Memory

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The ability to modify our behaviour in response to life's experiences is shared by all animals including the bacteria E. coli. Such feat requires the brain's willingness to learn. Learning results in the formation of memories and in humans this process reaches its most sophisticated form, allowing us creatively to associate different reflections on the past, to generate new ideas, and most importantly to acquire language as a medium of expression and communication. Memory requires the brain to be physically altered by experience and it is this remarkable property that makes thought, consciousness, and language possible. The basic mechanism of memory formation is highly conservative over billion years of biological evolution. The difference in humans is that we have a lot more of the stuffs. There are about 100 trillion synaptic connections in our brain.

There are many ways to classify the memory. The concept of explicit and implicit memory refers to whether or not the recollection is produced consciously and intentionally. While the scheme of declarative and nondeclarative memory depend on the retrieval that can be declared verbally or not. Associative memory is triggered by clues; nonassociative memory can be habitual or sensitive. There are also short term and long term memory. Only the working memory belongs to the category of short term memory fading away in hours, while the others are long term, and available for retrieval in years. This image shows the components, locations, and pathways for many types of memory.