Page 21 - Use Your Memory

USE YOUR MEMORY
psychology is dotted with similar cases of perfect memorisers. In
every instance, their brains were found to be normal, and in every
instance they had, as young children, 'discovered' the basic prin-
ciples of their memory's function.
4 Professor Rosensweig's Experiments
Professor Mark Rosensweig, a Californian psychologist and
neurophysiologist, spent years studying the individual brain cell
and its capacity for storage. As early as 1974 he stated that if we
fed in ten new items of information every second for an entire
lifetime to any normal human brain that brain would be con-
siderably less than half full. He emphasised that memory prob-
lems have nothing to do with the capacity of the brain but rather
with the self-management of that apparently limitless capacity.
5 Professor Penfield 's Experiments
Professor Wilder Penfield of Canada came across his discovery of
the capacity of human memory by mistake. He was stimulating
individual brain cells with tiny electrodes for the purpose of
locating areas of the brain that were the cause of patients' epilepsy.
To his amazement he found that when he stimulated certain
individual brain cells, his patients were suddenly recalling experi-
ences from their past. The patients emphasised that it was not
simple memory, but that they actually were reliving the entire
experience, including smells, noises, colours, movement, tastes.
These experiences ranged from a few hours before the experi-
mental session to as much as forty years earlier.
Penfield suggested that hidden within each brain cell or cluster
of brain cells lies a perfect store of every event of our past and that
if we could find the right stimulus we could replay the entire film.
6 The Potential Pattern-Making Ability of Your Brain
Professor Pyotr Anokhin, the famous Pavlov's brightest student,
spent his last years investigating the potential pattern-making
capabilities of the human brain. His findings were important for
memory researchers. It seems that memory is recorded in separ-
ate little patterns, or electromagnetic circuits, that are formed by
the brain's interconnecting cells.
Anokhin already knew that the brain contained a million million
(1,000,000,000,000) brain cells but that even this gigantic
number was going to be small in comparison with the number of
patterns that those brain cells could make among themselves.
Working with advanced electron microscopes and computers, he
came up with a staggering number. Anokhin calculated that the
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