How Does Human Memory Work?

Memory is divided into three categories. These categories consist of: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory, out of these short term memory is the main focus in this essay. It has been widely researched due to interest of how much memory can be stored, how long this memory can be stored for and what information is memorised.

Sensory memories are momentary recordings of information in our sensory systems. They are memories evoked through a person's five senses: sight, smell, sound, taste, and touch. Although sensory memory is very brief, different sensory memories last for different amounts of time. Iconic

How essential is memory to us? Why is this term highly verifying to people in the world? Memory is a being’s power to remember things and retain information from the past. Human beings are encountered by this process of remembrance for eternity- throughout their lifetime. It is a key element for an individual, which doesn’t have an authentic origin. Memories can be portrayed in many unique ways, such as emotionally, spiritually or mentally. A person may have memories of dead loved ones, childhood; life experiences etc, there is no closing stage to the various types of memories, a being might stumble upon. However, memories can also come across our brain as

The human brain is a very complex organ that is considered the processing center for all information that is received in from outside sources to sending information out to other organs. One function of the brain that is very important to human’s way of life is memory. Memories are a recollection of events, persons, sounds, or fact from the past. It is the mental capacity of retaining or reviving previous experiences (Duff, Wszalek, Tranel, & Cohen, 2008). Short-term memories are recollections from recent events and long-term memories are recollections of events past (McCaffrey, 2015). There are four different regions of the cerebral cortex each responsible for certain aspects of memory. The prefrontal cortex plays a part in processing short-term memories and retaining long-term memories. The parietal lobe integrates sensory information from various senses such as smell from the nose or sounds from the ears (McCaffrey, 2015). The occipital lobe processes what we see with our eyes and the temporal lobe is involved in processing smell, sound, semantics in speech and vision. The temporal lobe is the key part of the brain that converts short-term memories to long-term ones (McCaffrey, 2015). A person has explicit memories that are consciously recalled knowledge such as how to eat and tie ones shoes for instance and implicit memories that are nonverbal memories embedded in behaviors and actions such as breathing (Brennels,

The human body is a complex machine with many different ways of keeping us alive, as well as allowing us to function properly. From the heart knowing when and how many times to beat, the lungs providing us with oxygen to breathe and even our glands knowing when to provide us with sweat to keep the body from overheating. The brain or the control center, is responsible for many actions throughout the body, one being memory. Memory can be defined as the brain or mind storing and later recollecting information (Merriam-Webster, 2016). So how exactly does the memory process work? There are three stages in the memory process; encoding, storage and retrieval.

Memories include many different stages of memory formation such as sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory, which requires an intensive cascade of neuronal signalling in many different regions in the brain in order to process. This brain-wide process of memory formation functions with each element of a memory (sights, sensations, emotions, sounds) being encoded in its respective region of the brain that processes these responses and result in a reactivation of the same neural patterns during recollection. Thus, this demonstrates the overall process of memory formation which incorporates its ability to encode, store and recall information (Gibbs, M. E. & Ng, K. T.,1977).

Endeavouring to understand the logistics of memory structure, (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968) deliberated the concept that memory is made up of three separate permanent memory structures (sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory) was developed, proposing memory as the ‘multi-store model’.

The brain has three main memory systems: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory. Sensory memory refers to the ability to accurately retain sensory impressions (visual, auditory and so on) on a short-term basis. The capacity of sensory memory is approximately

Smell, touch, taste, hear and see it. The more senses you involve when you need to encode memory, usually the more strong a memory it becomes. That’s why the smell of mom’s home-baked cookies can still be recalled as fresh as though she were downstairs making them just now. Need to remember someone’s name you met for the first time? It may help to look them in the eye when you repeat their name, and offer a handshake. By doing so, you’ve engaged 4 out of your 5 senses (Grohol, J.

The three major components of the Information-Processing Model of memory work, in a way, as a system. First, when sensory information from your sensory system gets encoded, it is considered sensory memory; lasting about a second. The sensory information is then converted into short-term memory if and only if the individual is paying attention; lasting about as long as attention is held. If the information is repeated/thought about enough, it will become long-term memory; basically etching itself across your cerebral cortex. That isn't to say that all long-term memories are stored

The one that lasts the least amount of time, sensory memory, is happening every second. It is the stream of information that the body sends to the brain that it absorbs from the outside world. This memory type is processed within less than a second and discarded to make room in the brain for other thoughts. The next type of memory, short-term memory, is made up of the connections and thoughts people have in day-to-day life. It may have information used to study for a test or a dance routine. Due to the limited amount of space in short-term memory, things like random lists of objects or sequences of numbers are thrown out to make more space. The third main type of memory is long-term memory. These memories last throughout life and are divided into two distinct categories: explicit memory and implicit memory. Explicit memories are the things people consciously, purposely remember, such as events in their lives, facts, concepts, and things learned over time. Implicit memories are skills or tasks that people unconsciously carry out. This can range from things like riding a bike to tying shoe laces. These are things encoded so deep into memories that the brain no longer has to think about

“Every time I learn the name of a student, I forget the name of a fish” was once said by David Jordan, the president of Stanford University (Anderson, Bjork & Bjork, 2000). This statement is interesting because it brings up the idea of the amount of information one can consume and maintain available at any given time; this information is put into memory. Memory is the process of maintaining, recovering, and applying information about episodes and events, when the original material is not current (Goldstein, 2008, p. 136). This definition mean even if we have not just experience that memory, our brain can go back in time and retrieve what has happened hours, days or years ago. Retrieving memories from the brain is the process of relocating material from Long Term Memory (LTM) back into working memory, where it becomes available through consciousness (Goldstein, 2008, p. 197). Our brain is capable of retrieving information because it has been encoded. Encoding is the process of obtaining information then converting it into memories, in which goes onto our LTM (Goldstein, 2008, p. 196). The main claim of this essay is that is that if a memory is encoded correctly, then that is all that is needed for memory failure or success and the process of retrieving memories also relies on the encoding of the memory.

There are many types of memory, but broken into two general types; short term and long term. Short term according to animal studies is said to be electric signals moving in circuits through series of neurons. When information is put into long term memory it is maintained in a certain type of protein. All of this of course happens in a matter of seconds, but it is still a complex process just to realize, for example, that the stop light is red and then to know to step on the brake and slow down (How Does the Brain Process Information? 1999).

In general, there are three types of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Sensory memory, by definition, is the preservation of information in its original sensory form, for a fraction of a second. This means that when you smell, touch and/or see anything, the impression of the occurrence will last for a couple of moments. This

The short term memories are stored in the hippocampus, the long-term are stored in the cerebral cortex, and the flashbulb memories are stored in a special part of the cerebral cortex called the amygdala (Young 2010; Hamzelou, 2011). Short-term memory can hold seven items of information for fifteen to twenty seconds. Information that was received verbally and information that was received visually are kept in different places in short-term memory. To make the most of the limits of short-term memory, the brain chunks two to three facts into one unit of information. Long-term memory, however, is stored by significance and meaning rather than the sequence in which they were received. The two kinds of long-term memory are implicit and explicit memories. Implicit memories are unconsciously remembered, like how to open doors. Explicit memories are consciously remembered. There are three types of explicit memory: episodic, semantic, and declarative.