Elkan Akyürek: do not forget! But how?

Do not forget! But how?

We have to remember all sorts of things during the day. Cycle past the bakery to buy bread, congratulate that colleague on her birthday, pick up the children from school, and so on. While studying and over the course of a career, it is also very important to be able to directly retain new information; it is a necessary step towards remembering it in the long term. It is a pity that we are not quite infallible when it comes to this particular ability, and we regularly forget something or another. Our research is aimed at the main culprit in our heads: our working memory.

What goes wrong when we forget something? We examine, for instance, why we sometimes burden our working memory with irrelevant things, unwittingly leaving too little room for information that is actually useful. Equally important is the question of what works well when we do remember something. Sometimes, clever tricks allow us to more easily remember something than would otherwise have been possible. For example, we may remember the four-digit code 1-9-8-5 of a combination lock as the year ‘1985’, which is a lot easier. In our research, we study how and when people can profit from such efficient solutions.

Our research delves deeper still. We also study what our brains are doing precisely when we try to remember something, by measuring the electroencephalogram (EEG). By applying new, powerful methods of analysis, we seek to gain more insight into the physiological processes that enable our working memory. Do not forget! But how? Elkan