Today on my every-morning routine trip through my newsaggregator NetNewsWire I bumped into sharpbrains . I found the site quite interesting. I found a few valuable articles about exercise and stress and their effect on the brain, I want to introduce to you in one of my next posts. For today as it is the beginning of the week this nice teaser to get your brain moving.
In which direction is the bus pictured below traveling?
Do you know the answer?
The only possible answers are “left” or “right.”
When pre-school children were shown this picture and question, they all answered “left.” When asked why, they answered “Because you can’t see the door.” Feel pretty dumb now, don’t you? I did too!« End of quotation…
I skipped the explanation in this place. Why? Because I do not completely agree with it. For school children the bus is an every day situation. For me old girl 😉 it needs other stimuli to refresh the situation more than 40 years ago. But to visualize a school bus, does it have to do something with memory – not for me at least. The metaphor of the brain as a batch porcessing storage room is not exactly what I think the brain is working like.
Yeah, sorry, I changed my mind, I give you the explanation of the author underneath. Please, feel free to comment!!
But this teaser illustrates a good concept to remember whenever you start thinking your memory is terrible. While most of us think our memories are pretty lousy, imagine if our memories were absolutely perfect. You might have been able to answer this puzzle correctly, since you could compare this image to all the school bus images you have in your head, and only the ones going left would match.
On the other hand, imagine having eidetic, or photographic, memory and remembering every single detail of every single day of your life. It would be insurmountable to filter through all that data retrieve useful information. (In real life, there have been very few people with eidetic memory, and some people speculate if there is such a thing at all.) So, your mind remembers things that it pays attention to because they are deemed important. Think of emotion-laden memories. With good or bad experiences- the memories are detail rich. Therefore, if you need to remember more – either do things that are more meaningful to you or find a way to ascribe meaning to what you’re trying to remember.
