It seems that resting in a quiet room for 10 minutes without distractions can boost our ability to remember new information. “A lot of people think the brain is a muscle that needs to be continually stimulated, but perhaps that’s not the best way,” says Michaela Dewar at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. To store them long-term, new memories must be consolidated, a process that may happen while we sleep. But at least some consolidation may occur while we’re awake, says Dewar – all you need is time out. In 2012, her team found that people who had a 10-minute rest after hearing a story remembered 10 per cent more of it a week later than those who played a spot-the-difference game immediately afterwards.’ “We dim the lights and ask them to sit in an empty, quiet room, with no mobile phones,” says Dewar. Most volunteers said they let their minds wander during this time.
Now Dewar and her colleagues have shown that rest can also consolidate spatial memories. Volunteers who rested after exploring a virtual-reality environment were 10 per cent more accurate at orientating themselves in relation to virtual landmarks (Hippocampus, doi.org/926). This is good news for insomniacs, suggesting that simply resting while awake can give us some of the memory benefits of sleep. “As long as you’re reasonably relaxed, you might still be experiencing some of the memory-consolidation processes,” says Gareth Gaskell at the University of York, UK. The effect is particularly strong in people with amnesia. In a memory test of a list of words, eight of 12 volunteers with the condition were unable to remember any of them without a break. But after resting for 9 minutes, the same volunteers could recall between 30 and 80 per cent of the list. The results suggest that amnesiacs may not have completely lost the ability to form new memories after all. Dewar thinks that overstimulation may be what causes their memory problems. (Jessica Hamzelou, New Scientist)
One of the most alarming and frustrating things about getting older is forgetting – forgetting words, forgetting events, forgetting names. Nothing upsets Epicurean ataraxia more than forgetting something or someone, while having clear recollection of events in childhood. So now I am going off to ……what was I going to do?
I absolutely agree with this. When doing my GCSE and A-level exams, I found that the people most relaxed were often the people that did the best, even if they weren’t expecting to. On the other hand, people who constantly revised and stayed up all night were the people that failed. Of course you need to work hard if you wish to remember things, but confidence and calmness are also key.
On a slightly different note, I think it’s actually sometimes good to forget things. Throughout our lives, we accumulate information that is of no interest or usefulness to us. We also experience events that may be bad, but are ultimately inconsequential in the long term. It’s those two sorts of memories that we ought to forget, and I think we’re much happier when we do.