When One Is More Than Two: Increasing Our Memory

kids.frontiersin.org In our daily lives, we learn new things all the time. Unfortunately, it is usually difficult for us to remember everything that we learn. To increase our ability to remember, either for a few seconds or for many years, we can think in a way that ties together several pieces of information, so that they make fewer pieces of information. There are two ways the brain does this. One is called “chunking” and it is a way of thinking that allows us to keep more information in our memory for very short time periods. The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that helps us with chunking. When we need to remember information for a long time, a different part of our brain, called the perirhinal cortex, performs a similar process called “unitization,” which links two or more items together through some sort of relationship between them. These ways of learning can help us when we need to remember lots of information, such as when we are studying for our exams!