Memory is the faculty of our mind that encodes, stores, and retrieves data when needed. It is
the retention of information overtime for the purpose of influencing our future actions.
Memory is a staple of the mind and without it, it would be impossible for language,
relationships, or personal identity to develop. There are three different types of memory that
are responsible for performing various actions. First, there is sensory memory. Sensory memory
holds information that is derived from the senses less than one second after it is perceived. An
example of sensory memory is our ability to look at an item and remember what it looked like after
a few brief seconds of observation. Next, we have short-term memory. Our short term memory,
also known as our working memory, is our ability to recall for a period of several seconds to a
minute without rehearsal. While our short-term memory is easily and rapidly accessible,
it has a very limited storage capacity. An example of this would be trying to remember a random ten
digit number one minute after you observe it for several seconds. Lastly is our long term memory.
The storage in sensory and short term memory has a strictly limited capacity and duration,
which is why the information stored with them is not retained indefinitely. By contrast,
long term memory can store much larger quantities of information for a potentially unlimited period
of time. The storage capacity for our long term memory is immeasurable. For example,
given a random ten digit number we may remember it for up to a minute after we observe it
as we it is stored in our short term memory. But we may remember a phone number for the rest of
our lives through repetition; this information is said to be stored in the long term memory.
These types of memories work together in ways that allow us to live an extremely advanced
life as human beings, but memory is not a perfect processor, and it sometimes fails us.
For example, imagine you and a friend are walking into the mall when you see an extremely familiar
face. You suddenly realize the man walking out of the mall looks just like an actor
from a movie you’ve recently seen. As you go to tell your friend, something weird happens,
“Hey! That man look just like”… You forget the actor’s name. You’ve just seen the movie in the
past couple of weeks, and the actor’s name is right on the tip of your tongue, but you still
can’t recall it. Or let’s say you’ve just gotten back home from a trip to the grocery store and as
you are unloading groceries, you realize you got everything needed to make the chicken casserole…
except the chicken. Is your memory failing you? Believe it or not, your memory is doing exactly
what it is supposed to do in these moments. Our brain was not designed to remember people’s name,
to catalog everything we experience in a given day, or to remember a list of things to do later.
A man known by the world for remembering over 100,000 digits of pi is known by his wife as the
man who can’t remember his wife’s birthday. Most of us will forget over 99% of what we
experience today, by tomorrow. We don’t even remember the vast majority of our own lives.
Memory is amazing and is essential for the functioning of almost everything we do. But
it will also cause you to forget to call your mom, or cause you to forget where you put your keys 5
minutes ago. So, how can memory be so powerful yet cause us to forget the simplest of things?
Having a word stuck on the tip of your tongue is a totally normal glitch in human memory.
Our memory was designed to remember things that will benefit us in the future, and if
we don’t identify an experience as such when we are having it, our brain lets the majority of that
information go to make room for future information that may be much more valuable. So, often times
when it seems like our memory is failing us, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Memory is an extremely powerful faculty of the mind and is responsible for storing critical
information that we later reference and use to our benefit. Without it,
the most important aspects of our lives, such as relationships and society, couldn’t exist.
We use the information stored in our memory to perform a critical function of the mind
known as reason – which we will discuss in next week’s video.
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