad... but she won't even try and encode stuff, anymore, because she is convinced her memory is bad so there is no point in trying.
you can improve your memory through practice (within limits).
lack of sleep will probably mess you up big time... the jury is still out... but sleep seems to play a big part in consolidating memory... in helping shift it from a more temporary storage area into something longer term. some people think that that fairly much is the function of sleep... REM sleep... a process of working through / consolidating...
how are your senses doing? if you need glasses / hearing aids etc then you might have problems appropirately attending to / encoding that kind of information...
poster:alexandra_k
thread:1074661
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20141120/msgs/1074686.html