Memory And Long-Term Memory

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The brain is a flexible organ, a collection of synapses that constantly reshape the circuitry of our brains. And from that, we know that neuron activity corresponds to memory, the more firing between a given set of neurons, the stronger the connection. That is why some memories are stronger than others. Memories are anything but concrete and can be easily altered. Loss of memory, and creation of new memory, is a processing that never rest, and having a properly functioning memory is important in day-to-day life. The most commonly known forms are, short-term memory (or STM) and long term-memory (or LTM). Forgetting is done more easily by STM than LTM, due to reasons like, it has a limited capacity, and the information needs to be rehearsed to stick. LTM does not have limited capacity and can retain information in many different forms.
Long-term memory can last for years. It holds everything we know about the world, such as, personal experiences, factual information, and knowing of how to do something. In general, “long-term memory is organized so that it is easy to reach a stored item by a number of routes. For example, the concept "umbrella" may be retrieved by seeing an umbrella, experiencing a rainstorm, hearing the words to the song "Let a smile be your umbrella," and so on (Myers & Gluck, 2008) .” Regardless of the organization of LTM, we still experience memory lapses on a daily basis. After keeping a "forgetting journal" for a period of five days, I have learned that the top three types of memory errors that I make are semantic, prospective, and retrospective errors.
Semantic memory is our store of general knowledge and can be compared to being like the dictionary or encyclopedia of our brains. It refers to, words, fac...

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...ir personal lives. To empirically test which type of memory lapses happen more frequently researchers would have to test two groups of people, sleep-deprived and well rested, on each type of memory and compare them. Through previous research of others we can already assume that that well-rested group will do better than the sleep-deprived group but out of the sleep deprived group which type of memory was the strongest and which had more frequent memory failures.
Memory is vital to the functioning and even the survival of humans. Without memory, we could never learn from our experience and we would operate meaninglessly, without plans or goals. Motor skills and language ability would be lost and even the sense of personal identity we all have would be absent. There are many different factors that contribute to memory failures but there are also ways to improve it.

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