Jill's Journal: Useless information that we retain

The other day as my mind wandered off to who knows where, this column idea surfaced somewhere along the trail of my “mindful” journey. It got me to thinking about all of the useless information that I have stockpiled in my noggin in my lifetime.  

For instance, I can still rattle off the Curry family’s landline phone number.

And I can sing the first verse of the Lutheran Girl Pioneers song without fail, or the McDonald’s jingle from decades ago: “Two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.”

Why I can tell you that Alice, the Brady TV family’s housekeeper’s last name was Nelson, land only knows, or why I retain the knowledge that Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin.

But I do.

Ironically so, there are times I’m walking into a room for a purpose only to forget why I was going there.

It’s clear the human memory is full of surprises.

Why is that we forget important information yet remember thousands of mundane details that we may never need unless you find yourself in a game of useless trivia. 

For the answer to this question, I turned to Synap, an online exam preparation company. Here’s a few “tidbits” about what I learned.

• There is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can remember.

I, however, beg to differ. And here’s why. I can have a mental list of four items that I need to grab at the grocery store, yet, I’ll leave with more than what I went in for, and likely have forgotten one of the four items that I intended to buy. Hence, why I am a pencil-to-paper list gal.

Paul Reber, professor of psychology at Northwestern University suggests that the brain can store 2.5 petabytes of data – that’s 2,500,000 Gigabytes, or 300 years’ worth of TV.

• We can only remember a handful of things in our ‘short-term’ memory.

Reber’s explanation is the reason we seem to forget so much may well be that, whilst our long-term memory is virtually limitless, our short term, or ‘working’ memory has a much smaller capacity. The research revealed that our short-term memory can only remember 5 to 9 pieces of information at any given time. Some argue it’s only four.

That’s an acceptable explanation of why I forget what I walked into the room for.

• Learning new things produces physical changes in your brain structure.

The only physical change in my brain happened when my high school algebra did his best to help me understand why Y times X to the third power was worth knowing. It never made sense to me, hence my career as a writer.

• Being able to access information quickly (i.e. on the Internet) makes you less likely to remember it.

While there’s something to be said to finding an answer to our question with just a few clicks on the keyboard, studies suggest there is an interesting flip-side to being able to access information so conveniently: if the brain knows it can just access it again so easily, it’s less likely to bother remembering the information itself.

The phenomenon is referred to as “The Google Effect. Apparently, there’s an ongoing debate as to whether the internet is making us stupid.

• (Almost) forgetting something makes you more likely to remember it.

It turns out that partially forgetting, and then struggling to remember it is a necessary part of the memory formation process. I’m equating this to the “absence makes the heart grow fonder” concept.

• Emotional intensity prioritizes how memories are stored.

The brain processes a huge amount of data every day, so clearly, it needs some kind of ‘triage’ system for determining what is important stuff that needs to be remembered, and what can be erased from our memory.

The bottom line, our brains are complicated, fascinating and weird. And of course, always have us thinking, “Why?”