How good is your memory?

Hey everyone! Today I'm going to be sharing with you some results that I've received from a few memory tests and what I think about them. Luckily for me, it looks like my memory is at least average.

The first test I took was a memory test that required recalling as many of 12 words as I could. It said that I would need to focus on each word for a couple seconds, so each time I looked at a word I would pair it with an image of that word in my head. For example, I imagined a blue vase for the word vase and a family of tigers for tiger and so on. I ended up recalling 11 out of the 12 words, forgetting the word book, which seems like it should be the easy one. However, maybe because I assumed it would be easy I did not focus as intently on it and only imagined a generic book. Overall, I think the test was a pretty fair judge.

The next test I took was also a short term memory test, but this one showed pictures and then asked me to recall the words associated with those images. It said it would give me thirty seconds, so I did not expect as many images as had popped up. I looked at each image for about a second, thought hard on its name, and then moved on. I had a little time left after that, so I started to connect thoughts together, like airplane with globe. Well, it didn't go so well as I completely forgot three of the words, light bulb, rainbow, and clock. Looking at those words, it seems crazy that I forgot them, but I feel like that connects to my last test and it's the "easy" ones that you forget exist. I also learned that connecting images in your head really does help you remember them as I recalled every single pair that I had time to think of. The test was fun and seemed to work fine.

I did two more tests, a facial recognition one where you had to piece all the parts of a face back together from choices and a penny one where you had to recall what a penny looked like. I got all the parts of the face right and the penny one right too. The face one was pretty easy because the options were extremely different, which made remembering the right one easy, especially because it was in front of me. If I had to redraw the face or something it would've been much harder. The penny one was pretty easy too because most were right, had "in god we trust," bottom right with the number, and then I felt like something belonged on the left and it ended up being right. These tests were cool but I felt like they didn't tell me much or require any sort of hard memorizing.

Also, in case you were interested, I found some interesting research relating to the Pavlov dog experiment. Scientists have recently found that in the hippocampus, neuron synchronization is what occurs and the main reason why the Pavlovian learning shift occurs. If this synchronization could be controlled, some memories could be forcefully remembered.

Well, that's all there was for this week, thanks for reading!

Trace Hankins