Memory

Memory is a beautiful word by itself, the word by itself makes us recollect the things that have happened in our lives. In psychology memory is defined as an organism’s ability to retain, recall and store information.  It is important to have a memory of the things that happen around you.

There are three types of processes

• Sensory memory: Sensory memory is the initial 200 to 500 seconds the image or information is retained when the information is perceived. It is the ability of a person to look an image and retain characteristics of an image after seeing it only for a second. This type of memory degrades very quickly. The person will not be able to remember all the details just by seeing it for a second
• Short term memory: Short term memory allows you to retain the memory for duration of a minute or so after you receive the information or see the image. However there is evidence of some men able to retain large amounts of information and recall the information within a matter of seconds.
• Long term memory: While in case of sensory memory and short term memory the information is stored only of a few minutes and larger information cannot be stored. Long term memory can store much larger quantities of information for a longer duration of time. The capacity of Long term memory is very large. The memory is encoded in long term memory semantically.

There are various models available which helps us to better understand how memory works. Some of them include:

• Atkinson-Shiffrin model
• Working memory

Some of the disease that affects the mental health of the person is

Amnesia: generally loss of memory is called as amnesia, now with in the present scenario we can find out various factors leading to it and to some extent cure it.

Hyperthymesia: Hyperthymesia is a disorder that affects an autobiographical memory of a person, in such cases the person cannot store small day to day details.

Korsakoff's syndrome: Korsakoff's syndrome is an organic brain disease that affects the memory.

Other then these, there are also some disease that indirectly affects the memory of a person.

Questions:

• What is the purpose of understanding the memory?
• Why do old people suffer from memory loss?