PartB

How Our Memory Works

Try to imagine a life without a memory. It would be impossible. You couldn't use a language, because you wouldn't remember the words. You couldn't understand a film, because you need to hold the first part of the story in your mind in order to understand the later parts. You wouldn't be able to recognize anyone - even members of your own family. You would live in a permanent present. You would have no past and you wouldn't be able to imagine a future.

Human beings have amazing memories. Apart from all our personal memories about our own lives, we can recall between 20,000 and 100,000 words in our own language as well as possibly thousands more in a foreign language. We have all sorts of information about different subjects such as history, science, and geography, and we have complex skills such as driving a car or playing a musical instrument. All these things and countless others depend on our memory.

How well you remember things depends on many different factors. Firstly, some people naturally have better memories than others, in just the same way as some people are taller than others, or have different color eyes. Some top chess players, for example, can remember every move of every game that they have ever seen or played.

Secondly, research shows that different things are stored in different parts of the brain. Ideas, words, and numbers are stored in the left-hand side, while the right-hand side remembers images, sounds, and smells. In most people one side of the brain is more developed than the other, and this may explain why some people can remember people's faces easily, but can't remember their names.

Thirdly, we all remember exciting, frightening, or dramatic events more easily. This is because these experiences produce chemicals such as adrenaline, which boost your memory. They say that anyone who is old enough to remember knows exactly where they were on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when radio and TV programs around the world were interrupted with the shocking news that the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York were hit.

Fourthly, the context in which you learn something can affect how well you remember it. Tests on divers, for example, showed that when they learned things underwater, they could also remember those things best when they were underwater.

Lastly, the more often you recall a memory the more likely you are to remember it. If you don't use it, you'll lose it. A telephone number that you dial frequently will stay in your memory easily, but you will probably have to write down one that you use only now and again.

Questions:

1. What does the passage mainly tell us?

2. What can be inferred from the passage?

3. Which of the following is stated to be true?

4. Why can we remember exciting, dramatic, or frightening events better?

PartC

Additional Listenings

Techniques to Help Us Remember Better

We all have problems remembering things, but there are some techniques that you can use to help you remember.

First of all, remember the names and jobs of the people and where they come from. Here, the best thing is to imagine images of the people and the names that you want to remember. And you should try to think of funny images as they are easier to remember. For example, we have Tom the student from Australia. Well, for Tom you might imagine a tomato. Then Australia has a shape a bit like a dog. Now let's imagine it's a very clever dog and is studying. So imagine Tom's face as a tomato and he's with a dog and the dog is reading a book. So now we have a picture of Tom the student from Australia.

Now let's take the numbers. The best thing to do here is to break a large number up into smaller numbers and then think of things that the numbers remind you of, such as a birthday, a particular year, the number of a house. Or with a number like 747 you might think of a jumbo jet -- a Boeing 747.

With the directions, the best thing is to imagine yourself following the directions. Create a picture in your mind of yourself going down the street. Count the turnings 1, 2, ... Then turn left. Now imagine going past a supermarket and a cinema and so on.

When you have to remember lists of words, try to build them into a story. So with our words we might start with, 'The sun was shining, so I went for a walk. I saw a horse wearing trousers. It was kicking some bananas over a television. The bananas landed in a bag.' And so on. Again the funnier the story, the better.

Try some of these techniques and you'll be amazed at what you can remember.

Questions:

1. How many techniques are mentioned in the talk?

2. Why should we imagine a dog in order to remember that Tom is from Australia?

3. What should we do to remember a large number?

4. How can we remember the directions to a certain place?

5. How can we remember lists of words?

PartD

Improve Your Memory

To many people advancing age means losing your hair, your waistline and your memory. But is it an inescapable fact that the older you get, the less you remember? Well, as time goes by, we tend to blame age for problems that are not necessarily age-related.

When a teenager can't find her keys, she thinks it's because she's distracted or disorganized, but a 70-year-old blames her memory. In fact, the 70-year-old may have been misplacing things for decades -- like we all do from time to time.

In healthy people, memory doesn't deteriorate as quickly as many of us think. According to psychologists, as we age, our memory mechanism isn't broken, it's just different. The brain's processing time slows down over the years, though no one knows exactly why. Recent research suggests that nerve cells lose efficiency and that there's less activity in the part of the brain that decides whether to store information or not. But it's not clear that less activity is worse. A beginning athlete is winded more easily than a trained athlete. In the same way, as the brain gets more skilled at a task, it spends less energy on it.

There are steps you can take to improve your memory, though you have to work to keep your brain in shape. It's like having a good body. You can't go to the gym once a year and expect to stay in top form.

Some memory enhancement experts suggest using the AM principle. Pay attention to what you want to remember. Then give some meaning to it. We remember things when we focus on them, whether we intend to or not. That helps explain why jingles stick in our minds. They are played on loud, flashy TV commercials. They also use rhyme and music to help us remember better.

Basic organization helps us remember the boring stuff. For example, rather than trying to recall a random list of groceries, we can divide them into categories, such as dairy, meat, and produce. For important things like keys and money, we can set up a "forget-me-not" spot where we always keep them.

We can also eat to aid our memory power. Whole grains, fruits and vegetables are excellent sources of glucose, the brain's preferred fuel. Another low-tech way to improve memory is to get adequate rest. Sleep may allow our brain time to encode memories.

Interest in friends, family and hobbies does wonders for our memory. A sense of passion or purpose helps us remember. Memory requires us to pay attention to our lives, allowing us to discover in them everything worth remembering.

Statements:

1. It is not always true that the older you get, the less you remember.

2. It can be inferred from the passage that memory problems are not really age-related.

3. As we get older, our memory mechanism is broken, and so cannot be the same as it was before.

4. Scientists have discovered that memory loss is caused by lack of activity in the part of the brain that decides what information to store.

5. You must work hard to keep your brain active, just as you work hard to keep yourself in shape.

6. In the AM principle, the letters A and M most likely refer to attention and memory respectively.

7. A right choice of food and plenty of rest help improve our memory.

8. Memory requires us to have purpose or passion in what we do.