What do we know about memory ? everything we memorize is the result of a conscious process, what types of memory are known? Let’s see a brief explanation to better understand these questions.

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 coding process . When we remember, we are evoking stored content, that is, everything we have memorized.

But memory does not only refer to the past, as 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. We could say that thanks to it we form an identity .

Are all the 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. For the moment, two major types of memory are considered, the declarative memory (conscious) and the non-declarative memory (unconscious), which, in turn, encompass various types of memory.

Declarative or explicit memory is all the knowledge that we can bring to mind and that we can remember in a conscious and voluntary way . Declarative memory, in turn, includes many other types of memories, one of which is short-term memory , which takes care of the immediate memory of something we have just perceived (for example, remembering a telephone number), the disadvantage is that, as we will have seen, it fades quickly and is very sensitive to interference. On the other hand, we have the long-term memory , involved in personal experiences and specific events with a temporal-spatial reference (episodic or autobiographical memory) and the general cultural knowledge we have (semantic memory).

This type of conscious memory tends to be impaired in neurodegenerative processes such as dementia, in which the person may not remember situations, places, objects, people, etc., that before the impairment he or she 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 that which is governed by some involuntary and unconscious storage mechanisms . Evoking is carried out through perceptive-motor acts that require attention but are not directly accessible to the consciousness, that is, knowledge is only accessible through the execution of a procedure in which knowledge has been impregnated, unlike explicit memory, whose content we can declare consciously and voluntarily.

Procedural memory

Generally, memorization and learning through unconscious memory is a process that is internalized with practice and requires time, unlike declarative memory, where learning is usually rapid and a single trial may be sufficient. Let’s see an example of this, in particular of the procedural memory ; let’s suppose that we want to learn to drive a car, every time we practice taking the car the connections between neurons in that motor zone will be reinforced and these skills will be recorded in a nonconscious way, 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 that same action but in a faster and more skilful way. This type of memory can be found in thousands of everyday events, such as making a potato omelette, dancing samba, or simply writing on a mobile phone.

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

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

For the moment, and by way of conclusion, we can think of the existence of a great variety of memories, both conscious and unconscious, and that many of the things we remember, such as 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.