Memory Management - Part I
MEMORY
What is memory?
A particular act of recall or recollection:
- Memories are constructions made in accordance with present needs, desires, influences, etc…
- Memories are often accompanied by feelings and emotions
- Memory usually involves awareness of the memor
Why do people FORGET?
- Weak encoding (why we forget most things, including our nightly dreams)
- Lack of a retrieval cue (we need something to stimulate memory)
- Time and the replacement in the neural network by later experiences
- A drive to keep us sane (imagine the brain overload that would occur if we were to never forget anything!)
**As far as psychologists can tell, the human brain has a limitless capacity for holding information. This means that our brains will never “fill up”.
Types of Memory
- Sensory memory
- iconic memory: visual stimuli
- echoic memory: aural stimuli
- haptic: touch
- Short-term memory
- Things remembered for a short period of time are stored here (ex: a phone number that just flashed on the television for 10 seconds for a product that you’d like to buy)
- Long-term memory
- Things remembered for a considerably long time (ex: Home address, your own name, etc.)
Episodic: our memory of events and experiences in a serial form (in other words how we reconstruct the actual events that took place at a given point in our lives)
Semantic: a structured record of facts, concepts and skills that we have acquired (derived from info in episodic memory, such that we can learn new facts or concepts from our experiences)
- Decay & inerference
- Recall: the information is reproduced from memory
Recognition: the presentation of the information provides the knowledge that the information has been seen before.
Memories are often accompanied by feelings and emotions?