Neurological Memory :: essays research papers

The Human Memory The reason people exist is because of two important things: memory and language, which have been vital in the evolution of humanity. (Our ancestors needed language to explain how to light a fire to keep them warm and a memory to remember how to do it). So we have a memory because if we did not we would never have evolved far enough for you to ask this question in this place. So how does it work? The process involve in the human memory are very complex†¦ I will present you the neuralgic and biologic part then Aurelie will talk about the characteristics of our human memory and then Sebastien will explain the troubles of the memory†¦ Despite big advances in recent years, memory is still a bit of mystery and there are disagreements among the experts about exactly what is going on. But now memory is seen as a function of the brain, and is not placed any more in the heart†¦ It’s defined as the ability to store and retrieve information. Codes of memory The new ways of communication taught us that information could be on different supports: Email, lettre, disc... The memory acts in the same way and info are supported by specific codes: sensorial codes, motor codes and symbolic codes. A special memory exists to each different info: tactual, visual, auditory and olfactory but these codes don’t have the same importance. Visual and auditory codes are the most important codes because they are the primary means of language in the memory. The auditory code is concerned with longer times than the visual one. (You remember longer a sequence of letters if you hear them than if you see them). Olfactory codes are very difficult to study and motor codes are not studied at all. These codes seem to be transitory and the info driven is encoded in the visual way or a linguistic way†¦ That’s why you probably heard about the visual memory and the auditory memory. In the long term memory the info learned becomes more and more abstract with time. The language arrived to a conceptual memory, the visual memory arrived to an analogic memory: visual- spatial but in fact an info is encoded with the two means: verbal and visual (a picture is named). These two codes are very complementary; visual codes are good for global spatial info but bad for a sequential order and verbal codes are good for the order of encode and analyze.