How does your memory work?

Have you ever thought about your memory?

How does your memory work?

Why do you remember some things quickly while others are hard to remember?

Imagine your first day at a new job, new office, new people. After you sit at your new desk, the person from the people’s department will come to you and give you a guided tour.

You start walking, and she introduces you to, let’s say 30 new people during your tour, plus three or four more that you meet at the cafeteria. Now imagine that at the end of the day, someone comes to you with a list of 200 names and says, could you please mark which of those names you can remember that you met today? You can mark less than five, the ones you’ve spent more time on or the last ones you’ve met.

But now imagine another situation.

You have the same situation; instead of a list of 200 names, this person comes and brings you a book with 200 pictures and says, Could you please mark which of these people you met during this tour? You will probably hit the 30.

And why?

Because names are isolated pieces of information, you can’t relate names to anything except the person introduced at that moment. Similarly, if you take a picture, this image has a lot of metadata.

For example, where you were at that moment, what did this person do? What was the first thing they said? It wasn’t just in the morning, in the afternoon.

We are more visual.

Images contain much more information, and as isolated pieces of information, they’re easier for us to relate to than names.

This concept is one of the facts that can help you see how to use your memory in the best way possible.