How do memories form?
A picture is worth a thousand words, but a memory is priceless. Memory is a way of holding on to the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose. Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal.
“Memory is the reactivation of a specific group of neurons, formed from persistent changes in the strength of connections between neurons.”
Remembering begins with your senses. Any festivals or functions at home, for instance, your brain might take note of how good the food smells, how nice it feels to hug your mom, and how your relatives joined you with more happiness during the event. As your brain processes that sensory input, it creates neural connections and those connections will eventually become memories.
Your brain decides how important a memory is based on context cues, such as your level of emotion or stress at the time. The more important the recollection is, the stronger the neural connections will be.
“Remembering highly emotionally charged events is an important survival tool.” Say you’re in a certain area of the woods and all of a sudden there’s a dangerous animal chasing you—when you remember such occurrences happened before, you won’t go to that place again.
There are several areas of the brain that are involved in encoding and later retrieving memories, but one part—the hippocampus—is thought to play a key role in “binding together the different scattered components of memory. “It might function as a kind of index.”
The hippocampus is a pair of wormlike structures nestled deep inside the midbrain. It’s believed to be especially important for processing long-term memories—like your last vacation, or what your email password is.
The brain has three types of memory processes: 1. Sensory register, 2. Short-term memory and 3. Long-term memory.
Sensory Register: In the sensory register process, the brain obtains information from the environment. This activity is short, lasting at most a few seconds. During sensory register, the brain gathers information passively through visual and auditory cues, known respectively as “iconic” and “echoic” memory.
Short-term Memory is the other main type of memory, and it refers to things you need to keep in your consciousness for no more than a few seconds. “That’s the kind of memory you’re taxing if you’re trying to hold a phone number in your head before putting it into your phone.” It’s also the memory you use to recall the specials the server has just recited, or measure out the correct dose printed on the label of a medication. Those bits of information appear to be stored in the prefrontal cortex, the structure that sits at the very front of your brain.
Long-Term Memory: The process allows information to remain in the brain for an extended period, nothing in the brain avoids risk. Information stored in long-term memory can stay in the brain for a short while (a day, a week) or last as long as a lifetime.
Thanks to Daniel Schacter, PhD & Brian Becker Professors of Neuropsychology.
In Gratitude,
N.R.Rakesh Babu
Psychologist | Doctoral Researcher
www.rakeshbabu.com | www.rbac.in