Neuroscience reveals the multi-distinct memory system's composition, including long-term and working memory, rather than being one system. Memory affects an individual's everyday functioning, capacity to sequence tasks, performance in their job, and functional status. It plays a significant role in an individual's learning or accumulation of knowledge that influences their decision-making actions. The brain's neural substrate is responsible for memory formation, time to time retrieval, memory loss, and memory-to-knowledge transitions. The encounters of people with details of one's experiences over time to make the right judgments, assessments, or decisions when facing similar people or events make up their memory. Humans can recollect details of past events and know an object, place, or person they have encountered before depending on their memory (Bastin et al., 2019: De Luca et al., 2018). Neuroimaging and neuropsychological studies help understand how humans remember past events, project into the future, and share experiences. The paper addresses the different types of memory, including the long-term and working memory, how various memory types influence lives, impacts of functionality deficits or impairments, and anterograde vs. retrograde amnesia.
Different Types of Memory and How They Support Daily Life
Memory is essential in day-to-day life to retain information and perform several everyday tasks. An individual's daily reasoning and decision-making that facilitates actions rely on their memory capacity. Memory is also responsible for an individual's capacity to learn, understand and master new concepts or skills. It is vital for all learning as it lets one store and retrieves the information they learn, as memory provides a framework for linking new knowledge through association and understanding (Beaver & Schmitter-Edgecombe, 2017). Memory is integral to human cognition and allows individuals to recall and draw upon past events, which is crucial in comprehending and determining present behavior. There are four main types of memory that include sensory, short-term, working, and long-term memory.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
Sensory memory
Sensory memory is responsible for remembering an input in details but only within few milliseconds. It could be visually representative, iconic, or imitative of a sound, also known as onomatopoeic or echoic, and usage in the sense of touch is haptic. Sensory memory is fleeting and similar to a flash yet necessary to buffer stimuli. The iconic memory comprises immediate visual memories on how the brain remembers images one saw moments ago up to 30 seconds (Clark & Martin, 2018). Echoic memory or auditory sensory memory refers to audio memories stored slightly longer than iconic memories for about 4 seconds. Haptic memory involves the sense of touch, such as the sensation of touching a rough surface. Short-term memory is stored temporarily and lasts between 20 to 30 seconds, later dismissed or transferred to LTM. It has a close association with working memory, although the latter has specificity to information people receive, use quickly, then discard such as an individual's mobile number and items to purchase (Greenwald & Banaji, 2017).
Long-term Memory (LTM)
LTM is the storage of information over extended periods. When it comes to LTM, they are not created equally, which is evident in how some memories get to mind fast while others need reminders and prompts or recall. Notably, access and recall of LTM depends on the importance one attaches to the memory items. For instance, memories that are accessed often become strangers and are easily recalled. Access to memories from time to time strengthens the neural networks of information encoding, facilitating recollection. LTM lasts from days to decades and is influenced by several factors which determine its strength and duration.
Explicit and Implicit Memory
LTM can be either explicit or implicit. Explicit or declarative memories refer to memories available in the consciousness, which could be specific events, episodic, or the knowledge about the work, semantic memory. Explicit memory requires conscious thinking, such as the name of a childhood pet. Episodic memory touches on one's personal life, such as their wedding date anniversary, a memorable retreat experience, or dinner one had the previous night (Beaver & Schmitter-Edgecombe, 2017). Retention of episodic memories depends on the emotional power of one's experiences. On the other hand, implicit memory is primarily unconscious, which comprises procedural memory such as body movement and use of objects in one's environment such as driving a car, riding a bicycle, speaking a language, or using a computer. Procedural memory enables people to complete specific tasks without thinking about them, such as type shoelaces or brushing one's teeth apart from the examples mentioned above.
Long-Term and Working Memory
Long-term memory (LTM) can be acquired in the absence of conscious awareness, leading to implicit memory. LTM is, however, not entirely independent of the working memory (WM) regardless of the lack of conscious awareness (Bastin et al., 2019). The limited WM constrains the acquisition of implicit LTM with varying ages and modalities. The working memory relates to the brain's temporary activation, while long-term memory changes to the physical form of neurons and their connections. Working memory entails actively maintain a limited amount of information while LTM provides the necessary support with a limited amount of learned material.
Effects of Memory Impairments or Functionality Deficits on Daily Life
Memory impairments lead to devastating impacts, which could have mild to severe effects on individuals and those around them. For instance, when one engages in a difficult or complex task and cannot remember due to impairment, it significantly affects their conscious awareness, judgments, and perception negatively and could lead them to relay false or inaccurate information. Such impairments get even worse for people involved in technical work such as medicine, engineering, or other work that instantly and significantly affect others' lives and livelihoods (Breedlove & Watson, 2019). Take the instance of an electric power engineer who is out in the field undertaking essential repairs. If they engage in a particular task that is multi-stepped that requires one to remember preceding procedures, it could lead to a fire catastrophe if the engineer cannot remember the step they took earlier and thus lead to property destruction or loss of lives. Memory impairments adversely affect one's quality of life and engagement in social activities, which in turn affects their health, mortality, and morbidity in the long run. Memory affects how people interact within their social networks, their experiences of stress, loneliness, sadness, self-esteem, sleeping, and eating.
Memory is affected by the events and experiences of an individual's life. For instance, life stress could affect one's cognition by influencing memory performance and capacity to retain helpful information for future retrieval. Memory impairment and functionality deficits lead to loss of self-confidence and embarrassment of dysfunctional ties (Josselyn & Tonegawa, 2020). The impairment causes people's withdrawal from their routine social activities. Memory impairments lead to people misplacing items and think of them a having been stolen or moved. Additionally, memory problems affect one's ability to pay attention, read, or communicate, essential in day-to-day activities in formal and informal settings. Memory defects or impairments cause some disorders and diseases such as cardiovascular disease or mental conditions. In other cases, an individual with memory problems may require physical aid in performing basic activities such as eating, dressing, bathing, and washing due to memory issues. Working memory deficit would mean one cannot remember anything within minutes and hours, thus unable to engage in routine tasks effectively. Furthermore, working memory deficits limit the individual's ability to communicate, move around or engage in simple routine activities.
Anterograde and Retrograde Amnesia
Anterograde amnesia patients cannot create new memories or transfer short-term memories to long-term memories that impair new learning. On the contrary, retrograde amnesia, RA, is the inability to remember or recall memories that lead to loss of information previously acquired before the onset of amnesia. With RA, the brain fails to retrieve information, while with AA, it fails to store information. Retrograde amnesia, especially focal retrograde amnesia, FRA, limits one's imagination of one personal future experiences without the inclusion of the imagination of fictitious personal experiences (Greenwald & Banaji, 2017; Yang et al., 2020). Additionally, FRA offers no preclude future-oriented cognition and choice. Conversely, autobiographical memory is essential for episodic future thinking, while semantic memory is responsible for imagining fictitious experiences. Examples of explicit memory include remembering lessons from a literature class, recalling the CEO's name or one's mobile phone number. Other examples include remembering meeting appointments, previous conversations, recalling the directions to a place, and recalling the rules of playing a Chess game. Examples of implicit memory include recalling song lyrics, using a computer, driving a car, and swimming.
Anterograde amnesia affects one's declarative memory that tampers with their ability to recall facts even though they retain their procedural memory. It primarily affects the episodic part of the declarative memory but retains the semantic part implying that one can remember things to the event but cannot retain memories of things that happened after a particular date. Anterograde amnesia affects remembering new information and limits LTM affecting short-term processing and leading to confusion or frustration (Beaver & Schmitter-Edgecombe, 2017; Clark & Martin, 2018; Josselyn & Tonegawa, 2020). The memory loss due to anterograde amnesia could date back decades, while other times could be back a few months.
Neuroscience has contributed to the understanding of memory and its mechanisms in humans and other living organisms. Memory influences humans' daily functioning and future activities since they rely on details of the past to make decisions of the present and future engagements. The types of memory include memory sensory, short-term, working, and long-term memory. These memory types differ in the length of time details of information are stored, recalled, and used. Sensory memory, which is echoic, iconic, or haptic, only lasts a few milliseconds. Short-term memory lasts for a few minutes, while working memory lasts for hours and is responsible for one's daily activities. Unlike the other three types, long-term memory lasts longer from months to decades and does not rely on consciousness once acquired. It is irrefutable that memory plays a vital role in facilitating an individual's capacity to engage in daily activities and any impairment such as amnesia adversely affects their daily activities.
References
Bastin et al. (2019). An integrative memory model of recollection and familiarity to understand memory deficits. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, 67-82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X19000621.
Beaver, J., & Schmitter-Edgecombe, M. (2017). Multiple types of memory and everyday functional assessment in older adults. Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology, 32(4), 413-426.https://doi.org/10.1093/arclin/acx016.
Breedlove, S. M., & Watson, N. V. (2019). Behavioral Neuroscience / Edition 9. Oxford University Press.
Clark, R. E., & Martin, S. J. (2018). Behavioral Neuroscience of Learning and Memory. Springer International Publishing.
De Luca et al. (2018). Episodic future thinking and future-based decision-making in a case of retrograde amnesia. Neuropsychologia, 110, 92-103.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.08.007.
Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (2017). The implicit revolution: Reconceiving the relation between conscious and unconscious. American Psychologist, 72(9), 861.
Josselyn, S. A., & Tonegawa, S. (2020). Memory engrams: Recalling the past and imagining the future. Science, 367(6473).
Martin et al. (2017). Explicit and implicit emotion regulation: a multi-level framework. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 12(10), 1545-1557.https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx096.
Shields et al. (2017). Recent life stress exposure is associated with poorer long-term memory, working memory, and self-reported memory: stress, 20(6), 598-607.https://doi.org/10.1080/10253890.2017.1380620.
Yang et al. (2020). The Role of Working Memory in Implicit Memory: A Developmental Perspective. Cognitive Development, 55, 100929, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2020.100929.
