Are we aware of everything we memorize?

What do we know about the memory? Is everything we memorize the result of a conscious process? What types of memory are known? Let's look at a brief explanation to better understand these issues.

What is memory?

From a neuropsychological perspective, memory could be defined as the cognitive function that allows us to store content in our mind after having carried out an information encoding process. When we remember, we are evoking stored content, that is, everything that we have memorized.

But the memory It does not refer to the past only since it is also related to the present and the future, because thanks to it we know who we are or what we are going to do based on what we know. It could be said that thanks to her we formed a identity.

Are all mnestic processes conscious?

Many of the associations, facts, learnings, etc. that we store in our memory are not conscious. Memory is a capacity of which many aspects are still unknown. At the moment, two major types of memory are considered, the

declarative memory (conscious) and non-declarative (unconscious), which, in turn, encompass various types of memory.

The declarative or explicit memory, is all that knowledge that we can bring to mind and that we can remember in a conscious and voluntary. Declarative memory, in turn, encompasses many other types of memories, one of them is memory a short term, which is responsible for the immediate memory of something that we have just perceived (for example, remembering a number of phone), the downside is that, as we have seen, it fades quickly and is very sensitive to interference. On the other hand, we have the memory of long term, involved in personal experiences and specific events with a temporal-spatial reference (episodic or autobiographical memory) and the knowledge of general culture that we have (memory semantics).

This type of conscious memory tends to be impaired in neurodegenerative processes such as dementias, in which the person may not remember situations, places, objects, people, etc., that before the deterioration he remembered perfectly.

However, memory is not only a process of which we are aware, but there is also a type of unconscious memory.

Non-declarative memory and implicit memory

The non-declarative memory or implicit memory, is one that is governed by involuntary and unconscious mechanisms storage. Evocation is carried out through perceptual-motor acts that require attention but are not directly accessible to consciousness, that is, knowledge is only accessible to through the execution of a procedure in which knowledge has been impregnated, unlike explicit memory, of which we can declare its content consciously and voluntary.

Procedural memory

Generally, memorization and learning through unconscious memory is a process that is internalized with practice and that takes time, unlike declarative memory, where learning is usually quick and a single trial can result in enough. Let's look at an example of this, specifically the procedural memory; Suppose we want to learn to drive a car, each time we practice taking the car, the connections between neurons in that motor area will be reinforced and these skills will be recorded. unconsciously, the same thing will happen to us if one of the things we want to learn is to park, we will realize that with practice we will do the same action but more quickly and skilled. This type of memory can be found in thousands of daily events, such as making a potato omelette, To dance samba, or simply by typing on the mobile phone.

Another very interesting type of implicit memory is the known classical conditioning, since it is common to make associations and unconscious learning, such as associating a smell to a person or sound to a memory, a fact that will provoke positive or negative emotions by involuntarily remembering that experience.

It is surprising to see that people who have suffered amnesia (partial or total memory loss) keep their implicit memory preserved. This fact is due to the fact that implicit memory is stored in different structures than those used by declarative memory, which is governed mainly by the hippocampus.

For the moment, and by way of conclusion, one can think of the existence of a great variety of memories, of a conscious and unconscious type, and that many of the things we remember, such as For example, the most remote memories do not have a single store but, once consolidated, are distributed throughout the cerebral cortex depending on the degree of consolidation and the type of information processed.