Human Brain: Forgetting Memory

Everybody goes about their life on a daily basis making endless amounts of memories, but does not think back on them until later down the road. In reality, people’s lives are constructed by these mostly great however sometimes undesirable times called memories. Early researchers believed that there was one particular part of the human brain that contained memory; however, present day researchers have found that specific parts of the brain are responsible for different aspects of memory. As gratifying it is to create a life filled with joyous memories, due to various theories, accidents, or simply old age, forgetting memories can happen as quickly as making them did.

Memory is an internal record or representation of some prior event or experience. Although some memories we make can be wonderful, our brain decides which memories it would like to keep. When creating a memory, your brain takes the individual encounters and puts them through a three-stage memory model. The first stage of this model is the sensory memory storage, which is where all encounters enter and lasts for only .4-4 seconds. In this stage, your brain sifts through all encounters, chooses what it deems is relevant, and passes it onto the second stage, which is short-term memory storage. Memory is limited to only 5-9 items in this stage and only lasts for approximately 30 seconds. Short-term memory is only a temporary storage unit for memories, as the brain then moves what memories it assumes to be most important to long-term memory. Long-term memory has unlimited capacity and duration. When we need to recall a memory, our brain takes it from long-term memory and pushes it forward to short-term memory. Any memories that are not pushed forward from sensory memory st...

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...asses it onto long-term memory without the explicit details of a certain situation. In retrieval failure theory, memories that are stored in long-term memory become temporarily inaccessible. This is also known as the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, which is when we feel like the event we are trying to recall will pop up in our mind at any moment however it does not.

Many people’s lives are shaped by both good and bad memories; however, there may be certain memories that one longs to forget. Forgetting memory stems from several causes, those ranging from medical issues to simply biological reasons. There are theories that explain why one forgets memories, even if it was done with full intention. If a human being were incapable of forgetting memories, our brains would be filled with both meaningless and undesirable memories that could ultimately bring us down as people.