Page 18 - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy

The Learning Styles of an Agile Mind • 3

MAKING MEMORIES

Imagine yourself at an elegant party. People are talking,
dishes and utensils are clinking, and music is playing softly
in the background. Soft candlelight illuminates silk-covered
furnishings while the aroma of dinner fills the air.
All of these impressions saturate your five senses, which
trans-fer as much information as they can to the brain via
what is called the sensory store. These fleeting sensations re-
main for only a few milliseconds before the majority of the
sensations are lost and only a small subset is passed on to
short-term, or working, memory (STM). The information is
lost within 15 to 30 seconds if not selected for closer consid-
eration. If you were not paying attention to a conversation,
you could reconstruct a recent comment if asked within this
15 to 30 second window. However, after this brief interval of
time, you must begin to organize and rehearse the informa-
tion you want to store in long-term memory (LTM). The
process of learning new information does not stop when we
go to sleep. Recent research indicates that sleep is essential
to the formation and efficient storage of memories. As we
sleep, the brain appears to replay the activities of the day, re-
activating old and activating new brain cell connections.
With proper encoding and retrieval strategies, information
that is stored in LTM is considered relatively permanent be-
cause it can be recalled years later. 1

Sleep is essential to the formation and efficient stor-
age of memories.

The overwhelming mode of human communication is a
mix of verbal and visual information. Figure 1-1 shows brain
images, which demonstrate the different parts of the brain
that are active when listening to words and looking at words.
Notice that if material is presented orally, the brain reacts
as shown in Figure 1-1a, whereas if material is presented vi-
sually, the brain reacts as shown in Figure 1-1b.