What Do We Get Out Of Training Memory?

Is it important to train your memory?

The term, memory training, is a modern concept that experts have known for centuries as the art of memory. In fact, it dates all the way back to Simonides of Keos (5th century BC) and the Loci method.

Later, other authors used terms such as artificial memory, natural memory, and memory with images. Memory is also linked to magic and philosophical and ideological ideas.

Memory training has positive effects, both in healthy elderly people and in the elderly with cognitive impairment. Today, there are many techniques to improve memory, such as rehabilitation, stimulation, and exercise.

In the 1970s, several studies and programs focused on memory training to address losses caused by trauma, early dementia, and aging. Nowadays, experts use other means, such as stimulation, group therapy, rehabilitation, re-learning or computer rehabilitation.

The use of these tools depends on the needs of the person, but also on the resources and knowledge of the professionals.

The difference between rehabilitation and training

The two most commonly used terms are rehabilitation and training. Training is the systematic teaching of knowledge and the use of control over process, strategy, technique and experience involved in memory function, as well as an improvement in performance.

On the other hand, rehabilitation is an intervention with a goal of regaining an optimal level of function (personal, social and professional) after an illness that has caused an injury or disability.

Therefore, rehabilitation is used for sick people, while exercise can be used for both sick and healthy people.

In addition, exercise is used for people who have disorders that may be the subject of clinical attention, as stated in DSM V (2013) “memory loss due to aging, for age-related cognitive impairment, etc.”

How to train your memory?

Memory training can be classified under different criteria (Montejo Carrasco, 2015):

• The content they are working on, as well as the proposed goal. Single or multiple topics.
• The number of people you work with. Individually or groups.
• Which strategies are used. Internal strategies (visualization, attachment…), external strategies (notebooks, colors, hangers, orders…) and those that use both types of elements.
• What kind of memory is used (either explicitly or implicitly).

Experts often choose group training for older people. In addition to memory, this reinforces the social context, a context in which older people simultaneously have to deal with important losses, such as friends and acquaintances of their age.

In addition, the overall habituation to everyday life and the results obtained from the training work better with this method. This methodology is preferable because of the beneficial effects that group work has. Furthermore, it is more profitable for the experts as one can work with more people in less time.

Train your memory

It seems that certain areas of the brain, with exercise, are able to store a certain cognitive reserve that can protect us from age-related impairment.

The neurologist, Rita Levi-Montalcini, once said that the plasticity of the brain, or neuroplasticity, remains constant throughout life, but only if the brain is trained.

Therefore, when we train our memory, we make a profitable investment in age-related cognitive impairment. The most optimistic data say that it can have a positive effect in 63% of cases and act as a positive factor in up to a third of all cases of Alzheimer’s.