How to stop forgetting important information and why sleep is so important

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

In the evening, when the business life calms down in the office centers, the cleaners start to work, collecting all the rubbish, sorting out everything important on the shelves and preparing the premises for the next working day. In the case of our head, the role of the cleaner is played by our brain, and it is he who decides what will be left and what will be sent to the trash can. But for this process, you can turn on manual control and stop forgetting what you think is important, but your brain is not. Do you want to know how to do it? Read the article!

Why is the brain cleaned up

During sleep, not only important processes for our body are activated (the production of growth hormone, melatonin and serotonin, muscle recovery and others), but also a general cleaning takes place, which helps to clear our head of scraps of unimportant thoughts, feelings and events, so that in the end there remains only the most important.

The brain literally flushes most of our lives away … luckily for us.

For example, right now, right now, as you read this article, you feel your back - the back of your thigh closer to your buttocks - that fits snugly against the chair, chair, or couch you're sitting on. The area of contact can be larger - it all depends on the posture in which you are reading. But in fact, this is not at all important, but the fact that you did not pay much attention to these sensations until they were pointed out to you. That is, you seem to have realized and felt yourself in the position in which you are now.

Likewise, you are "deafening" most of the information that passes through your brain. You do not focus on the feeling of how the clothes fit to your body, do not pay much attention to extraneous background noises (the noise of the refrigerator, air conditioner or cars passing by the window) or every change in the temperature of the air that you breathe in and out (when you breathe in, the air is cooler than on exhalation). The same applies to visual information - you practically do not analyze what you notice with peripheral vision.

The brain simply takes and sends these unnecessary scraps of information to the trash can so that clutter does not accumulate and interfere with more important processes: memory, perception and thinking.

Perhaps tomorrow you will remember today's feelings while reading this text, since we drew your attention to them. But you can hardly remember something like that a year or two years ago, because the brain did a good job as a filter and simply removed tons of this unnecessary information.

These sensations are not the only thing that our brains send to the trash can. Try to remember what, for example, happened a year ago on this particular day. In order to remember at least something, you will need to look at the calendar and view the entries for that day. And even then, most likely, if nothing significant has happened, you will be able to remember only something general, and not more specific sensations (we will not even talk about tactile ones).

You can't remember because your brain threw all the unnecessary things into the trash bin while cleaning and then emptied it. Of course, you remember the days when something happened that struck you, left a strong emotional mark, both positive and, unfortunately, negative. But most of the memories of your life have sunk into oblivion.

How the brain decides what to discard and what to keep

Let's run a quick experiment to explain how this works. Take a pencil and a piece of paper in your hands and quickly take a look at the nine pictures located under this text: spend either no more than three seconds for all nine images, or a second for each row. Now you need to close your eyes and count to 20. Open your eyes and, without peeping, try to describe each image.

It is unlikely that you will remember all the photos, but if you have memorized most of them, then most likely your answers will look like this: a rabbit with a waffle on its head, a cheetah on a branch, a building with a tree that grows from its wall, and a musician XVII century with a guitar.

Why? Because all these pictures stand out from the rest, simpler or familiar to our eyes. For the same reason, we remember the vivid events of our life, which stand out against the background of a more measured everyday life.

In other words, your brain stores information that it considers non-standard and sends normal information to the trash can.

The brain does this because this kind of "abnormal" information helps you stay out of trouble. Standard, familiar events that happen to us every day are not dangerous. You can prepare for them as they are predictable and have happened to you a thousand times. This applies to traffic jams during rush hour, winter weather or drunk drivers on New Year's holidays. The threat is just unusual, non-standard events, such as, for example, rain in clear weather, a robbery in the safest area of the city, or … a cheetah resting on a branch.

Our brains are designed so that we are able to quickly find the answer we need only in a limited amount of information. That is why everything that passes through our senses and memory is so carefully filtered. This increases our chances of survival.

Recent research shows that the removal of mental debris is a very important process that does not occur passively through gradual decay, but only due to the active work of the brain, during which it selectively erases memories marked as unimportant.

Neurologist Oliver Hardt and colleagues at McGill University recently discovered that this selective memory erasure process occurs during sleep. It turns out that we lose some of our knowledge every time we go to bed. That is why in the morning we remember only important things.

How to prevent the "cleaner"

If you think your brain has taken over too much authority and is erasing information that is important to you, you can intervene in this process. This can be done "manually".

The easiest way is to pay special attention to the details or information that you would like to remember. If you tag them emotionally, your brain will not send them to your memory's wastebasket.

Another way is to repeat this to yourself over and over, as if remembering a phone number. And the third way is to constantly return to these memories. For example, viewing photos and videos from your vacation. Every time you bring these memories back to life, your brain will receive a signal that they should not be removed during the next night cleaning.

One way or another, but using all these tricks, you just let your brain know that this information is very important to you.

Ron Davis of the Scripps Research Institute looked at neurotransmitters that are involved in memory formation and forgetting, and concluded that dopamine plays an active role in erasing secondary memories almost immediately after they are formed.

When a new memory is formed, a dopamine-based forgetting mechanism kicks in, he says, and begins to erase memories, leaving only those labeled "Important!" This process is known as consolidation, and it can protect important information from the dopamine forgetting process.

Do you want to remember all important information or events for you? Come up with your own unusual and vivid labels that will not allow your brain to throw data in a landfill during the next general cleaning.

And if you don't want your head to be clogged with all sorts of unnecessary garbage, do not neglect sleep! Otherwise, your brain will cease to put things in order altogether, and you risk being under the rubble of absolutely unnecessary information.