Human memory: How we make, remember, and forget memories
Curated from: nationalgeographic.com
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The different kinds of memories
We hold on to different kinds of memories.
- Short-term memories last seconds to hours and long-term memories last for years.
- We also have a working memory, which allows us to keep something in mind for a limited time by repeating it.
- Declarative memories are memories you experience consciously, like facts or "common knowledge."
- Nondeclaritive memory unconsciously builds up. These include procedural memories, such as riding a bicycle or playing the piano.
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Where your brain keeps memories
By studying people with amnesia, it seems that short-term and long-term memories don't form in precisely the same way, nor do declarative and procedural memories.
- Emotional responses such as fear occur in a brain region called the amygdala.
- Memories of learned skills are associated with the region called the striatum.
- The hippocampus is essential for forming, retaining, and recalling declarative memories.
- The temporal lobes play a critical role in forming and recalling memories.
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How we experience memories
Memories are held within groups of neurons called cell assemblies. They fire as a group in response to a specific stimulus, such as recognising your friend's face.
The more neurons fire together, the more the interconnection of the cells strengthen. We experience the nerves' collective activity as a memory.
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Memory consolidation
For a short-term memory to become a long-term memory, it must be strengthened for long-term storage. The process is called memory consolidation and occurs using several processes.
Long-term potentiation consists of individual nerves changing themselves to grow and talk to their neighboring nerves differently. The remodeling modifies the nerve's connections, which makes the memory stable.
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Recalling a memory
When we recall a memory, many parts of the brain share information, including regions that do high-level information processing, regions that deal with our senses' new inputs, and the region that help coordinate the process, the medial temporal lobe.
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