The Three Stages of Memory

 The Three Stages of Memory

By Hardik

Memory is a single term that reflects a number of different abilities: holding information briefly while working with it (working memory), remembering episodes of one’s life (episodic memory), and our general knowledge of facts of the world (semantic memory), among other types. Remembering episodes involves three processes: encoding information (learning it, by perceiving it and relating it to past knowledge), storing it (maintaining it over time), and then retrieving it (accessing the information when needed). Failures can occur at any stage, leading to forgetting or to having false memories. 

The key to improving one’s memory is to improve processes of encoding and to use techniques that guarantee effective retrieval. Good encoding techniques include relating new information to what one already knows, forming mental images, and creating associations among information that needs to be remembered. The key to good retrieval is developing effective cues that will lead the remember back to the encoded information. Classic mnemonic systems, known since the time of the ancient Greeks and still used by some today, can greatly improve one’s memory abilities.

The learning/memory process involves three stages: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding is initial information learning, storage is maintaining information over time, and retrieval is accessing information when needed.

Encoding

Encoding involves perceiving and learning information. While recall studies use straightforward methods, real-life encoding is selective and prolific. We selectively attend to some events while ignoring others, and encoding is continuous as we try to understand the world. It becomes challenging in rich environments, requiring selective attention. Storage changes our brains with each experience, creating memory traces or engrams. The brain alters its physical composition to store memories, analogous to writing notes. Events create engrams through consolidation, reflecting neural changes after learning.

Storage

Every experience we have changes our brains. That may seem like a bold, even strange, claim at first, but it’s true. We encode each of our experiences within the structures of the nervous system, making new impressions in the process—and each of those impressions involves changes in the brain. Psychologists (and neurobiologists) say that experiences leave memory traces, or engrams (the two terms are synonyms). Memories have to be stored somewhere in the brain, so in order to do so, the brain biochemically alters itself and its neural tissue. Just like you might write yourself a note to remind you of something, the brain “writes” a memory trace, changing its own physical composition to do so. The basic idea is that events (occurrences in our environment) create engrams through a process of consolidation: the neural changes that occur after learning to create the memory trace of an experience. Although neurobiologists are concerned with exactly what neural processes change when memories are created, for psychologists, the term memory trace simply refers to the physical change in the nervous system (whatever that may be, exactly) that represents our experience.

Retrieval

Endel Tulving argued that “the key process in memory is retrieval”. If information were encoded and stored but could not be retrieved, it would be useless. We encode and store thousands of events—conversations, sights and sounds—every day, creating memory traces. However, we later access only a tiny portion of what we’ve taken in. Most of our memories will never be used—in the sense of being brought back to mind, consciously. Psychologists distinguish information that is available in memory from that which is accessible. Available information is the information that is stored in memory— but precisely how much and what types are stored cannot be known. We can't know the entirety of what is in our memory, but only that portion we can actually retrieve. Something that cannot be retrieved now and which is seemingly gone from memory may, with different cues applied, reemerge.

Putting It All Together: Improving Your Memory

In summary, memory involves encoding, storage, and retrieval processes. Improving memory requires enhancing encoding and retrieval through effective techniques and cues. Selective and prolific encoding, along with meaningful and distinctive cues, contributes to optimal memory function.