The secrets of your memory Memory expert Professor Jemima Gryaznov answers your most common questions about memory. 1 Why can I remember events in my childhood but not what happened last week? ‘We remember the things that have strong connections in our mind, especially emotional connections. Childhood memories are often very emotional: we experience things for the first time so we have strong feelings of fear or excitement. Retelling events also helps to fix them in our memories and interesting or funny stories from our childhood are often told again and again! 2 Do some people really have a photographic memory? It is well known that some people have an extraordinary memory. Daniel Tarmmet, for example, can remember the first 22,500 digits of pi and Stephen Wiltshire can draw a detailed picture of a city from memory after flying over it in a helicopter. However, neither Daniel nor Stephen have a photographic memory. They are good at remembering particular things for a limited time. A person with 4 photographic memory could remember every detail of a picture, a book or an event many years later. No one has yet proved that they have a photographic memory in a scientific test, 3 Is computer memory better than human. memory? ‘That depends what you mean by ‘better’! Information in a computer is stored in separate pieces. Human memory is stored in a different way. Each piece of information is connected to many other pieces, That's why a particular smell can bring back memories of @ holiday or @ person. The problem with human memory is that it is messy and not very accurate, The problem with computer memory is that it can't make connections between pieces of information — it isn't creative, 4 I'm 24. Is my memory getting worse? Not yet, but it will do soon. Ourmemory reaches its full power at the age of 25, At that point we can remember up to 200 pieces of information a second. After this age, however, the brain starts to get smaller. By the age of 40 we are losing 10,000 brain cells every day. By middle age our memory is significantly worse than when we were young. 5 Is it possible to remember early childhood? Scientists used to believe that it was impossible to remember very early childhood, but recent research shows that babies are much cleverer than we previously thought. Some people really can remember being a baby. Others, however, remember nothing before the age of five or even ten!