The human brain, our mind and our memories are an interseting subject. Most of us don’t even know why we remember what we do, why we forget what we don’t and other nice little anecdotes regarding our abilities up there. Here are a few things most of us don’t even realize about ourselves.
Our brain as a hard drive
If you try and translate the brain’s ability to store information, it’s approximately 2.5 Petabytes, which is 2.5 million gigabytes. You do the match how many laptops you have stored up there.
Alcohol and long term memory
Alcohol prevents the brain from transferring information into long-term memory. That’s why heavy drinkers have a hard time remembering what happened to them on the previous night.
The Hippocampus
By age 80, our hippocampus, which plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory and spatial navigation, is vastly declined, sometimes with more than 20% of the nerves lost and gone.
Beta blockers
Studies suggest that erasing bad memories is possible, and using beta blocker drugs can interfere with the recollection of certain memories.
Short attention span
The maximum attention span for most adults in things they have and never will have any interest in is 20 minutes, meaning some people spend 40 years at a job that’s all about forgetting what they’re learning and doing.
Better memory if you’re left handed
Left handed people have better memories, because the corpus callosum, the largest white matter structure in the brain which aid recall is larger in lefties.
Selective period memory
Most adults have their memories come from the ten year span between their 15th and 25th birthday. This reminiscence bump accounts for about 60% of our memories as we get older.
Short Term Memory
Our short term capablities allow us to remember up to 7 different pieces of information at the same time, but trying to hold on to so much is usually managable for about 20 seconds before certain things start popping out of our heads.
Prosopamnesia
A rare neuropsychological deficit defined by an inability to remember faces. It can be subdivided into two different types, including a ‘congenital’ and ‘acquired’ version. Cognetial - involves an inborn difficulty in remembering faces, but having intact facial recognition and perception abilities.
Visual memory & crime
Eyewitnesses are notriously inaccurate and mistaken. In fact, over half of the wrongful convictions in the United States are caused by unreliable eyewitnesses. Or maybe simply someone convicned them to be wrong…
