You are most likely to remember something if you enjoyed the activity you were doing. However, you may remember bad things about your life, such as past traumas. The human brain is amazing. Your brain stores everything that you have done, even if you cannot remember it. Today, I am going to be talking about how we remember and forget our memories in life.
How does the brain remember a memory?
When you are going through an experience, the activity is converted into a pulse of energy. This energy then travels along the neurons that are in your brain. First of all, the activity is stored in your short-term memory; it's available for you to recall from a matter of seconds to minutes. Your brain uses long-term memory by storing the activity in the hippocampus - this part of the brain is known as the center of emotion, memory and the automatic nervous system. The activity will then travel across other regions of the brain.
When two neurons communicate repeatedly, especially at the synapses, it improves the efficiency of communication between them. This mechanism is known as the long-term potentiation and is what keeps our memories stored long-term.
We mostly remember memories when we are paying attention, engaged in an activity and when the information given has some useful meaning to us.
How do we lose memories?
We can forget our memory through many factors: age, stress and health conditions, depression being an example. As we grow old, our synapses change and weaken, which affects our ability to recall memories. Every decade, the hippocampus loses 5% of it's neurons. We can also forget things by the lack of neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine, which is used to learn and memorise and can affect our ways of storing information.
Stress can make our bodies very alert, so alert that it floods your body with chemicals and results in the loss of brain cells, and not have the ability to create new ones. This can affect our ability to memorise information. In 2008, a study released that elderly adults with high social integration has a slower memory rate decline over 6 years; the makes the brain work much harder, retaining information.
In conclusion, we all risk losing our precious memories. In order to keep them for longer, doing physical activities get blood flowing to brain. We can also eat well as it will provide the brain with the nutrients needed and challenge yourself; learn a language or learn how to code with Python Programming! All of these ways help to preserve your memory and keep your brain healthy!
Speaking of learning a programming language, learn Python. I have written guides on how to get started and going through the key things that we need to know:
Getting Started: https://steemit.com/programming/@jackmanmania/python-programming-getting-started-installation
Lesson 1 (Variables): https://steemit.com/howto/@jackmanmania/python-programming-lesson-1-variables
Lesson 2 (Lists): https://steemit.com/howto/@jackmanmania/python-programming-lesson-2-lists
Lesson 3 (Functions): https://steemit.com/howto/@jackmanmania/python-programming-lesson-3-functions
Lesson 4 (Loops): https://steemit.com/howto/@jackmanmania/python-programming-lesson-4-loops
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