Memories

Essay by nc8498@gmail.comHigh School, 11th gradeB, September 2007

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The human brain is one of the most amazing and complex subjects to study because we must use our own brain to study the initial subject. In the brain there are countless procedures that occur every second whether it is sending signals to the beating heart, receiving and deciphering signals from the nose, and even wondering about what will be served at lunch. The depth of understanding required to be knowledgeable on basic reactions is huge, but the most astonishing aspect of the brain is memorization.

As psychology defines it, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and also retrieve information. Memory is divided into three separate categories: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. An example of sensory memory is a subject's ability to observe an object for a very short period of time such as 1 or 2 seconds, and recall what that item looked like or what was printed on it.

Short-term memory is a combination of some sensory memories, and memories you can recall several seconds or minutes after initially being exposed to it. George A. Miller worked with short-term memory in his experiments and found that the average person could memorize 7-9 figures after a short period of time, but this memory could be enhanced if the person used a process called "chunking". Memories that go into the sensory and short-term storage have a strict limit on capacity and duration which makes them unavailable after long periods of time. Long-term memories however can be accessed for a much longer period of time sometimes an entire lifetime. The three stages in formation and recollection of memories are encoding (or registration), storage (creation of a permanent record), and retrieval (recalling back the stored information).

Our memories affect almost all areas of the way that...