An entity that accompanies Alzheimer’s patients in their day-to-day life and that of their families, the Rosa María Vivar de Reus Foundation, promoter of a pioneering project to raise awareness in society of the importance of training memory from childhood and adolescence. To achieve this, the retention capacity of more than 5,000 students of 1st ESO from seventy centers throughout Catalonia has been put to the test and half a thousand teachers have been trained.
The main reason is because during puberty the brain has enormous neuroplasticity that favors retention and all the cognitive functions that are involved when we memorize something and put our brain to the test. Memorization, reviled and less and less valued in the educational curriculum, as a way to exercise the brain and protect it for what will come throughout life.
“From the encoding of some data or an experience, the brain can save it to later recover it. This is memory”, highlights Margalida Coll, professor of Psychobiology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). “Encoding, consolidation and retrieval are keys to memory,” she adds.
A contest to measure the memorization capacity of 12 and 13-year-old boys and girls with various tests has been just the claim. “The objective is to raise awareness among the educational community, students, teachers and families, that we can work on cognitive health from childhood”, points out Margarita Oliva, president of the Fundació Rosa María Vivar.
Although there is popular talk about whether or not you have a good memory, there are different types of memory and different models of exercises to measure and work on them.
There are several types of memory and different ways to classify them. Two first large categories: a short-term memory, which does not need to be kept for a long time, and a long-term one, which we can keep for hours, days, months, years and even for a lifetime. There is also a working memory, the operational one, which we use to carry out day-to-day tasks, such as remembering what you have just been told to be able to talk; or the one that allows you to cook.
“We have put verbal, non-verbal, visual or auditory memory to the test,” exemplifies Blanca de la Cruz, a neuropsychologist who designed the tests.
The project has the support of the Department of Education, which has helped to involve institutes and teachers in inclusive tests. All students have participated, whatever their ability and level. The UAB’s Institute of Neurosciences has joined the project to scientifically endorse the memory tests that students have passed.
“When the brain undergoes many changes, such as in adolescence, from 12 to 18-19 years old, genetics intervenes, but it is clear that what we do influences how our genes are expressed. To keep ourselves cognitively healthy we can do things throughout our lives”, highlights Coll (UAB).
Cognitive functions are challenged because the tests go far beyond memorizing a list with the rivers of Spain or the Gothic Monarchs. The tests to the students, in two rounds that lasted approximately one hour, have sought a global perspective of memory.
In the ability to remember in the short term there are several key factors, explains the neuropsychologist. Among the most decisive is “the capacity for attention, concentration and the speed to process the information we receive”. Whether words or images. Cognitive skills, the ability to concentrate and maintain attention for a certain period of time, can also be exercised. There is a part that is innate.
The students have retained symbols, such as lists of emoticons, images and even melodies. The tests of the project, designed for the adolescent public in an attractive way so as not to bore them, can also be carried out by adults. More than 500 teachers have been trained to make them aware of the importance of working on cognitive functions from such an early age. Memory and its recesses.
“Motivation and attention have a direct impact on cognitive performance, on the ability to retain”, De la Cruz points out. When we have fun, we memorize better. “There are techniques to memorize better and strategies to remember some information, the so-called metamemory”, Coll points out.
Interferences in the ability to remember have also been tested. For example, with tests deferred in time, with an exercise in between to ask shortly after about what was previously memorized.
There is an innate ability to retain, marked above all by genetics. But you can add work capacity, periodic exercise to improve memory, the experts insist. “The neuroplasticity of the brain in youth makes it an ideal stage to stimulate it, it should be used to create highly cognitively trained people; the brain requires stimulation throughout life to create a lot of cognitive reserve, a protective shield against future damage it may suffer, whether due to illness or other types of pathologies”, highlights the foundation’s neuropsychologist.
With the results of the tests, a subsequent scientific analysis work will be carried out. “The project wants to value the need to work on cognitive functions,” says Coll. The plan began two years ago and will have more to do. They want to repeat the tests in other courses, in 2nd and 3rd ESO. “A disease like Alzheimer’s cannot be cured, but neurodegenerative diseases can be prevented, science tells us; You have to start in childhood and adolescence, when the brain is more plastic”, Oliva adds.
