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What is Memory and How Does It Work?

You know that in order to gain muscular strength you need to exercise, well the same goes for actually increasing your ability to remember things. Your brain needs exercise, as well as being nurtured. So your diet needs to be good, and you need to look at taking up much healthier habits.

Unfortunately, because our brains are so complex, they need a lot of effort in order to get them in the best shape possible. There are a number of things that you can look at doing which will help you improve the capacity of the retrieval mechanism in your brain. But first, let us take a look at how it is we remember things.

To put it in simple terms, our memory is the activity carried out in our brain to recall information that we have gained through experiences in our lives. However, it is a complex process which involves various parts of the brain, and serves us all in very different ways. It can either be short term or long term.

With short term memory, you will find that your brain is able to store certain pieces of information for only a few seconds or minutes. Unfortunately, the problem with this memory is that it is very fragile and, if it were to retain all the information it receives, your brain would soon be telling you that it has no more space. Plus, each person's short term memory is only meant to hold around 7 items at any one time, and this is why, although you may be able to remember a new telephone number for a few minutes, you will often find that when you are going to buy something online with your credit card, you need it beside you, because it actually has more than 7 items on it.

Long term memory is all to do with the information that you are making an effort to retain, both consciously and unconsciously. This is because the information may be particularly personal and meaningful to you, or it is because it is something that you need in order to complete a task or to take some exams. However, there is some information that you retain in your long term memory which will need you to make a conscious effort in order to recall it, such as a personal memory which relates to a specific experience or time in your life, known as episodic memory, or it may be some factual data that you need to recall, and this is known as semantic memory.

The other type of long term memory that we all have is known as procedural memory, and this is where your memory will recall skills or routines that you use so that you do not have to consciously need to recall them.

There are certain parts of the brain which are especially important in relation to not only the formation, but also the retention of memories, and these are as shown below.

Hippocampus - This is found deep in the human brain, and plays the largest role in the brain processing information as memory.

Amygdala - This is an almond shaped piece of the brain which is found close to the hippocampus and processes a person's emotions. This particular area helps to imprint memories into the brain which involve emotions.

Cerebral Cortex - This is the outer layer of the human brain, and is where most long term memory is stored in various different sectors. It will all depend on where particular memories are stored, as to what process the information involves. So language will be stored in one sector, sensory input into another, problem solving into yet another sector and so on.

As well as the above, the memory also involves communication occurring between the brains various network of neurons and cells (millions of which are activated by chemicals in the brain known as neurotransmitters).