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How Memories From The Brain Is Capable Of Retrieving Information

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“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. Meanwhile, this claim that encoding is all that is needed for memory failure or success was researched by Craik and Lockhart (1972, as described by Goldstein, 2008, p.

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