The Brain, Store house of Memory Part I

Memory is one of the vital building blocks of intelligence. Without memory there would be no learning, no recall no communication. Every second of the, day your memory is busy processing images from the world around you and storing them in the appropriate portion of your brain’s data banks. The way this process works is still only partially understood.

The capacity to remember is one of the miracles of the mind. We remember all kinds of things- telephone numbers, dates, prices, titles of books. Each person has his or her own capacity for memory, and some people can remember truly stupendous amount of information: Bhandata Vicisara, from Burma, can recite 16,000 pages of Buddhist scripture by heart; Hideaki Tomoyori from Japan, can reel off the first 40,000 decimals places of the value of Pi and French woman Dany Sirejean can name the day of the week for any random date of the 20^th century.

But in spite of intense investigations into the workings of our memory, scientists are only slowly beginning to understand the functioning of the giant data bank in our brains. Hidden there is a complex archiving centre based on he co ordinations of billions of nerve cells. Our memory is so sensitive that some times just glancing at a rough outline or hearing a few words is enough to reconstruct an entire picture in our minds.

(Cont.)