MEMORY

Memory

Name of Student

Name of Instructor

Memory

Introduction

Memory is defined as the faculty by which sense impressions and information are retained in the mind and subsequently recalled. A person's capability to remember and the total store of mentally retained impressions and knowledge also formulate memory (Encarta). Memory is fundamental to our everyday lives, we have to recall who we are, recognize the faces of others and remember how to move and communicate. Several models of the direction in which memory is structured and how it functions have been advanced and although there are many differences between the models, they all view memory as a means of processing information.

Discussion

Sensory memory is the first stage of memory that can play a very crucial role in this writing task.

Example # 1

An example of sensory memory is if you see a car, the image of the car is briefly held by the sensory memory and as the car moves on you lose the information unless you transfer it to your short-term memory. It refers to sectors detected by the sensory receptors which are retained temporarily in the sensory registers and which have a large capability for unprocessed information but are only able to hold accurate images of sensory information momentarily (Brown 2004). There are two types of sensory memory: iconic memory for visual and echoic memory for hearing stimuli and touch. In 1960, experiments performed by George Sperling provided evidence that your iconic memory seems to last less than a second.

Long-Term memory is considered the final level of memory. It is memory that is stored as meaning; it can last as little as 30 seconds or as long as decades. Long-term memory has its own dynamic system, which is very crucial for the students of this group in which the information is modified and transformed. The memory bank is nothing like an archive; it is not separated and ordered properly. Sectors in the long-term memory are fully interconnected. When new information is added to the long-term memory it is immediately associated with a lot of existing information that bears a relationship with it (Brown, 2004).

Example # 2

For example, the sound of a word produces a pattern of activity in the brain that matches a stored pattern for that sound by associative connections, and activates other memory traces of information associated with the word (Hanson, 1999). The sound of a specific word brings immediate recognition of information about that word, the look, what the word is used for, what it's made of and so on. So if you are given an appropriate input cue, the cue stimulates activity in the brain that results in the retrieval of all sorts of information stored relating to that cue (Ciccarelli, & White, 2008).

Practice makes perfect, using devices such as rhymes, clues, mental pictures, and other methods really help hold information. For a student, it is recommended that you review material you learned in your class a couple hours after you learned it to solidify the concepts in your mind. Other ways ...