well sandeep, Information flows from the outside world through our sight, hearing smelling, tasting and touch sensors. Memory is simply ways we store and recall things we've sensed.
Recalling memories re-fires many of the same neural paths we originally used to sense the experience and, therefore, almost re-creates the event. Memories of concepts and ideas are related to sensed experiences because we extract the essence from sensed experiences to form generalized concepts.
Consider Sir Isaac Newton, for example. Newton "hammered wooden pegs" into the ground, and "cut sundials into stone" to measure the Sun's movement through the sky, writes James Gleick in Isaac Newton. "This meant seeing time as akin to space, duration as length ...." Newton generalized what he observed into a concept of time.
We store — for fractions of a second — sensory information in areas located throughout the cortex. Then some data moves into short-term memory. Finally, some of that information goes in long-term storage in various parts of the cortex, much of it returning to the sensory cortex areas where we originally received it.
Only the data that catches our attention (like a police car behind us) or because we need it soon (a telephone number) goes into short-term memory. We hold short-term data for maybe half a minute. Short-term storage is small; it holds about seven independent items at one time, such as "carry" numbers when calculating arithmetic.
Finally, information that may help us in the future (for instance, the downwind smell of a saber-toothed tiger) goes into long-term memory, where it can last a lifetime.
Long-term memory involves three processes: encoding, storage and retrieval.
• First we break new concepts into their composite parts to establish meaning. Furthermore, we include the context around us as we learn a new concept, or experience another episode in our life. For example, I might encode the phrase "delicious apple" with key descriptive ideas — red color, sweet taste, round shape, the crisp sound of a bite — and then such contextual items as '"I'm feeling good because it's a happy fall day and I'm picking apples."
• Second, as we store the memory, we attach it to other related memories, like "similar to Granny Smith apples but sweeter," and thus, consolidate the new concept with older memories.
• Third, we retrieve the concept, by following some of the pointers that trace the various meaning codes and decoding the stored information to regain meaning. If I can't remember just what "delicious apple" means, I might activate any of the pointer-hints, such as "red" or "picking apples." Pointers connect with other pointers so one hint may allow me to recover the whole meaning.
For more details , Please visit the source site :
http://www.usatoday.com/t ech/c olumnist/aprilholladay/2007-03 -12-m emory-first_N.htm
Answered by
Romi
, an ibibo Master,
at
11:35 AM on June 25, 2008
