About Memory

Everything that you see, touch, taste, smell, hear and otherwise experience is stored in your brain, but as Einstein theorized, human beings and animals are only able to recall a small fraction of that stored data. Memory is an organism's ability to retrieve information from past experiences, and is essential both to development and learning. Despite scientific advancements, researchers still know very little about the way the human brain works, and memory is very much a mystery beyond a basic understanding.

The Facts

There are three basic types of memory that we rely upon in our daily lives. The first is sensory memory, which is essentially the first impression that a person perceives during an experience. When you walk into a room, for example, you see hundreds of objects, and very little of that experience is converted to short- or long-term memory. You're likely to forget what you saw almost immediately.

Short- and long-term memory, on the other hand, are lasting impressions left over from sensory memory. In the short-term, you're likely to remember clusters of objects or events, but not for longer than a few hours. Long-term memories are those that are stored for a significant period of time, sometimes for life.

Function

Memory is one of the most important functions of the brain and humans rely on it far more often than they realize. When you have a negative experience, for example, memory of that experience will keep you from the repeating the behavior that produced the experience. This makes it a powerful survival tool that fills in the holes left by instinct and natural defense mechanisms. Although you might not be able to recall pain, you can remember that something was painful, and therefore not advisable.

Risk Factors

Although memory is an innate function of the brain, it is very fragile. Damage to the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain, for example, often has a negative impact on short-term memory, causing anterograde amnesia in extreme cases. Damage to the hippocampus, on the other hand, will interfere with the brain's ability to convert short-term memory to long-term memory, which can cause retrograde amnesia.

Significance

A loss of memory function can be both painful and dangerous for human beings. We rely on memories of our childhoods, our families, our careers and our past experiences, and to lose our grip on those memories can cause any number of secondary mental illnesses. Many people who experience amnesia, for example, experience varying degrees of depression and anxiety, especially if the prognosis is not good for eventually retrieving those memories again.

Type

Beyond the three basic types of memory, there are several sub-types that have been identified and named by scientists over the course of research. Declarative memory, for example, characterizes memories that are stored in a specific situation in a specific set of circumstances. For example, when you memorize dates for a history test, you are creating declarative memory.

Procedural memory, on the other hand, refers to memories that are constantly evolving due to experience. When you learn to change the tire on your car, for example, you'll get better at it the second and third time around because you learn better ways to improve upon the task.

Expert Insight

Although we rely heavily on our memories to live our lives, the memory function of our brains is largely susceptible. This is why eye-witness testimony is often discredited in legal proceedings: people are prone to "filling in the gaps" for information that isn't encoded beyond sensory memory. Scientists have conducted extensive research on the implanting of false memories, according to Skepdic.com, and have found that the human brain is sufficiently malleable to create whole new memories by distorting actual recollections.

Resources

• Skepdic.com - Memory