Filtering out useless information can help people increase their capacity to remember what is really important, researchers say.
Scientists at the University of Oregon in the United States have demonstrated that awareness, or visual working memory, does not depend on extra storage space in the brain but on an ability to ignore what is irrelevant.
"Until now, it’s been assumed that people with high capacity visual working memory had greater storage, but actually it’s about the bouncer - a neural mechanism that controls what information gets into awareness," Edward Vogel, who headed the research team, said.
This partially explains why I can’t be called on to remember anything anymore these days, although I think I may still be having trouble deciding exactly which information is relevant and which is disposable. Read the rest of the article here.