Jay Legenza, age 9, of Trumbull, Conn., for his question:
WHY DO WE HAVE PROBLEMS WITH OUR MEMORY?
Memory is the ability to keep a mental record of earlier experiences. Actually, memory is nothing more than learning.
Usually a person forgets more and more as time goes on. Memory loss is greatest shortly after the original learning. After that, it is more gradual. To have problems with memory is normal. Some people have better memories than others.
Some psychologists say that time by itself does not produce loss of memory. They believe the events that occur produce the failure to remember. Daily events rather than the passage of time often interfere with the ability to remember.
Some forms of activity interfere with remembering more than others do. Learning to ride a bicycle, for example, should have no effect on your ability to learn the items you have written on a grocery list. But having to learn a second grocery list, with different items, would almost certainly interfere with remembering the first list accurately.
This type of memory problem is called retroactive inhibition. The more similar the second activity is to the first, the more it interferes with remembering the first activity.
Psychologists use three methods to determine how much a person remembers: recall, recognition and relearning.
If you ask a person to tell you the items he originally memorized from a shopping list, his ability to do so is called recall. If you show him another list and ask him to pick out the correct items from his shopping list, he's using the ability of recognition. Relearning takes place when he has a second chance to study the original list. Usually a person relearns a list faster than he learned it the first time.
Some people have excellent memories while others have poor memories. Generally, memories improve up to the time of maturity, and after that there is a very gradual decline in the ability to remember things.
The higher a person's intelligence, the better the person will be able to remember.
A person with eidetic imagery is often said to have a photographic memory. Actually, his memory is not photographic. If a person had a true photographic memory, he would be able to glance at a page and then recite the words on the page from left to right or from top to bottom.
Many children under 14 years of age can visualize objects with amazing clarity and correctly answer detailed questions about them.
Some people suffer from a condition called amnesia. Such a person has lost his memories, not his memory. He has forgotten, at least in his conscious mind, everything that has happened before the emotional shock or accident that caused the amnesia.
As people get older they develop a condition called dementia. This causes a severe lack of memory both short term memory and long term memory. The cause of dementia is not completely understood.