Can staying up late make people's memory decline?

Memory decline, in today's information age, may be mixed.

On the one hand, because information is a kind of resource and wealth, people try to get a lot of information through various channels.

According to the survey data, most people check their smartphones 47 times a day on average, and 18 to 24-year-old people check them twice. But the amount of information is so large that it is very difficult to process and remember, and we don't even know what information to remember.

On the other hand, as Adam popescu published in The New York Times, "How to improve memory in the age of information fragmentation? When the knowledge of all mankind is in everyone's pocket and at your fingertips, why should we bother to remember it?

Joseph Ledoux, director of the Emotional Brain Research Institute of new york University, said, you should be good at filtering and storing information, and choose what to remember.

However, even if you choose the right thing to remember, you can't guarantee the accuracy of your memory.

Music lovers who study how the brain forms memories say that memory is an error-prone thing that will change with time.

When recalling, long-term memory is mapped to our short-term memory, which actually establishes a new connection. Therefore, memory is a process of reconstruction. Once an inaccurate memory is distorted, it will make future memories more error-prone.

Staying up late for a long time leads to memory loss. Is there any way to remedy it?

For people whose memory begins to decline, it will be a great boon if there is a way to improve their memory. Psychologists who study memory have come to a positive conclusion: reviewing, focusing and stimulating hints are very effective means to improve memory.

Review repeatedly

Repetition is the best way to transform short-term memory into long-term memory. When learning, new connections will be formed in the brain. If you want to remember what you have learned, you must strengthen this connection. To do this, we must review it repeatedly. This is the simplest brain game and the lowest cost method that most people ignore.

Robert Bjork, head of the psychology department at UCLA, said that over time, people forget information.

If you often review or practice some knowledge, it is easy to deepen your shallow memory and make it solid. If you stop studying for a period of time, the probability of remembering them will decrease. Psychologically, this phenomenon is called "forgetting curve".

To overcome the "forgetting curve", repeat the memory every few days and test the effect yourself. Psychologists have also found that too long or too short an interval will affect the effect, so it is necessary to find the most suitable interval to enhance the memory effect.

concentrate

Memory is closely related to concentration. When remembering, you must stay focused and focus on only one thing at a time.

One of the ways to improve concentration is to transform the office layout. Nelson Cowan, a working memory expert at the University of Missouri, believes that the open office space advocated by CEOs in Silicon Valley will actually greatly reduce our work efficiency, because they will produce many distracting factors. Such as yoga studios, rock climbing facilities, gardens, etc. All of them are great benefits, but they create too much excitement and it is difficult to finish the task on time.

Don't let other things interfere with your memory, such as browsing the web. This will greatly improve your concentration and your memory. Cowen said that when attention and memory stop deceiving each other, both will perform better.

Perhaps the most important thing for the elderly to resist memory loss is to overcome distraction. Many people are overconfident that they can control their distractions and don't know the cost of doing two things at a time. Not focusing on memory will make our efforts get nothing. Unfortunately, most of us ignore this fact and think that we can multitask.

Incentives and tips

For students, the pressure of exams will arouse their attention. Harvard researchers found that the stress of exams can reduce distractions by 50%. So looking for motivation and stress can improve memory.

Memory also depends on hints. A simple way to increase the frequency of memory by creating reminders is to set reminders, such as writing reminders on paper and putting them on your desk, so that you are forced to read them over and over again for a long time. Incorporate interval repetition memory method to make things that need to be remembered not easy to forget.

With the increase of age, the decline of memory is an irresistible process. But when you try these methods and find that you are better than most of your peers, the process may not be painful.