Memory Definition Essay Examples

Memory

Nicole Murphy

Introduction to Psychology

Bryan Godduhn

Memory is how the brain stores and remembers information from something that has occurred before, or what we remember. It is the ability to remember knowledge, learned facts, or even skills we may have been taught. (Mastin, 2010) Our memory doesn’t begin until around age three, after that we begin to remember our childhood memories, then our teenage memories, and so on. Memory breaks into three different methods, memory encoding, memory storage, and memory retrieval. (McLeod, 2007)

When getting information from someone or something, the information travels to a part of the brain called the memory encoding. Memory encoding is changing information visually, meaningfully or acoustically so that the information can be stored and therefore remembered more easily. (McLeod, 2007) For example when meeting someone, we may remember what they look like or how they talk, rather than what their name is. This is the brains way of storing the information or making it easier to remember that person. (McLeod, 2007) This information comes from visual, sounds, or significant events that occur. Then there is the memory storage, this part of the brain is where we recollect that information from the memory encoding system. The average adult can only hold five to nine of their short term memory thoughts at once.

Well what happens when memory encoding fails? When memory encoding fails, it causes us to forget. This means that the memory was never really there to begin with, that the information then went to short-term memory, and was forgotten. Encoding memory can also fail when paying attention to more than one thing at once, for an example, if studying while watching TV. Th...

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...ive memory. If the information then moves onto declarative memory it is lastly divided into two more categories, semantic memory, or episodic memory. (Coon, 2008)

Memory is how the brain restores information, and how we are able to remember different events or experiences. As talked about before the brain uses different methods to remember different parts of information that we gather. These events were broken down into deeper events and dealt with more in depth. The brain has the ability to allow information to travel all around from one section of the brain to another. It has the ability to remember things that we may have thought that we had forgotten, things that we didn’t even know that we knew. The brain does unbelievable things, and one of them is the ability to break down all of the information that we gather and categorize it for us without us even knowing.