Trading Memory and the Enviroment You Work In

This interesting article about the relationship between memory and our physical body rings very true to me. Since I started trading I relocated 4 times, with every move I changed my environment, monitors, desks, chairs, lighting conditions, day of time etc. And every time my environment changed I had to go through a mini learning curve of re-adjustment. Large part of trading is of course pattern recognition, i.e. matching what the current data is showing you against similar chunks of data stored in your memory. I suspect those re-adjustment phases I was going through are in part due to the findings of this research.

Cognitive Daily: Body position affects memory for events

..more events were recalled when the participants had assumed a matching body position compared to when they hadn’t; the effect was especially pronounced for young adults (though this may simply be due to the fact that older adults had older memories). Even though you might think that recalling a memory of a visit to the dentist’s office while standing in a baseball pose might be more memorable than a memory where the body position matched, the reverse was true.

Dijkstra’s team believes that the effect may be due to the way memories are stored in the brain: one theory of memory suggests that memories are composed of linked sensory fragments — odors, sights, sounds, and even body positions. Simply activating one or more of those fragments makes the entire memory more likely to be retrieved.

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