I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this for but its been multiple months and I’ve run out of interesting intros to start off my articles so this is it. This is my intro. We’re talking about memory today. Let’s go.

What is memory?

A place in our brain that stores and remembers information for us to recollect later. The super psychological definition would be “the cognitive process that encodes, stores and retrieves information.” (that’s right, I’m an HL student).

How does memory work?

Great question. According to one memory model (called the multi-store model of memory) we have three memory storages which are sensory perception, short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). There are actually other models that explain memory in better detail and are way more thorough but I’m too tired to explain the whole thing so this is what you’re going to get.  

Sensory Perception: this memory storage picks up information from your experiences of the world using your senses. Memories only stay here for 1-2 seconds before moving onto STM.

STM: STM only has a limited capacity so that could explain why you don’t remember all your homework. Here memories stay for 6-12 seconds. After that memories will be lost if they don’t get transferred to LTM. To transfer memories from STM to LTM you need to rehearse the memory. So that means if you’re trying to remember a formula for maths you gotta keep repeating it over and over in your head until you remember (even though it might be incredibly boring you just have to do it, sorry).

LTM: This storage is infinite! You can hold as many memories as you want! Memories also last in here for a really long time. Memories are clearly here the more you revisit them and think about them. So this could explain why you might remember your friend coming to visit you a few years ago instead of the test you had on chemistry that one time (totally not speaking from experience).

Can we trust our memories?

That’s an interesting question and the answer is ~possibly not~. *gasp! I know. If we can’t trust ourselves can we trust anyone at all? Probably not. We’re all on our own. Anyway the reason why our memories can’t be trusted is sometimes they’re distorted. This means sometimes we remember something that didn’t happen. For example you might remember there were balloons at your 7th birthday party because you always have balloons at parties. But when you look back at pictures you find there were no balloons. Crazy huh? Other times we merge memories together or we think a memory of ours is real but the memory is actually from a dream you had.

Any tips and tricks for helping improve your memory?

Nope sorry I can’t help you there. Look it up yourself 🙂

Okay that’s it! As I didn’t have a proper intro it stands to reason that I don’t need a proper outro so. The end.
Sources:

http://the-mind-of-petra.com

http://I-basically-just-learnt-this-in-psychology-so-creds-to-Ms.Ana.com

http://if-any-of-this-is-wrong-I’m-sorry,-I’m-tired.com