What Do We Gain From Training Memory?

Many studies support the fact that age can lead to cognitive decline. With this in mind, can we achieve anything by training memory? Is it beneficial in both the short and long term?

Age does not affect all people nor their memory. We tend to retain the procedural memory, the memories related to distant and emotionally intense events. On the other hand, working memory is what suffers the most.

Disseminated attention, forgetting new events, poor use of coding strategies and omitting or misusing verbal or visual cues to retrieve information are also common, along with a negative perception of one’s own performance and the possibility of improvement (Craik, 1977. Parkin, 1987 Montenegro, 1998).

Is it important to train your memory?

Training memory is not a new concept, for centuries it was known as memory art. In fact, it goes back to Simonides from Kea (500s BC) and the Palace of Remembrance, also called the loci method.

Later, other authors have used terms such as mnemonics, and art theory for memory. In addition, memory has been considered linked to magic, philosophical and ideological ideas.

Exercising memory has beneficial effects, both in healthy elderly people and in the elderly with cognitive impairment. Nowadays, there are many techniques to improve memory, such as rehabilitation, stimulation and exercise.

In 1970, there were several programs and studies that focused on training memory to meet losses resulting from trauma, early dementia and aging. Nowadays, experts use various methods, such as stimulation, group therapy, rehabilitation, learning or computer rehabilitation.

The use of these tools depends on the person’s needs but also on the professional resources and knowledge.

The differences between rehabilitation and training

The two most common terms are rehabilitation and exercise. Training is based on a systematic learning of knowledge and the use and control of processes, strategies, techniques and experiences that are involved in the memory function, as well as improving its performance.

On the other hand, rehabilitation is an intervention with the goal of recovering optimal levels of function (personal, social and professional) after an illness that has caused an injury or a variation in function.

Therefore, rehabilitation with sick people is used, while exercise can be applied to both sick and healthy people.

Exercise is also used in people who have disorders that may be subject to clinical attention, according to what is stated in DSM V (2013) as “memory loss due to age, for age-related cognitive decline, etc.”

How do we train memory?

Memory training can be classified according to different criteria (Montejo Carrasco, 2015):

• The content you work with and the proposed goals – unifactorial or multifactorial.
• The number of people to work with – individuals or groups.
• The type of strategies used – internal strategies (visualization, association…), external strategies (notebooks, colors, folders, organization…) and those that use both types of elements.
• Type of memory used – either explicitly or implicitly.

Experts often choose group training for the elderly. In addition to memory, this strengthens the social context. This may apply to contexts where the elderly also have to deal with significant losses, such as by friends and acquaintances of their age.

In addition, this method helps to better apply this to daily life and get better results with the trained functions. This method is preferable due to the positive effects that come with group work. In addition, it is more profitable for experts, as they can work with more people in less time.

To train the memory

It seems that with exercise, certain areas of our brain can accumulate a certain cognitive reserve that can protect us from age-related deterioration.

Neuroscientist Rita Levi-Montalcini once said that brain plasticity, or neuroplasticity, can remain constant throughout life, but only if we train the brain.

By training memory, we therefore make a profitable investment in counteracting age-related cognitive decline. The most optimistic data suggest that it may have a positive impact in 63% of cases and act as a protective factor in up to a third of Alzheimer’s cases.