What is Memory?

- Every experience generates a memory - whether it lasts depends on how often it is

revisited
- Intricate neural connections allow memoires to form, and these can strengthen, aiding in
an individual being able to recall, or fade away
- Memory is formed when a group of neurons fire in a specific pattern in response to a
new experience
- These neural connections can then refire in order to reconstruct that experience
as a memory

Five Types of Memory

1. Episodic Memory: recalling past events or experiences, usually closely linked with
sensory and emotional information
2. Semantic Memory: retaining factual information (e.g. capital city of Canada)
3. Working Memory: storing information temporarily; capable of holding between 5-7 items
at a time (also known as short term memory)
4. Procedural (body) Memory: used learned actions that require no conscious recall (e.g.
riding a bike)
5. Implicit Memory: bringing back an unconscious memory that influences behaviour

Storing Memory

- These 5 types are briefly stored in the short term (working) memory but can fade unless
the experience is of emotional value or importance in which case it is encoded in the
long term memory
- The process of encoding depends on many factors. Even once encoded a memory can
take 2 years to be firmly established
- In recalling a memory, the nerve cells that first encoded it are reactivated
- This strengthens their connections and, if done repeatedly, solidifies the memory

How Memories Form

1. Attention
Focusing attention on an event helps to solidify the memory: the thalamus activates neurons
more intensely, while the frontal lobe inhibits distractions (0.2 seconds).

2. Emotion and Sensation

A. Emotion: high emotion increases attention, making an event more likely to be encoded
into a memory. Emotional responses are processed in the amygdala.
 B. Sensation: sensory stimuli are part of most experiences and if they are high intensity,
they increase the chances of recollection, it gets transferred to the hippocampus
(0.25-0.5 seconds)

3. Working Memory
Short term memory stores information until needed - it is kept active by two neural circuits that
incorporate the sensory cortices and the frontal lobes. (0.5 seconds → 10 minutes)

4. Hippocampal Processing
Important information transfers to the hippocampus where it is encoded. It can then loop back to
the brain area that first registered it, to be recalled as a memory. (10 minutes - 2 years).

5. Consolidation
The neural firing patterns that encode