The brain
You jump up from the couch and rush to the bedroom and look around thinking; why in
the world am I standing in the middle of the bedroom. Everyone has done it, but why?
Why is it that the one organ of our body that can keep our heart beating day and night
without us remembering or thinking about it at all seems to be unable to remind us of why
we walked into the bedroom?
Since the beginning of time humans have tried to understand what memory is, how it
works and why it fails us, yet the brain is still least understood organ in the human body.
The brain is three only pounds, but it guides every thought, action, and heartbeat, of our
life. It is where we store memories, how we pay our bills, and where we feel emotions. But
every so often our brains let us down. (Olszewska, 2015)
What is memory?
The modern English word “memory” comes to us from the Middle English memorie,
which in turn comes from the Anglo-French memoire, and ultimately from the Latin
memoria , meaning “mindful” or “remembering”. Memory is our ability to encode, store,
retain and subsequently recall information and past experiences in the human brain. It
could be thought of in another way as the manner in which we use past experience to
influence current behavior. Essentially it’s how we learn and how we became the person
that we are today. Memory is the sum total of what we can recall, and gives us the
capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences. It is the ability to remember past
experiences, and the power to process and recall to mind previously learned facts,
experiences, impressions, and skills. It is our store of things learned and retained from all
of our activities and experiences, as displayed by the modification of our behavior, or by
recall and recognition. (Scullin, 2013)
As if that wasn’t complicated enough, memory isn’t just one process, there are different
types of memory. Short term and long-term memories are encoded and stored in different
ways and in different parts of the brain. We also have Implicit, explicit, declarative,
procedural, semantic, episodic, and even more types of memories. The ways in which
these are stored and where they are stored vary. (Olszewska, 2015)
The file cabinet
A popular way of understanding memory is to think of it as a collection of filing cabinets
