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What's Going On In There? How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life 
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How to Improve Children Memory Power? Understanding the FundamentalsBy Andrew Loh One of the major worries of parents around the world is how to improve memory in their children. Many children fail to do well in their classroom because of a lapse in the art of remembering their lessons. Loss of memory is a serious issue for many children because it deprives them of the right to score better and compete with their peers. Loss of memory is potentially a dangerous malady that makes children lose confidence and self-esteem. According to Dictionary.com, the term Memory is ...."The mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences". Memory assists you know who you are. With memory, you can easily recollect your experiences. It plays an important role in your life too. The memory retention system is an intricate system. Your brain plays an important role while retaining experiences. Certain sections in your brain act like a cabinet. It will help you store information until you want them for some purposes. In essence, memory retention is a great process. It is also highly complicated. Memories in humans could be vibrant, long or short, inaccurate, false or even image like. Memory can be either long or short depending on the storage mechanism. Long-term memory means continuing or ongoing storage of information and details. In technical language, it could be either pre-conscious or un-conscious. You can retrieve it when you need it the most because it lies outside your sense of awareness. Some bits of information are easy to recall while others are very difficult. The time to which long-term memory occurs depends on the content of short-term memory. With the right type of association and proper rehearsal, it is possible to keep the memory for a very long time. However, long-term memory is very easy to forget. There are two types of long-term memories - declarative and procedural. Declarative memory comes through active consciousness. For example, specific events and general knowledge about the world around us belong to this memory type. On the other hand, procedural memory works on body movements and usage of patterns and objects in the nature around us. The art of driving a car or riding a bike or using several objects belong to this memory type. On the contrary, short-term memory is the most active memory in humans. It is also the primary memory. With it, you are aware of information or details that you will be thinking about. This memory is also of conscious type. In other words, this memory comes to you by developing an attention to information available around you. Short-term memory is very short and it lasts for just 30 seconds. It could even be just a blink of an eye if you maintain it actively within your conscious mind. If you attend to it in a proper way and try to keep for more time, you can transfer it to the filing cabinet of your brain that is the long-term memory. Your children can store up to four chunks, bits or pieces of information in short-term memory. It is very easy to create a distinction between short and long-term memories. People often compare working and short-term memories and analyze their benefits. However, you should remember that working memory could store, index, organize and manipulate information only temporarily. On the other hand, short-term memory means temporary storage of information in the memory chest. Some children show an inability to remember information learnt from their classrooms. There are many reasons for forgetting information and details from our brains. Here are some reasons why children forget information from their brain: Failure to retrieve information At times, it might seem that a piece of information suddenly disappears from your children's memory. It is also possible that they just cannot recall that particular bit of information. Children's failure to retrieve information is one of the main reasons for forgetting and this could be due to genetic causes inherited by children from the earlier generation. Interference as a cause of forgetting Interference theory is one of the reasons for forgetting. Within the brain, some types of memories could compete and interfere with other types of memories. If there is a similarity between two types of information, the brain may not differentiate between them and the result is confusion. Sometimes, old memories are very difficult to remember as the new ones may interfere with them. Similarly, the old memories might mask new memories, thus making retrieval very difficult. Failure to store information Long-term memory is a complicated process. At times, a piece of information might never be stored in the cabinet of long-term memory. This will result in poor memory. Just consider a basket of flowers. You might just remember the colors and shades of all flowers present in the basket. However, you may fail to remember the names of different flowers present in the basket. Motivated forgetting or deliberate forgetting Traumatic events or disturbing experiences may be the cause of loss of memories in children. Accidents and injuries to brain might result in repression that leads to complete loss of memory. Even after recovery, the person who underwent recovery might not remember while the memorizing process becomes very weak. On the other hand, people who experience disturbing events like the news of death or a debilitating spell of illness might consciously forget information. Such people have poor memory process because of a suppressing effect. Whatever the reasons are, parents should remember one thing - they should try hard and use every other available technique or method to improve the children memory power so that they get better grades and do well in the classroom. Continue to read How to Improve Children Memory Power? Some Simple Techniques. 
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