whereas you can only store around five random letters, you should find
you can store many more if they are arranged in the form of meaningful
words or acronyms.
There are several further ways to distinguish between types of
memory. The first relates to the fact that all of what we know is not
actually available to our conscious minds. In other words, we have
many implicit memories. For example, if you’re more than, say, 25 years
old, I doubt whether you can recall every member of your final class at
school, and yet if you were shown a class photo, memories of most of
your classmates would probably come flooding back. Similarly, there’s
no way that you could remember every song you’ve ever enjoyed, and
yet if you heard one of these songs, you’d recognize it straight away. In
Is there a limit to how much we can memorize?
It’s hard to say for sure, and the answer will obviously vary from one
person to another, but what we do know is that human memory
capacity is massive and far larger than most experts had previously
realized. In a 2008 study, a team led by Timothy Brady (an MIT graduate
student at the time) sat fourteen participants down for five and a half
hours and presented them with pictures of 2,500 mundane objects,
each shown for three seconds (view the task at cvcl.mit.edu/MM/).
Ten minutes after this marathon session had ended, the researchers
presented the participants with three hundred pairs of pictures, and
for each pair they had to say which object was among the original
sample of objects they’d watched earlier.
Remarkably, the participants picked out the correct object around
ninety percent of the time. Research from the 1970s had similarly
shown that people were able to perform feats like this, but in these
studies, earlier objects were paired with completely different pictures,
thus prompting critics to argue that it was only gist memory (see p.76)
that had such a large capacity. Brady’s test, by contrast, was much
more difficult, showing that we have a huge capacity for detailed,
“photographic” memories. Objects seen earlier were paired with three
different kinds of previously unseen stimuli: an object from an entirely
novel category; a physically similar object from a previously seen
object category; and finally, an object identical to one seen earlier
but presented in a different state or pose (for example, a side-cabinet
with one of its doors open rather than closed). Even in the latter, most
difficult condition, participants answered with an average accuracy of
87 percent. Brady’s team felt they were able to “...raise only the lower
bound of what is possible”, and that the upper limit of human memory
storage was yet to be identified.YOUR MEMORIES