Memory myths part 1
Myth 1: Subliminal learning or sleep-learning is possible.
“Subliminal” means outside of awareness. You might listen to a recording of music that has another recorded track almost inaudible of someone else reading some informative information. If you listen to this recording enough times, will you know the contents of the informative information, even if the voice was subliminal? No. Stimuli that are not within our awareness can have subtle impact on some types of behaviors, but you won’t be able to consciously access the memory the way you would access regular memory. Sleep-learning, in which you would listen to this information while you slept with the hope hat you would remember it upon waking, unfortunately works not better then subliminal learning.
Myth 2 Memory is like a video recording.
One sometimes reads that all of your experiences are recorded perfectly in your memory and you only forget things because you don’t have the right cues. One also hears that hypnosis is good for memory improvement, because the hypnotic state that it puts you in gives you have direct access to your memory. This seems like a plausible idea given what has been said before about cues for memory recall, and it’s a hard one to disprove. A supporter of this idea can always claim that we remember everything, and its all stored away somewhere in the brain just waiting for the right key to access it. There has been no substantial proof in any research that supports such claims.
Most memory researchers believe that this to be untrue and think it would be an odd and terribly inefficient way to design a memory system. The hypnosis claim is testable and has been shown not to improve memory recall, or make one more accurate, but been shown to make someone more confident that they are right.