What is Memory?

Last time we saw that Akira Haraguchi, a man with an amazing memory, had memorised pi to 100,000 digits.

But, what actually is memory?

Well, in our everyday life, information is constantly being thrown at us. We’re always seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting new things. 

And people are always telling us stuff. Teachers tell us facts, like what the capital city of Benin is…. Parents tell us to make the bed in the morning… And friends give us the school gossip.

And if we try to think about this information later, most of it probably doesn’t stick.

For example, what did you have for dinner on the 16th December, 2013?

Like most of us, you probably have no idea!

So  Beds are left unmade in the morning… teachers ask what the capital city of Benin is… and we just don’t know. 

But, sometimes, some of the information that’s thrown at us does stick. 

Maybe it’s the juicy school gossip that friends shared with us a few hours earlier, that we can’t wait to tell everyone else about. Or maybe it’s the special meal we had for our tenth birthday.

This is the information that we remember, that we retain over time.

When information is retained in our minds over time, so that we can access the information later, we call this memory.

But we can use the word memory in two different ways…

First, we can say things like “that’s a really special memory”. 

Here, we’re using the word memory to talk about the information that we retain and remember, like the juicy gossip or the special birthday meal…

We call this ‘a’ memory.

But second, we can also say things like “my memory is awful”.

Here, we’re using the word memory to talk about the process of retaining information in our minds over a period of time, so that we can access it later… 

And here, we’re talking about our ability to remember things, like the juicy gossip…

So, if we say that we have ‘a’ memory of something, we’re talking about…

If we say that we have ‘a’ memory, we’re talking about the information that we have retained over a period of time… 

And if we say that our ‘memory’ is bad, we are talking about our ability to retain information, so we’re talking about the process of remembering things…

But, how do we retain information over a period of time?

Actually, there are three stages to memory, which we’ll look at next.

But first, to sum up…

Memory is….

Memory is the process of retaining information over time. And the information that we retain is called a memory.