Research Explains Why You Can Remember Something From 10 Years Ago, But Not 10 Minutes Ago
GaudiLab | ShutterstockWe’ve all had the unfortunate experience of having to pull food packaging out of the garbage because we almost immediately forgot what temperature to set the oven on. At the same time, if someone asked us to recite our favorite 2000s rom-com word-for-word, we could probably do it.
Why does our memory work in a way that allows us to remember things from the past but forget more recent events very easily? That’s the question researchers from the University of Houston set out to answer with a study published in Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. Apparently, there’s a scientific reason why you tend to forget things you just learned.
Your ability to remember things in the short-term is dependent on your working memory consolidation.
According to a release from the University of Houston Newsroom, working memory consolidation refers to “the process of protecting the information you just perceived from distraction, even though you might not aim to remember it in the longer term.”
To perform the study, researchers asked a participant group made up of University of Houston students to remember a sequence of letters or a certain color. Then, they had the students make decisions, some of which were similar to what they were remembering and some which weren’t.
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The researchers wanted to determine if participants had a higher chance of forgetting when the decision they made directly correlated to what they were trying to remember. For example, if a visual memory would be more or less affected by a visual choice. They concluded that any decision that was made immediately disrupted the process of working memory consolidation, whether it was related or not.
Psychology professor Benjamin Tamber-Rosenau summed up the findings, saying, “Our results showed that premature shifting to new tasks disrupts memory consolidation primarily because of demands on central executive processing, not on the storage systems themselves.”
Working memory is not the same thing as long-term memory, which is why you can sometimes remember things better when you learned them a while ago.
Clinical neuropsychologist Matthew Cruger, PhD, explained that working memory is more focused on the here and now. “Working memory is sort of a category above attention,” he said. “It’s keeping in mind anything you need to keep in mind while you’re doing something.”
Instructions are a good example of what your working memory entails. Maybe you’re assembling a bookshelf, and you’re using the manual to know what you should do. The steps you’ve read exist in your working memory, but you’re obviously not going to remember them three days from now.
Alex Burmester, a research associate in perception and memory at New York University, described long-term memory as having “a much larger storage capacity” and being “more durable and stable.” It covers everything from life events to academic knowledge to motor skills. Something that starts out in your working memory can cross the “gateway” to long-term memory if you’re exposed to it enough.
We don’t have unlimited working memory, but we can work to increase it.
Once you reach adulthood, you can count on skills like reading and multiplication being a part of your long-term memory. But, even if you aren’t in school anymore, there are still near-constant opportunities to learn, and a strong working memory can help with that.
Luckily, there are some strategies you can use to improve your working memory capacity. The University of Houston researchers said you have to give something your full attention to remember it, so you can’t review the information while you’re in the middle of multitasking or immediately move onto something else that distracts you.
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Even small lifestyle changes like taking plenty of breaks and working to lower your stress levels can make a difference.
The brain is something that is still a bit of an enigma in a lot of ways, so there’s no easy process to make your working memory function better. Building consistent healthy habits might mean you have to dig those cooking directions out of the trash a little less, though.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
