Masters of Memory

                                                   

Most of us, at some point in our busy days, have a little trouble remembering things. Without memory, how would we be able to learn anything? The ability to learn is the key to our very survival, and we cannot learn unless we can remember what happened the last time a particular situation arose. It is clear that memory is a process but it also has a "place" in the brain as well. Memory is an active system that receives information from the sense, puts that information into a usable form, organizes it as it stores it away, and then retrieves the information from storage.

                                             

The first stage in the memory system is to get sensory information into a form that the brain can use. This is called encoding. Encoding is the set of mental operations that people perform on sensory information to convert that information into a form that is usable in the brain's storage systems. It sounds like memory encoding works just like the senses. Encoding is not limited to turning sensory information into signals for the brain. Encoding is accomplished differently in each of three different storage systems, or stages of memory. In one stage of memory storage, encoding may involve rehearsing information over and over to keep it in memory. whereas in another stage encoding involves elaborating on the meaning of the information. Let's elaborate on that later.

The next step in memory is to hold in to the information for some period of time in a process called storage. This period of time will actually be of different lengths, depending on the stage of memory being used. In one stage of memory people hold on to information just long enough to work with it, about 20 seconds or so. In another stage of memory, people hold on to information more or less permanently.

The biggest problem many people have is retrieval, getting the information they know they have out of storage. We will discuss more on this mastery of memory further as we go. I hope this was helpful for you. Might not be interesting but for me it was an interesting knowledge.

Thank you for reading. Happy Steeming.