Types of memories

Experts have classified memory into two major kinds:

      Knowledge Memory

      Personal Memory

Knowledge memory contains information about the world while personal memory consists of information about you.

Within knowledge memory, separate domains may exist for numbers, for music, for language and for stories. These are all types of information, which appear to be dealt with in different ways.

Personal memory also comprises different kinds of domain like autobiographical memory, social memory (remembering names and faces of people), skill memory and planning memory.

      Autobiographical memory contains information about you and about personal experiences.

      Emotions, the “facts” that describe you and make you unique, the facts of your life and the experiences you have had, are all contained in separate domains and processed differently.

      Your memory for emotions can help you modify your moods.

      Specific events you have experienced are only memorable to the extent that they include details special to that specific occasion.

Most events in our lives are routine and are merged in memory into one generic memory containing the common element of the experience.

The most common memory problems faced by people occur in four key areas

1. 1.       Knowledge Memory
2. 2.       Identity or Personal Memory
3. 3.       Event Memory
4. 4.       Planning Memory

Within each of these zones of memory, there are specific details in which people have problems. Let us have a look at the type of things one forgets.

Knowledge Memory:

•       Remembering information you have studied.
•       Remembering words.
•       Remembering data.
•       Remembering visuals.

Identity Memory

•       Trying to put a name to a face.
•       Trying to put a face to a name.
•       Trying to remember who someone is.
•       Wanting to remember someone’s personal details.

Event Memory

•       Remembering whether you’ve done something.
•       Remembering where you’ve put something.
•       Remembering when/where something happened.
•       Remembering important dates.

Planning Memory

•       Remembering to do something at a particular time
•       Knowledge there’s something you need to remember but you can’t think what it is.

How brain fitness works

Just as physical exercise maintains body tone, strength and endurance, mental exercising has positive conditioning effects for people of all ages. We will cover the essentials that constitute “mental workout” – daily exercises for the brain.

The goal of brain fitness is to revive certain mental abilities before they slow down. In le poncin’s own words, “our team does not claim to work miracles. We simply develop the previously unknown fertility of land that had been lying fallow”. The exercises are simple and fun to do. And, by repeating the exercises over several weeks time, real progress can be seen in a relatively short time.

Although these exercises have been especially created for the people of advancing age, anyone can do them in order to keep the mental faculties functioning properly. 

How to get the most out of your practice

While practice is the key, there are some actions we can take to ensure we get the most value out of our practice:

      Learn from specific examples rather than abstract rules.

      Provide feedback while the action is active in memory (i.e. immediately). Try again while the feedback is active in memory.

      Practice a skill with subtle variations (such as varying the force of your pitch, or the distance you are throwing) rather than trying to repeat your action exactly.

      Space your practice (math, textbooks, for example, trend to put similar exercises together, but in fact they would be better spaced out).

      Allow for interference with similar skills: if a new skill contains steps that are antagonistic to steps contained in an already mastered skill, the new skill will be much harder to learn (e.g., when I changed keyboards, the buttons for page up, page down, insert etc., had been put in different order – the conflict between the old habit and the new pattern made learning the new pattern harder than it would have been if I had never had a keyboard before). The existing skill may also be badly affected.

      If a skill can be broken down in to independent sub-skills, break it down into its components are dependent, learn the skill as a whole (e.g. computer programming can be broken into independent sub-skills, but learning to play the piano is best learned as a whole). 

Problem Solving Flowchart