A fellow walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, "Doc, you've got to help me! I'm suffering from a severe case of amnesia."

With instant concern the psychiatrist asks, "How long have you had it?"

And the guy replies with a blank stare, "How long have I had what?"

To be sure, the ability to remember is no laughing matter for some people, but such humor about the limitations of our memories at times has been penned by numerous authors and poets. Indeed, the human range of memory runs from computer-like retention to the dreaded Alzheimer's disease.

Unquestionably, in our everyday activities, the better we are able to remember (recall) and/or retain, the more successful we will be in our pursuits. There definitely is a strong correlation between a good memory and success. And, as you might guess, this most certainly applies to the sport of bowling.

Though I don't profess to be a scientist, I came to harbor several intuitions about memory and how it best effects bowling skills while teaching bowling over the course of many, many years. Recently, I was more than pleased to learn of current scientific studies that corroborate most of those long-held intuitions.

Why is it you can't remember where you parked your car in the bowling center's parking lot, but can remember your season (final) league average for the last five years? In breakthrough studies conducted at Harvard and Stanford, scientists used complex imaging techniques to watch people's neural activity and, for the first time, to show what parts of the brain determine whether a specific experience will be remembered.

These studies mark a significant step forward in improving memory, and in treating memory loss. Scientists have long suspected that a person's success at remembering things depends on differences in how their experiences are encoded into the brain at the time they occur.

In the past, when studying people with brain damage, experts suspected that various brain regions were involved, but it wasn't clear if those damaged areas meant that those afflicted could make new memories, retrieve old ones, or store memories over time.

New high-powered magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines now work rapidly enough so as to allow scientists to measure split-second neural activity as a person's brain processes an experience. One study put normal volunteers into these functional machines and rapidly flashed one word every two seconds onto a screen inside. At first, the volunteers merely noted whether words were in upper or lower case letters.

However, when adding additional words, they were told to decide if each was concrete, like "rock" or "spoon," or abstract like "empathy" or "patriotism," because psychologists already knew that analyzing the meaning of the word helps people remember it.

The lesson to be learned here by bowlers is, "Paying attention provides retention." If you understand the true meaning of such nomenclature as leverage, extension, flare and precession, you are more likely to retain and display appropriate technique at any given time.

In another study, volunteers were shown color photographs of indoor and outdoor scenes instead of words. Neither group of volunteers was told that this was a memory test. After the use of the machine scans, they were asked which words or pictures they remembered best, remembered vaguely or didn't remember. The scientists compared those memories to the brain scans. They found that the longer the two brain regions (the prefrontal lobes and the parahippocampal cortex) lit up on the machine scans, the better people remembered the items. On the other hand, words or pictures that caused weak activity in the two regions were forgotten.

What makes your brain more likely to react to one item over another? The studies provided some hints. They indicated that volunteers showed more neural activity and better memory during the "concrete-abstract" word test than for other words, thus supporting biological evidence that more complex cognition increases the chances of memory. These studies also suggested that personal experience plays a role here. For example, when flashing an action picture of Earl Anthony on the screen, a bowling enthusiast would react a lot more than someone who says, "Oh, it's a bowler."

Finally, a recent test conducted at Duke University has confirmed my long-standing conviction that many instructors attempt to teach too much in a given session. This study proved conclusively that it takes approximately six hours for newly introduced instruction to move from the front to the rear of the brain (where it is most likely to be retained). Attempting to teach a second, unrelated aspect of bowling before the first aspect of instruction has had time (approximately six hours) to reach its final destination in the brain, will most likely result in a memory loss of the first aspect.