You learned to ride a bicycle or to swim last season. This season you could do it naturally. Do you wonder how it happened? The skills you learned and practiced got stored in your memory in the brain and you fetched them from your memory when needed. Sometimes you forget what someone told you to do. This happens when information is not encoded properly in the memory in the first place. Don't we hear so often "oh! because you didn't listen properly"?
Isn't 'memory' an interesting thing? Let's learn more about it.
Memory is the process of taking in information from the world around us, processing it, storing it, and later recalling that information, sometimes many years later. It can be thought of in general terms as the use of past experience to affect or influence current behavior whether that's soon after the information has been processed, or many years into the future.
Human memory involves the ability to both preserve and recover information. It gives us the ability to remember past experiences, and the power or process of recalling to mind previously learned facts, experiences, impressions, skills, and habits.
Certain tasks like brushing teeth, tying shoelaces, buttoning pants and shirts, or combing hair are all automatic tasks. You don't think twice about how to do it? Once something is mastered, it becomes automatic and you don’t need to consciously think about the steps involved. This is implicit memory.
Can you think of some more examples of implicit memory in your daily life?
There are several different types of memories, some of which are fleeting, and others that last a lifetime. Normally, when we talk about memory or remembering things, we are referring to explicit memory, which is consciously recalled. Explicit memories can be episodic, meaning that they relate to experiences or 'episodes' in your life (e.g., a particular holiday or the first time you were stung by a bee); or, they are semantic, relating to facts or general knowledge (e.g., that the brain has about 90 billion neurons). Explicit memories are clearly affected by neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
Explicit memory is one type of long-term memory. The other kind of long-term memory is implicit, or unconscious memory. These unconscious memories may be procedural, involving learned motor skills—learning how to ride a bike or how to type using a keyboard, for example.
Implicit memories can also result from priming, which occurs when exposure to one stimulus influences your brain’s response to another. For example, in word-judging tasks, participants identify pairs of associated words such as bread-butter faster than non-associated pairs such as bread-doctor.
Short-term memory enables the brain to remember a small amount of information for a short period of time. The shortest type of memory is known as working memory, which can last just seconds. This is what we use to hold information in our head while we engage in other cognitive processes. An example is remembering the numbers a new friend recites as you navigate your phone’s menu system to add a contact. A person’s working memory capacity is one of the best predictors of general intelligence, as measured by standard psychological tests.
Let's now understand how memories are formed and why they are sometimes forgotten.
How are memories formed?
Memories are made in three stages:
Have you ever wondered why you can’t remember being a baby? Or why you can easily remember all the words to a song you learned several years back? The answers to these questions may lie in the way our memory system develops as we grow from a baby to a teenager and into early adulthood. Our brain is not fully developed when we are born—it continues to grow and change during this important period of our lives. And, as our brain develops, so does our memory.
Memories are stored in different, interconnected parts of the brain. Memories aren’t just stored in just one place in the brain. Rather, different (interconnected) parts of the brain specialize in different kinds of memories. For example, an area of the brain called the hippocampus is important for storing memories of particular things that happened in your life, known as episodic memories.
Learning and memory are closely related concepts. Learning is the acquisition of skill or knowledge, while memory is the expression of what you've acquired. Another difference is the speed with which the two things happen. If you acquire a new skill or knowledge slowly and laboriously, that's learning. If acquisition occurs instantly, that's making a memory. For example, we learn a new language by studying it, but we then speak it by using our memory and subsequent retrieval of the words that we have learned in order to express ourselves.
Memory depends on learning because it lets us store and retrieve learned information. But learning also depends, to some extent, on memory and the retrieval process, in that the knowledge stored in our memory provides the framework to which new knowledge is linked by association and inference. This ability of humans to call on past memories in order to imagine the future and to plan future courses of action is a hugely advantageous attribute in our survival and development as a species.
Have you ever felt like a piece of information has just vanished from your memory? It is "forgetting" - loss or change in information that was previously stored in short-term or long-term memory. Major reasons for forgetting are the passage of time, not enough practice or review, or some brain disease or injury.
Generally, we do not like to forget, but forgetting serves some important purposes. Sometimes it helps people to get over painful experiences. The brain forgets information that it no longer needs, thus making space for learning new information.
Here are some ways to improve your memory:
