Try to imagine a life without a memory. It would be impossible. You couldn't use a language, because you wouldn't remember the words. You couldn't understand a film, because you need to hold the first part of the story in your mind in order to understand the later parts. You wouldn't be able to recognize anyone - even members of your own family. You would live in a present forever. You would have no past and you wouldn't be able to imagine a future.
Human beings have amazing memories. Besides all our memories about our own lives, we can recall (回忆) between 20,000 and 100,000 words in our own language as well as possibly thousands more in a foreign language. We have all kinds of information about different subjects such as history, science, and geography, and we have many skills such as driving a car or playing a musical instrument. All these things depend on our memory.
How well you remember things depends on many different factors. Firstly, some people have better memories than others, in just the same way as some people are taller than others. Secondly, research shows that, you canstoredifferent things in different parts of the brain. Ideas, words, and numbers are stored in the left—hand side, while the right-hand side remembers pictures, sounds, and smells. In most people, one side of the brain is more developed than the other, and this may explain why some people can remember people's faces easily, but can't remember their names.
