A Brief Introduction To The Psychology Of Memory
A guide to learning how we make new memories
How often do you forget places, names, dates, and meetings?
Oh, I know how annoying and frustrating it is not to remember daily tasks or what you just read or studied. However, I improved this after taking a neuroscience course during my degree in Psychology.
Here, I want to share what I learned and why it was so helpful to me.
Ready to learn how to improve your memory?
Divisions Of Memory
Memory is a huge topic.
Over the years, scientists have found that there’s not only one memory but many. So, they decided to divide the concept into different classes. Logic, right?
The first division they agreed on was the period a memory is stored in our brain:
Short-term memory: information lasts seconds to minutes and hours.
Long-term memory: information lasts hours to days, months, years, and even a lifetime.
Let’s dive into these memories deeply:
1. “Ups! I Forgot It”: Short-Term Memory
Let’s start with an example.
Let’s say you are meeting with friends, and you ask what they want to drink. People are thirsty. So they start yelling at you:
“Coca-cola”, ”Fanta”, “Coca-cola”, “Sprite, “Water”, “Sprite”, “Coca-cola”, “Coca-cola”, “Fanta”, “Water”, etc.
“Got it!” — you think.
Then, you go to buy and … forget what they told you.
What happened?
Well, you were a victim of your short-term memory, particularly your working memory. Your brain can’t retain too much information in a brief period, so it forgets, just like Dory in Nemo.
Short-term memory is the reason of:
Why you get fooled by the illusion of learning (thinking you learned something when you didn’t)?
Why you forget things they just told you.
Why you forget supermarket items.
And so on.
Don’t worry—forgetting is a natural brain process.
It helps prioritize relevant information and prevents cognitive overload, as remembering everything would be computationally and energetically expensive.
However, you should be worried if forgetting begins to affect well-consolidated memories or if you start getting lost in familiar places. These could signal cognitive decline.
2. “Now I Remember”: Long-Term Memory
Long-term memory lasts way longer than short-term memory.
It happens when you can retrieve information you learned in the past. For example, after you master multiplication tables, I can ask you what 2*2 is, and you will retrieve the question quickly.
That’s because this information is now stored in your long-term memory.
This knowledge can last hours, days, months, and a lifetime. In this type of memory, more interesting things happen. At the neuronal level, your neural pathways get stronger. At the behavior level, things like riding a bicycle or playing an instrument become almost automatic.
But remembering your childhood is different from remembering how to drive a car.
Scientists needed another division.
More Sub-Divisions: Implicit and Explicit Memory
Psychologists also split long-term memory into 2: implicit and explicit/declarative.
1. Implicit Long-Term Memory
These are unconscious and automatic memories.
There are four sub-types:
Priming.
Procedural: skills and habits (automatic). For example, riding a bicycle.
Associative Learning: classical and operant conditioning. For example, when you instantly smile after another’s smile (operant conditioning) or when you associate walking steps with one person.
Nonassociative Learning: habituation and sensitization. For example, when you get used to the sound of the train that passes near your house (habituation) or when you get more and more sensitive to a particular smell (sensitization).
More about this next week :)
2. Explicit Or Declarative Long-Term Memory
In contrast, this type of memory refers to the conscious retrieval of previous experiences, such as people, places, and things.
These kind of memories can also be divided into:
Facts: semantic.
Events: episodic.
Semantic memory is used to learn the meanings of new words or concepts.
On the other hand, episodic ones are those used to recall what we saw during episodes of our lives, like a birthday, a song, etc.
The Whole Picture
Damn, that was a lot of information, right?
Let’s recap. At the highest level, memory is divided by how long information can be retained. So, you have short-term and long-term memory. Then, in the short term, you find working memory. In the long term, you have implicit and explicit memory.
Finally, explicit memory is divided into semantic and episodic.
And implicit into priming, procedural, associative and non-associative learning.
4 Steps For Explicit Memory Processing
One last point.
In the Super Learning Lab I write about effective learning. That means linking information from your short-term to your long-term memory. For this, it is important to know the 4 steps of memory processing:
Encoding.
Storage.
Consolidation.
Retrieval.
When you first learn about something, your brain encodes the new information to link it to existing ones (pre-existing knowledge). Then, neural mechanisms make the information to be stored.
Third, your brain consolidates the new information by making it more stable.
Finally, you retrieve this stored information by using it again. The more you retrieve, the better you learn. That’s why retrieval is key to moving information from short-term memory to long-term memory.
And to avoid the illusion of learning.
The brain is fascinating.
It’s the origin of everything we experience—our emotions, perceptions, consciousness, and behaviors. Every thought and action is driven by complex biological algorithms that evolved over millennia, shaping our nervous systems into finely tuned machines.
Ultimately, our brains are what make us human.
The more we understand it, the closer we understand ourselves and other life beings.
Until the next time,
Axel
📚 References:
Carlson, N. R., & Birkett, M. A. (2017). Chapter 13. Learning and Memory. In Physiology of Behavior (11th ed., pp. 434). Pearson.
Terry, W.S. (2017). Learning and Memory: Basic Principles, Processes, and Procedures, Fifth Edition (5th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315622781