Concentration and Memory

A good memory is a great advantage in many aspects of our lives: study, work or social life.

What is the memory?

The memory is commonly understood as our ability to remember things. However, from the point of view of medicine and psychology, the memory has different cognitive functions in the mind.

Our memory is not only involved in the learning performance, but it is also important when it comes to our ability to concentrate or focus. It is necessary to understand, think abstractly and use the acquired knowledge.

Memories are also involved in the functioning of our imagination, planning and retrospective review of our own acts. All of this requires complex processes in the brain.

The memory is involved in the development of the brain and mental growth.

Concentration and Memory

Symptoms of memory failure

Everyone has experienced certain situations when we do not remember important things:

We forget our four digit secret password
Again, we forget to purchase basic products
We forget the name of our colleagues at work

This type of memory failures in which we forget some kind of information are not necessarily something we should worry about.

However, if this happen frequently, our daily activities may be affected by this, which will also affect our quality of life.

Concentration and Memory

We are not always capable of improvising when we have to face a loss of information. Moreover, it can also be quite frustrating to forget information that can be necessary in our everyday lives.

When this memory loss happens frequently, the uncertainty can be overwhelming and we may end up losing trust in our own abilities, which are necessary for our professional and private life.

What should we do when our memory starts to fail?

We should act as soon as our memory starts to fail.

The first thing we should do is consulting our doctor, so that he will make a proper diagnose and specify if the memory loss is due to some kind of health problem derived by organic causes.

These symptoms tend to be common in dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

According to the current scientific research about these diseases, we currently cannot heal memory loss that is caused by these pathologies.

In these cases, the brain deteriorates progressively. First of all, all the short-term memories are destroyed, and when the disease is in an advance stage, it attacks the long-term memories, even though this process is much slower.

Tips for the memory

However, not all those who experience memory loses are affected by serious diseases.

It is much more frequent to experience a punctual loss of certain memories or information.

Causes of memory loss

Losing our memory can be due to objective causes, such as an excess of intellectual work.

When we force our mind to retain a lot of information and being constantly alert, the anxiety that this produces will cause memory loss, which is a way of overcoming this anxiety.

It is a protection mechanism of our own brain when there is an excess of information.

A lot of intellectual stress can hinder the performance of our memory and it can entail serious consequences.

It can affect many aspects, from the possibility of finding a new job to losing relationships.

Memory loss

When a person works mechanically in a production chain for eight hours straight, they can suffer a loss of memory and performance. This is due to the fact that we stop doing the basic functions for our mind, such as using analytical thinking and abstraction.

Tips to train our memory

We can improve our memory gradually with a good training. There are many methods in psychology to train the short-term memory.

A stimulating psychology game is the Brain Training, which stimulates the memory with exercises that touch upon our different cognitive abilities.

A memory that works properly needs to meet different aspects, which is why it is so important to reach a balance and stimulate the mind in different ways.

Those who are used to solving theoretical problems at work need to intellectually relax during their spare time, since this type of work requires abstract and analytical thinking. We suggest choosing other activities that require a different cognitive work.

In these cases, the best thing to do is practising sports like dancing, martial arts, or team sports that require complex motor functions that will compensate for the lack of activity when we work.

Concentration and sports

Activities that stimulate the memory

There are many activities that can help to stimulate the performance a good health of our memory.

That’s the case of learning a foreign language, learning to play a musical instrument, singing in a choir, playing strategy games on the computer. These things stimulate different areas of our brain.

The advantage of this type of activities lies in the personal and cultural implication, social interaction and the fact that they are enjoyable and entertaining, as opposed to the memory developed in clinical studies.

In these cases, the memory is stimulated in a positive way, which is an added value to enhance its performance while improving the lifestyle.

Natural supplements to improve our memory

If we want our mind to work efficiently, we will need a lot of energy. We can provide this energy through our daily diet, eating products that contain certain types of fats and amino acids.

Some of the natural sources from which we can get this energy are: omega 3, NADH, also known as coenzyme, lecithin, L-tyrosine and L-theanine. All these elements are important for the functioning of the brain.

However, it is not always possible to get these vital substances in the necessary amounts only through the diet.

Therefore, it is quite useful to take the corresponding dietary supplements to compensate for this lack. With them, we will ensure that our brain gets all the nutrients it needs for its proper functioning.