The Importance Of Long Term Memory

As you are walking along the beach at sunset enjoying the view and feeling the sensation of the sand between your toes, your brain is receiving the experience. While you are looking around, your brain is collecting information about the setting around you such as the color of the streaks in the sky and the sparkling of the water. After your trip to the beach during the next day, you may remember the color of the sky but not the color of the sea shells and you only remember when you find them in your jeans pocket. As well, you might remember the color of that sunset for many years into the future but you may not remember the feeling of the sand between your toes. These types of experiences can show how our mind processes and stores memories

Long term memories can be accessible for years but it may be harder to retrieve them. Information from something that happened a long time ago can be hard to remember and it takes work locating them in your long term memory. Unlike short term memory, the information that is stored in long term memory stays in the human mind for a long time and can be easily accessible because there is some significance to it. A person is not going to remember a multiple choice history test, unless the test was significantly important to that person, he or she is going to remember the amazing trip with six other friends to Yosemite National Park. People store long term memories that are meaningful to them whether they be happy or traumatic and whether they want to remember something or not. If something really traumatic happens to someone that is too painful to think about, he or she may forget what happened in the traumatic event because it is too psychologically stressful for them to remember. The memory will be impossible to retrieve from the long term memory because it is too disturbing and they don’t want to remember it. If something fantastic happens to someone and it brings him or her joy to think about it, the memory is going to be stored long term and will be easy to retrieve because there is a positive