Long-Term Memory

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Part of being human is to have memories. Whether they are positive or negative, short-term or long-term, or even if some people suffer from a disease that affects their memories in some way, we all have them. Our experiences throughout our entire lives, consciously and unconsciously is how we acquire them. Our brain stores these memories for later retrieval when necessary. However, memories are not "truth", but our perception of what occurred (Ch. 7 pg. 231, Norton 's Psychology In Your Life, Grison, Heatherton, and Gazzaniga). An individual 's memories may differ based on how they have retrieved, maintained, and remembered information.
The process of creating a new memory happens in three phases: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Emotional experiences play a role in the process, making it more or less likely for information to be encoded, whether storage of memories will be short or long-term, and whether remembering memories will be a negative or positive experience .
The first and most crucial phase of creating a new memory is encoding. This is when your brain converts the information that your senses receive from your external surroundings so that it can be stored. Now that the information is encoded into a retainable memory, a place to …show more content…

The ability to consciously verbalize and describe a memory is an explicit memories. There are also two types of explicit memory: episodic and sematic memory. Episodic memory is based on an episode that occurred in your personal life and semantic memory are memories we have but do not remember how they were acquired. For example, brushing my hair is semantic. I don 't remember how or when I learned to brush my hair, but I just know how to. An episodic memory is when my friend was showing me how to style my hair a certain way for a special occasion that was coming up. Together this explicit memory helps me to instruct my daughter in the steps on how to style her hair the same

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