Behavior Research Institute
Southwest Medical Center
San Antonio, Texas 78229
Memory is basically considered an organism's mental ability to store, retain, and recall information. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy and somewhat surprisingly also included early on the techniques of artificially enhancing the memory. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary link between cognitive psychology and neuroscience. However, that being said, there are multiiple types and kinds of memory...and know one really understands fully the corrilation between them or even possibly the differing kinds of friction which may causes a working against each other.
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UNDERSTANDING HOW THE BRAIN WORKS First of all it's very important to try to understand the complexity of the human brain. The human brain weighs only three pounds but is estimated to have about 100 billion cells. It is hard to get a handle on a number that large (or connections that small). Encoding is the first step in creating a memory. It's a biological phenomenon, rooted in the senses, that begins with perception. Consider, for example, the memory of the first person you ever fell in love with. When you met that person, your visual system likely registered physical features, such as the color of their eyes and hair. Your auditory system may have picked up the sound of their laugh. You probably noticed the scent of their perfume or cologne. You may even have felt the touch of their hand. Each of these separate sensations traveled to the part of your brain called the hippocampus, which integrated these perceptions as they were occurring into one single experience -- your experience of that specific person. |