Years ago, there was a consumer competition show on TV called "Supermarket Big Winner". The rules are very simple: the competitors participating in the show need to compete in the first 10 rounds of games, and the final winner will have the money to go to the supermarket to "snatch". Eligibility - Items snatched within a fixed period of time, regardless of value, will be given away for free to the winner.
It sounds like a simple and happy thing, but it's actually not easy to "make a lot of money". In the supermarket, the classification of goods is not based on value but category. Only by remembering where the items with high value are placed and giving up items with lower value can we win a big victory in a limited time.
The memory strategy based on the standard of value shown in this program is an instinctive memory activity of human beings. The researchers found that information that contains important value occupies more "memory" in the "memory hard drive" of the human brain.
Scientific research has also verified the existence of value-oriented memory from an empirical point of view. In 1999, Professor Watkins of Yale University in the United States and others conducted such an experiment: they recruited a group of adults to the laboratory and asked these participants to memorize English words. On the word list, different words are assigned different scores, from the lowest score of 1 to the highest score of 12. The goal that participants need to achieve is to get as many high scores as possible. Obviously, in addition to memorizing as many words as possible, we should also focus on memorizing words with higher scores in order to get higher scores. As expected, the participants showed a tendency to remember high-scoring words more, despite differences in the number of words each person remembered.
Value-oriented memory is instinct
According to the current research results, value-oriented memory seems to be an instinctive memory method, which promotes people to choose higher value things. However, why does the brain "prefer" valuable memories more? In fact, this is related to the "reward mechanism" in the human brain - the dopaminergic system.
What is a "reward mechanism"? When people make decisions that are proven correct and have valuable results, the brain sends "reward" signals to the areas responsible for the decision, which promotes further cognitive improvement, forming a virtuous circle. "Reward" signals are substances that make people feel happy, safe, and fulfilled, including dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter secreted by the brain, produced from tyrosine, which can give people a feeling of happiness and excitement. When the ego completes the preset goal, the dopamine secreted by the brain will make people feel happy and satisfied.
Interestingly, the dopaminergic system does not only respond to valuable outcomes, but also receives stimulation from cues that can "predict" future outcomes. For example, in Professor Watkins' experiment, memorizing words was not the fundamental goal of the participants, but different words pointed to different scores, so high-scoring words themselves became cues for higher scores. When participants memorize high-score words, the brain "predicts" the future value results through this clue, which promotes the secretion of dopamine in the hippocampus, which is responsible for memory, making people feel excited and form better A virtuous cycle of memorizing high-value words.
This was confirmed in a 2006 study by Professor Edcock and his team at the University of California. They designed a monetary value-related experiment in which participants were required to memorize different scenarios marked with higher or lower monetary reward cues. On the second day of the test, as expected, people remembered more of the scenarios marked by high-money cues. At the same time, the observed brain wave data showed that the participants' brains released dopamine in the hippocampus when they remembered high-value cues, reflecting the "prediction" of reward.
Value-Oriented Memory Makes Older People Boost Their Strengths and Avoid Their Weaknesses
Value-oriented memory not only runs through our daily life, helping us to develop strengths and avoid weaknesses, but also a large number of research results prove that this memory model follows people's life and continues to play a role. It is well known that as adults age, the ability of the brain to extract and process memory information gradually declines. Compared with young people, it is more difficult for the elderly to remember things. Therefore, prioritizing memory of more important high-value information is especially important for older adults.
Several studies comparing the memory levels of young and old have found that although young people can remember more information than old people, when faced with high-value items, the recall performance of both age groups showed The gap is not big, and even older people remember this part more. That is to say, this value-oriented memory strategy successfully helped the elderly to make up for the decline of memory ability and maintain normal living ability.
In addition, there are many studies showing the deeper mechanisms of value-oriented memory. From the above introduction, we know that this memory model focuses on high-value memory information, while at the same time restricting and ignoring low-value memory. However, in recent years, scientific research has made new discoveries: in the process of value-oriented memory, low-value information is not completely forgotten, but stored in the brain in different ways. That is to say, low-value information is not cleared out of our "memory hard disk", but is stored in a form similar to compression, reducing the "memory ratio" to memory capacity, and then playing a role when needed.
This brain memory strategy has real-life implications as well. Human memory capacity is limited, but in today's highly developed technology, people still have many smart devices, such as mobile phones, computers, etc., which can assist human beings to store additional information. In the face of numerous affairs and information, we can also take the initiative to sort the value of these items and store them in memory or other devices. Prioritize the most important content where it gets the most attention, and put marginal things to a lesser extent. If we can use the value-oriented memory strategy reasonably, we will complete more high-value tasks and achieve more high-value goals, and our lives will be changed accordingly.
