This podcast unravels the mysteries of memory. How memory is creative, not precise and often unreliable. How effective learning depends on attention, spaced learning and self-testing. How forgetting is a good thing, especially compared to hyperthymesia. And how memory changes with age due to accumulated knowledge, not decline. This is combined with memory enhancement techniques such as memory palaces, chunking or techniques for remembering dates and numbers. This bootcamp combines scientific research with real-life stories. It’s an engaging guide to understanding and improving memory in everyday life, and with Derren Brown’s witty chat, it’s a very good and fun podcast to listen to.
Unless you are annoyingly young, I imagine you have already started to notice how time seems to speed up as we age. One study in Germany concluded that there appears to be a steady quickening of the perception of time-passing from the ages of fourteen up to fifty-nine. But from sixty onwards, a plateau was reached and no further speeding up of time was detected, which is a relief. But what’s going on exactly and what does it got to do with memory? Experimental psychologist Ruth Ogden from Liverpool John Moores University has been trying to find out. “When we’re trying to make estimations or judgements about time, our brain isn’t constantly monitoring time, so what it does is it uses a shortcut where it looks at how many memories have been stored in a period, and it uses that as a guide for how much time has passed. So, if you got a period of time where there’s been loads of memories, you’ve done lots of new things, you’ve had loads of emotional experiences, then that tells our brain that it must have been a long time because we did lots of things. Conversely, if you’ve got a period where you didn’t do much, or it was very mundane, you didn’t remember anything, you’ve got no new memories, that tricks our brain in thinking it must be a short period of time. So we use memory as a guide for how long something has lasted for when we are not been consciously monitoring time. So if you think when you are driving somewhere that you have never been to before, you’ve got a bit of anxiety about where you are going, so there’s a lots of additional thought process going on, you might have to follow a map, you are probably seeing things you’ve never seen before, so you’re forming new memories, and you’re using more of your brain’s capacity on the way there then you are on the way back. So, this gives us the false impression that journeys to somewhere often last a lot longer than journeys from somewhere, just because journeys from somewhere are familiar”. Our perception of the passage of time in the moment is naturally detected by what we are actually doing. So, time flies when we’re having fun, and it drags when we’re bored. But it’s a more general reflective sense of time-passing which seems to change as we grow older. So why does it fell it’s speeding up at an alarming rate? “As we get older, our memory deteriorates, as our memory gets worse, we’re less able to remember all the things that we have done across the year and that can give us a sensation that time is passing more quickly during that year. Another way that our memory affects our experience of time, as we get older, is that we do fewer new things as we get older. So when you’re little you’re constantly having new experiences, you’re constantly learning new things, and that means your years are very, very full of new exciting memories. The most people, as we get older, we do have fewer new experiences, we take on fewer new pieces of information, just through the years of experience that we’ve got, and again, this can trick us into felling like well they aren’t that many memories, and therefore the year is passing very quickly.” The solution, of course, is quite simple. We do have the power to slow down time, just keep busy, don’t slump into routines that fail to generate vibrant memories. Travel more, learn new languages, listen to Derren Brown’s Boot Camp for Memory podcast.
Eight episodes of approximately 40 minutes each
Episode 1. Memory – A Will Of It’s Own
Episode 2. How Good is Your memory
Episode 3. How memory Works
Episode 4. How to Learn
Episode 5. The Art of Forgetting
Episode 6. The Rise and Fall of memory
Episode 7. Memory in The Digital Age
Episode 8. You Must Remember This