"Walking into a room and forget what to do" Forgetful psychology: Four secrets of a sudden short circuit in the brain

Get up from the bed, thinking thirsty to drink water, so you go to the living room, the result forget what you want to do;

I believe that such experience everyone has had, although forgetfulness is not a disease, but really happened, in fact, it is quite disturbing. However, is forgetfulness really just "not remembering well"? Why do most people have such "short circuit" experience? What the brain is thinking?

Today, let's look at "forgetfulness" from a psychological point of view regardless of age or identity.

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Often forget the east and west? I can't get out of touch with them.

Elizabeth Loftus, an American psychologist who has long studied human memory, has come up with four explanations for forgetting, which she believes are related to the reasons why people forget things:

Failed extraction (retrieve failure)

In past "forgotten" experiences, have you ever felt that certain messages/messages have disappeared from your brain? Or do you think you remember, but try to think back and find yourself out of the way? This process of "extracting long-term memories from the brain" fails (in other words, i.e. can't remember) is the most common reason for forgetting.

The failure to extract may be related to the theory of recession. According to the theory of decline, when a new memory is composed, the brain produces traces of memory (Trace Memory), and over time, the traces of memory slowly die, causing us to forget, and the longer we forget, the more we forget.

If memory is not extracted from the brain again and reviewed (The Strie), the memory traces will fade over time, resulting in forgotten. (Recommended reading:"What You Forget, I Can Remember for You" Three movies about dementia, walking through the low tide with loved ones.

Interference

Unlike the theory of decline, there is another theory that memories compete with each other and interfere with each other, and that when new memories are very similar to old ones, interference is more severe, known as interference theory. The most basic interference is divided into two types:

• Forward interference refers to the interference of "old memories" to "new memories", such as when you study sociology and then take a psychological test, which recalls sociological theory in the test, which is the interference of the hue.
• Retroactive interference refers to "new memories" mixed with "old memories", such as when you take a psychological test and then think about the content of a psychological test in a sociology class, which is reverse interference.

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Storage Failure (Fail to To-Ford)

But sometimes, forgetting is not related to interference between the extraction of the above two "long-term memories", that messages or messages are not stored as "long-term memories" at all, and that is that they are naturally forgotten, which is storage failure. Storage failures can be caused by failure to simplify information into focused memories or by not paying special attention to information, causing it to lose rapidly before it enters the brain's long-term memory area.

Motivated Forgotten (Motivated Forgetting)

Compared with the above-mentioned theory of "forget without doing anything in particular", the initiative of motivational oblivion is higher and is "deliberately chosen to forget". The opportunity for motivational oblivion is usually the event itself that makes people feel uneasy, painful, and unable to feel, and human beings, out of their instinct to protect themselves, will choose to deliberately suppress memory, deliberately forget. (Recommended reading:"I want to forget trauma, but trauma always remembers me" about the darkness and light of sexual assault victims.

But the explanation of suppressing memory is not accepted by all psychologists, some psychologists believe that "even if repressed memory is not impossible, it is difficult to scientifically verify whether memory is suppressed".

What can I do if I want to improve forgetfulness?

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, forget is the experience that everyone has had, and while we will never be able to avoid "forgetting things", we can begin to improve by "understanding why we have forgotten". If you've learned why you've forgotten from the above theory, here are three ways to improve you:

• Do aerobic exercise

To improve memory, a large part of the brain is related, and exercise can promote blood circulation in the brain, but also improve the body's sensitivity, is to improve memory is one of the effective ways to improve memory. According to Karen Postal, dean of the American College of Clinical Neuropsychology, if you exercise "aerobic exercise" for 30-40 minutes until sweating, the memory region of the brain produces new cells, so it is especially recommended that you use aerobic exercise to help improve your memory!

• Improving eating habits

In addition to exercise, eating belly food is also important for mental improvement, can be more than rich in DHA, lecithin, catechins, vitamin E, zinc and other nutrients, including deep-sea fish (salmon, mackerel, sardines), eggs, green tea, nuts, dark chocolate and other foods.

• Write it down.

In addition to changes in exercise habits and eating habits, changes in lifestyle can also prevent forgetfulness. The simplest and most easy-to-do thing is to "record", whether it's drawn with an image, or with a list column, or with a memo focused on reminders, can free up brain space so that you don't have to "remember everything with your brain all the time."

2020 Women's Book, with Everyday Counts as the theme, has designed a full year's calendar, weekly notes, monthly notes, blank pages, square pages and more formats to accompany you through the upcoming 2020 years. If you want to improve your forgetfulness and get rid of the "confused" way of doing things, try your hand-billed record and you'll find that "writing down" can change more things than you might think.