Page 23 - Use Your Memory

IS YOUR MEMORY PERFECT?
number of patterns, or 'degrees of freedom', throughout the brain
is, to use his own words, 'so great that writing it would take a line of
figures, in normal manuscript characters, more than ten and a half
million kilometres in length. With such a number of possibilities,
the brain is a keyboard on which hundreds of millions of different
melodies can be played.'
Your memory is the music.
7 Near-Death - Type Experiences
Many people have looked up at the surface ripples of a swimming
pool from the bottom, knowing that they were going to drown
within the next two minutes; or seen the rapidly disappearing
ledge of the mountain from which they have just fallen; or felt the
oncoming grid of the 10-ton lorry bearing down on them at 60
miles per hour. A common theme runs through the accounts that
survivors of such traumas tell. In such moments of 'final con-
sideration' the brain slows all things down to a standstill,
expanding a fraction of a second into a lifetime, and reviews the
total experience of the individual.
When pressed to admit that what they had really experienced
were a few highlights, the individuals concerned insisted that what
they had experienced was their entire life, including all things they
had completely forgotten until that instant of time. 'My whole life
flashed before me' has almost become a cliche that goes with the
near-death experience. Such a commonality of experience again
argues for a storage capacity of the brain that we have only just
begun to tap.
8 Photographic Memory
Photographic, or eidetic, memory is a specific phenomenon in
which people can remember, usually for a very short time, per-
fectly and exactly anything they have seen. This memory usually
fades, but it can be so accurate as to enable somebody, after seeing
a picture of 1000 randomly sprayed dots on a white sheet, to
reproduce them perfectly. This suggests that in addition to the
deep, long-term storage capacity, we also have a shorter-term and
immediate photographic ability. It is argued that children often
have this ability as a natural part of their mental functioning and
that we train it away by forcing them to concentrate too much on
logic and language and too little on imagination and their other
range of mental skills.
9 The 1000 Photographs
In recent experiments people were shown 1000 photographs, one
after the other, at a pace of about one photograph per second. The
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