How We Make Memories: Our Brains Make and Recall Memories in Different Ways.

 Accessing Memory; Recall, Recognition, and Relearning.

Clive Waring was playing the piano alone in his room. When his wife came into the room, he immediately leaped up and embraced her with joyful enthusiasm. A minute later, she slipped out to grab a glass of water, and when she returned, he gave her that same bright greeting, as if she'd been gone for days. And then he did it again, and again. Clive was an accomplished London musician, until in 1985, at the age of 47, he contracted a rare herpes encephalitis virus that ravaged his central nervous system. Since then, he's been unable to remember almost any of his past or to make new memories. His wife is the only person he recognizes, but he can never recall the last time he saw her. 

This may be the most profound case of extreme and chronic amnesia ever recorded. Our memory helps make us who we are, whether recognizing loved ones, recalling past joys, or just remembering how to walk and talk and fry an egg. Memory is the chain that connects our past to our present. If it breaks, we're left untethered, incapable of leaving the present moment, and unable to embrace the future. But memory isn't an all-or-nothing thing. of course. Waring can't remember any details about his personal past, but he still remembers how to speak English, get dressed, and play the piano. Some memories you process automatically, and they are stored differently than your more personal or factual memories, like your first kiss, how to recite pi to twelve places, or who won the Peloponnesian War. 

How is Memory Stored?

Speaking of ancient Greeks, and to help demonstrate what I'm talking about, I want you to have a look at our Spartan friend here, and remember his name because we're going to be testing your memory in just a minute. Technically, memory is learning that has persisted over time. Information that has been stored, and in many cases, can be recalled. Except, of course, during the exam. Our memories are typically accessed in three different ways. Through recall, recognition, and relearning. And if you think about all the different kinds of tests you've taken in school, they're all actually designed to size up how you act. access stored information in these ways. Like, recall is how you reach back into your mind and bring up information, just as you do in fill-in-the-blank tests. 

So if I say blank is the capital of Greece, your brain hopefully would just recall the answer as Athens. Recognition, meanwhile, is more like the multiple choice test. You only need to identify old information when presented with it. , which of the following was not an ancient city in Greece? Athens, Marathon, Pompeii, or Sparta. And relearning is sort of like refreshing or reinforcing old information. So when you study for a final exam, you relearn things you half forgot more easily than you did when you were first learning them, like, say, a basic timeline of the Greek Empire. But how? How does all of that data that we're exposed to all the time every day become a memory? Well, in the late 1960s, American psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Schifrin 

figured out enough about the process of memory formation to break it down into three stages. First, it's encoded into the brain, then stored for future use, and then eventually retrieved. Sounds simple, but by now you've figured out that just because you take a lot of stuff about your mind for granted doesn't mean that it is not complicated. By Atkinson and Schifrin's model, we first record things we want to remember as an immediate but fleeting sensory memory. Think back to the image I showed you a minute ago. Do you remember his name? If you do, It's because you successfully managed to shuffle it into your short-term memory, where you probably encoded it through rehearsal. This is how you briefly remember something like a password or phone number. 

Like, hey Tommy, what's Jenny's number? Okay, 867-5309. 867-5309, 867-5309. Getting it in your head there. Or, in this case, I told you to remember that guy's name. Maybe you were thinking of Leonidas repeatedly over and over, even if you didn't think you were doing it. But this information really only stays in your short-term memory for under 30 seconds without a lot of rehearsal. So if you weren't repeating Leonidas, you probably have forgotten it already. Because your mind, amazing as it is, can really only hold between four and seven distinct bits of information at a time. At this point, the memory either decays or it gets transferred into long-term memory. Long-term memory is your brain's,, durable and ridiculously spacious storage unit, holding all of your knowledge, skills, and experiences. 

Now, since the days of Atkinson and Schifrin, psychologists have recognized that the classical definition of short-term memory didn't really capture all of the processes involved in the transfer of information to long-term memory. I mean, it's more than being able to just remember some Greek guy's name. So later generations of psychologists revisited the whole idea of short-term memory and updated it to the more comprehensive concept of working memory. Working memory involves all the ways that we take short-term information and stash it in our long-term stores. And increasingly, we think of it as involving both explicit and implicit processes. When we store information consciously and actively, that's an explicit process. We make the most of this aspect of working memory when we study, for instance. 

so that we can know that Athens is the capital of Greece and that Pompeii was a Roman town and not a Greek one. This is how we capture facts and knowledge that we think we're going to need. Like I told you, specifically to remember Leonidas' name, you concentrated on that detail and filed it away, if briefly. But of course, we're not conscious of every tiny thing that we take in, yet our working memory often transfers stuff we're not aware of to long-term storage. We call that an implicit process, the kind you don't have to actively concentrate on. A good example might be classically conditioned associations, like if you get all sweaty and nervous at the dentist's because you had a root canal last year. 

You don't need to pull up that file on the last time you got your face drilled on to think, oh, oral surgery, not my favorite. Instead, implicit processes cover all that stuff automatically. This kind of automatic processing is hard to shut off. Unless you've got something unusual going on in your brain, you might not have much choice but to learn this way, like how you learned how to not put your hand into a fire, that learning would have happened pretty much automatically as soon as you first yanked your hand away from an open flame. Whether those things are lodged in there explicitly or implicitly or both, there are also different kinds of long-term memory. For instance, procedural memory refers to how we remember to do things, like riding a bike or reading. 

It's effortful to learn it first, but eventually, you can do it without thinking about it. Long-term memory can also be episodic, tied to specific episodes of your life. Like, remember that time that Bernice fell out of her chair at chemistry and everybody started laughing uncontrollably? Man, good times. There are other types of long-term memory, too, and we're continually learning more about the biology and psychology of the whole complex phenomenon. For instance, while Clive Waring's episodic memories, among others, seem to be deeply affected, his procedural memories of things seem to be in one piece. This has to do with neuroanatomy that we do not have time to explore here and we don't yet fully understand. Waring and others have a lot to teach us about the different types of long-term memory storage. 

Now, for healthy memories, there are lots of little tricks you can use to help remember information. Mnemonics, for one, help with memorization, and I'm sure you know a few that take the form of acronyms. ROYGBIV for the colors of the rainbow, for instance. Mnemonics work in part by organizing items into familiar, manageable units in a process called junking. For example, it may be hard to recall a seven-digit number, but it'll be easier to commit to memory in the rhythm of a phone number. or you could just write a song about it. Strategies like mnemonics and chunking can help you with explicit processes, but how well you retain your data can depend on how deep you dig through the different levels of processing. Shallow processing, for instance, lets you encode information on really basic auditory or visual levels based on the sound, 

structure, or appearance of a word. So if you're trying to commit the name Leonidas to your explicit memory using shallow processing, you might encode the word by recalling the cool font you saw it in. But to really retain that information, you'd want to activate your deep processing, which encodes semantically based on the actual meaning associated with the word. In this case, you might remember the story of that mega-tough yet very scantily clad warrior of ancient Greece. Or you might remember that Leon means lion in Greek, that lions are tough fighters, and that Leonidas was a tough Spartan warrior king. And then to really, really make it stick, you want to connect it to something meaningful or related to your own personal emotional experience. 

Maybe Gerard Butler's bronzed APEC torso and unconquerable bloodlust helped lock down the words Spartan and Leonidas in your memory forever. I mean, maybe, if that helps you. In the end, how much information you encode and remember depends on both the time you took to learn it and how you made it personally relevant to you. Memory is extremely powerful. It's constantly shaping and reshaping your brain, your life, and your identity. Clive Waring is still himself on the outside, but in his inability to recall who he was or process what has happened, he has lost some critically important parts of himself. Our memories may haunt us or sustain us, but either way, they define us. Without them, we are left to wander alone in the 

If you were committing this lesson to memory, you learned about how we encode and store in memory, the difference between implicit automatic and effortful explicit processing, how shallow and deep processing work, and a few types of long-term storage.