One of the mental functions and types of mental activity, designed to store, accumulate and reproduce information. The ability to store information about the events of the external world and the reactions of the body for a long time and repeatedly use it in the sphere of consciousness to organize subsequent activities.

There are different types of memory:

• by sensory modality - visual (visual) memory, motor (kinesthetic) memory, sound (auditory) memory, taste memory, pain memory;
• by content - figurative memory, motor memory, emotional memory;
• on the organization of memorization - episodic memory, semantic memory, procedural memory;
• according to temporal characteristics - , ultra-short-term memory;
• by the presence of a goal - arbitrary and involuntary;
• by availability of funds - indirect and non-mediated;
• according to the level of development - motor, emotional, figurative, verbal-logical.

Features of the functioning of memory

Memory properties

• Accuracy
• Volume
• The speed of memorization processes
• The speed of forgetting processes

Patterns of memory

Memory is limited. The success of reproducing a large amount of material depends on the nature of the distribution of repetitions in time. There is such a pattern as the forgetting curve.

Memory laws:

Law of Interest- Interesting things are easier to remember.
Law of comprehension- The deeper you become aware of the memorized information, the better it will be remembered.
Installation law- If a person gave himself the installation to remember information, then memorization will happen easier.
Law of action– Information involved in activities (i.e. if knowledge is put into practice) is remembered better.
Law of context- With the associative linking of information with already familiar concepts, the new is absorbed better.
Law of inhibition– When studying similar concepts, the effect of “overlapping” the old information with the new one is observed.
The Law of Optimal Row Length- The length of the memorized row for better memorization should not greatly exceed the volume.
edge law- The information presented at the beginning and at the end is best remembered.
Law of repetition- Information that is repeated several times is best remembered.
Law of incompleteness– Incomplete actions, tasks, unsaid phrases, etc. are best remembered.

Mnemotechnical methods of memorization

• The formation of semantic phrases from the initial letters of the memorized information.
• Rhyming.
• Memorization of long terms or foreign words with the help of consonants.
• Finding bright unusual associations (pictures, phrases) that are connected with memorized information.
• Cicero's method on spatial imagination.
• Aivazovsky's method is based on the training of visual memory.
• Methods for memorizing numbers:
  • patterns;
  • familiar numbers.

Memory processes

• Memorization is a memory process through which traces are imprinted, new elements of sensations, perception, thinking or experience are introduced into the system of associative links. The basis of memorization is the connection of material with meaning into one whole. The establishment of semantic connections is the result of the work of thinking on the content of the memorized material.
• Storage - the process of accumulation of material in the structure of memory, including its processing and assimilation. Preservation makes it possible for a person to learn, develop his perceptual (internal assessments, perception of the world) processes, thinking and speech.
• Reproduction and recognition is the process of updating the elements of past experience (images, thoughts, feelings, movements). A simple form of reproduction is recognition - the recognition of a perceived object or phenomenon as already known from past experience, the establishment of similarities between the object and its image in memory. Reproduction is voluntary and involuntary. With an involuntary image pops up in the head without the efforts of a person.

If there are difficulties in the process of reproducing, then the process is in progress. Selection of elements necessary from the point of view of the required task. The reproduced information is not an exact copy of what is imprinted in memory. Information is always being transformed, rearranged.

• Forgetting is the loss of the ability to reproduce, and sometimes even in recognizing what was previously memorized. Most often we forget what is not significant. Forgetting can be partial (reproduction is not complete or with) and complete (impossibility of reproduction and recognition). Distinguish between temporary and long-term forgetting.

neurological memory

Memory is a set of activities that include both biological-physiological and mental processes, the implementation of which at the moment is due to the fact that some previous events, close or distant in time, have significantly modified the state of the organism. (C. Flores).

Memory means the use and participation of previous experience in the present. From this point of view, memory, both at the moment of consolidation and at the moment of its reproduction, is an activity in the full sense of the word. (Zinchenko).

• Visual (visual) memory is responsible for the preservation and reproduction of visual images.
• Motor memory is responsible for storing information about motor functions. For example, a first-class baseball player throws the ball superbly, in part due to the memory of motor activity during past throws.
• Episodic memory is the memory of events that we participated in or witnessed (Tulving, 1972). Examples of it might be remembering how you celebrated your seventeenth birthday, remembering your engagement day, remembering the plot of a movie you saw last week. This type of memory is characterized by the fact that the memorization of information occurs without visible effort on our part.
• Semantic memory is the memory of facts such as the multiplication table or the meaning of words. You probably won't be able to remember where and when you learned that 6547 x 8791 = 57554677, or from whom you learned what the word "stock" means, but nevertheless this knowledge is part of your memory. Perhaps you will be able to remember all the torment that the study of the multiplication table brought you. Both episodic and semantic memory contain knowledge that can be easily told and declared. Therefore, these two subsystems form part of a larger category called declarative memory.
• Procedural memory, or remembering how to do something, has some similarities with motor memory. The difference is that the description of the procedure does not necessarily imply the possession of any motor skills. For example, in your school years, you were supposed to be taught how to work with a slide rule. This is a kind of "knowing how", which is often contrasted with descriptive tasks that involve "knowing what".
• Topographic memory - the ability to navigate in space, recognize the path and follow the route, recognize familiar places. Topographic cretinism can be caused by numerous disorders, including difficulties with perception, orientation, and memory.

Classification of types of memory according to criteria

• figurative memory
• verbal-logical memory
• sensory memory
• emotional memory

Time

• operational
• intermediate

Organization of memorization

• episodic memory
• semantic memory
• procedural memory

Properties of human memory

The pioneer in the study of human memory is Herman Ebbinghaus, who experimented on himself (the main technique was to memorize meaningless lists of words or syllables).

Long-term and short-term memory

Physiological studies reveal 2 main types of memory: short-term and long-term. One of the most important discoveries of Ebbinghaus was that if the list is not very large (usually 7), then it can be remembered after the first reading (usually the list of elements that can be remembered immediately is called the size of short-term memory).

Another law established by Ebbinghaus is that the amount of material retained depends on the time interval from the moment of memorization to verification (the so-called "Ebbinghaus curve"). The positional effect was discovered (occurring if the stored information exceeds short-term memory in volume). It lies in the fact that the ease of remembering a given element depends on the place it occupies in a row (the first and last elements are easier to remember).

It is believed that short-term memory is based on electrophysiological mechanisms that support connected neuronal systems. Long-term memory is fixed by structural changes in individual cells that are part of neuronal systems, and is associated with chemical transformation, the formation of new substances.

short term memory

Short-term memory exists due to temporal patterns of neural connections emanating from areas of the frontal (especially dorsolateral, prefrontal) and parietal cortex. This is where sensory information comes in. Short-term memory allows you to remember something after a period of time from a few seconds to a minute without repetition. Its capacity is very limited. George Miller, while working at Bell Laboratories, performed experiments showing that the capacity of short-term memory is 7 ± 2 objects (the title of his famous work is “The Magic Number 7 ± 2”). Modern estimates of short-term memory capacity are somewhat lower, typically 4-5 objects, and it is known that short-term memory capacity increases through a process called "chunking" (grouping of objects). For example, if you present the string

FSBKMSMCHSEGE

a person will be able to remember only a few letters. However, if the same information is presented differently:

FSB CMS Ministry of Emergency Situations Unified State Examination

a person will be able to remember much more letters because he is able to group (combine into chains) information about the semantic groups of letters (in the English original: FBIPHDTWAIBM and FBI PHD TWA IBM). Herbert Simon also showed that the ideal size for chunks of letters and numbers, whether meaningful or not, is three units. Perhaps in some countries this is reflected in the tendency to present a telephone number as several groups of 3 digits and a final group of 4 digits divided into 2 groups of two.

There are hypotheses that short-term memory relies primarily on an acoustic (verbal) code for storing information and, to a lesser extent, on a visual code. Conrad (1964) showed that subjects have more difficulty remembering sets of words that are acoustically similar.

Modern studies of ant communication have proven that ants are able to memorize and transmit information up to 7 bits. Moreover, the influence of possible grouping of objects on the message length and transmission efficiency is demonstrated. In this sense, the law "Magic number 7 ± 2" is also fulfilled for ants.

long term memory

Storage in sensory and short-term memory usually has a hard limited capacity and duration, that is, information remains available for some time, but not indefinitely. In contrast, long-term memory can store much more information for a potentially infinite amount of time (throughout a lifetime). For example, some 7-digit phone number can be stored in short-term memory and forgotten after a few seconds. On the other hand, a person can remember by repeating a phone number for years to come. In long-term memory, information is encoded semantically: Baddeley (1960) showed that after a 20-minute pause, subjects had significant difficulty recalling a list of words with similar meanings (eg, large, huge, large, massive).

Long-term memory is supported by more stable and unchanging changes in neural connections widely distributed throughout the brain. is important in consolidating information from short-term to long-term memory, although it does not appear to store information itself. Rather, the hippocampus is involved in changing neural connections after 3 months of initial learning.

One of the primary functions is the consolidation of information. It is possible to show that memory depends on a sufficient period between training and testing. Moreover, the hippocampus reproduces the activity of the current day during sleep.

Memory disorders

A large amount of knowledge about the structure and operation of memory, which is now available, was obtained by studying the phenomena of its violation. Memory disorders - amnesia - can be caused by various reasons. In 1887, the Russian psychiatrist S. S. Korsakov, in his publication On Alcoholic Paralysis, first described the picture of severe memory disorders that occur with severe alcohol poisoning. The discovery called "Korsakov's syndrome" is firmly established in the scientific literature. Currently, all memory disorders are divided into:

• Hypomnesia - weakening of memory. Memory impairment may occur with age and / and as a result of any brain disease (sclerosis of cerebral vessels, epilepsy, etc.).
• Hypermnesia - an abnormal sharpening of memory compared to normal indicators, is observed much less frequently. People with this feature forget events with great difficulty (Shereshevsky)
• Paramnesias, which involve false or distorted memories, as well as the displacement of the present and the past, the real and the imagined.

Particularly stands out childhood amnesia - loss of memory for the events of early childhood. Apparently, this type of amnesia is associated with the immaturity of the hippocampal connections, or with the use of other methods of encoding "keys" to memory at this age.

Mythology, religion, philosophy about memory

• In ancient Greek mythology, there is a myth about the river Lethe. Lethe means "forgetfulness" and is an integral part of the realm of death. The dead are those who have lost their memory. On the other hand, some who were favored, among them Tiresias or Amphiaraus, retained their memory even after their death.
• The opposite of the Lethe River is the Goddess Mnemosyne, the personified Memory, the sister of Kronos and Okeanos - the mother of all muses. She has Omniscience: according to Hesiod (Theogony, 32 38), she knows "everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be." When the Muses take possession of the poet, he drinks from the source of knowledge of Mnemosyne, which means, first of all, that he touches the knowledge of the “origins”, “beginnings”.
• According to the philosophy of Anamnesis - recollection, recollection - a concept that describes the basic procedure of the process of cognition.

- Every time you can't remember a name or a place, write it down in your diary.
“What if I can’t remember the diary?”

In this article, we will introduce you to the principles of memory, tell you about the methods of remembering and retrieving memories, share exercises, recommendations from scientists and unexpected facts about memory. You will definitely remember it 🙂

How memory works

Did you know that the very word "memory" misleads us. It gives the impression that we are talking about something unified, about one mental skill. But over the past fifty years, scientists have found that there are several different processes of remembering. For example, we have short-term and long-term memory.

Everyone knows that short term memory used when you need to hold a thought in your mind for about a minute (for example, the phone number you are going to call). At the same time, it is very important not to think about something else - otherwise you will immediately forget the number. This statement is true for both young and old people, but for the latter, its relevance is still slightly higher. Short-term memory is involved in various processes, for example, it serves to track changes in a number when adding or subtracting.

Long term memoryь is responsible for everything that we need in more than a minute, even if you were distracted by something else in this interval. Long-term memory is divided into procedural and declarative.

1. procedural memory concerns activities such as riding a bicycle or playing the piano. If once you have learned to do this, then your body will simply repeat the necessary movements - and this is controlled by procedural memory.
2. Declarative memory, in turn, participates in the conscious recall of information, for example, when you need to restore a shopping list. This type of memory can be either verbal (verbal) or visual (visual) and is divided into semantic and episodic memory.

• semantic memory refers to the meaning of concepts (in particular, to the names of people). Suppose that knowledge of what a bicycle is belongs to this kind of memory.
• episodic memory- to events. For example, knowing when you last went for a bike ride calls on your episodic memory. Part of episodic memory is autobiographical - it relates to various events and life experiences.

Finally we got to prospective memory- it refers to the things you are going to do: call the car service, or buy a bouquet of flowers and visit your aunt, or clean the cat's litter box.

How memories are formed and returned

Memory is the mechanism by which impressions received in the present affect us in the future. For the brain, new experience means spontaneous activity of neurons. When something happens to us, clusters of neurons fire up, passing on electrical impulses. The work of the gene and the production of protein create new synapses, stimulate the growth of new neurons.

But the process of forgetting is similar to how snow falls on objects, covering them with itself, from which they become white and white - and such that you can no longer distinguish where it was.

An impulse that provokes the extraction of a memory - an internal (thought or feeling) or an external event, causes the brain to associate with an event from the past. works like a kind of predictive device: it is constantly preparing for the future based on the past. Memories condition our perception of the present through a "filter" through which we look and automatically assume what will happen next.

The memory extraction mechanism has an important property. It has only been carefully studied in the last twenty-five years: when we take a coded memory out of our internal storage, it is not necessarily recognized as something from the past.

Take, for example, cycling. You sit on a bike and just ride, and clusters of neurons fire in the brain, allowing you to pedal, balance and brake. This is one type of memory: an event in the past (trying to learn to ride a bike) influenced your behavior in the present (you ride it), but you don't feel today's bike ride as a memory of the day you first got to do it.

If you are asked to remember the very first ride on a bicycle, you will think, scan the memory storage, and, for example, you will have an image of a dad or an older sister who ran after you, you will remember the fear and pain from the first fall or the delight that you managed to get to the nearest turn. And you will know for sure that you are remembering something from the past.

The two types of memory processing are closely related in our daily lives. Those that help us pedal are called implicit memories, and the ability to remember the day we learned to ride are called explicit memories.

Master to collect mosaics

We have a short-term working memory, a slate of consciousness, on which we can place a picture at any given moment. And, by the way, it has a limited capacity, where the images present in the foreground of consciousness are stored. But there are other types of memory.

In the left hemisphere, the hippocampus forms factual and linguistic knowledge; in the right - arranges the "bricks" of life history by time and topic. All this work makes the "search engine" of memory more efficient. The hippocampus can be compared to the one who collects mosaics: it connects separate fragments of images and sensations of implicit memories into full-fledged "pictures" of actual and autobiographical memory.

If suddenly the hippocampus is damaged, for example, during a stroke, memory will also be impaired. Daniel Siegel told this story in his book: “Once at a dinner with friends, I met a man with such a problem. He politely informed me that he had had several bilateral hippocampal strokes, and asked me not to be offended if I went away for a second to pour myself water, and then he did not remember me. And indeed, I returned with a glass in my hands, and we again introduced ourselves to each other.

Like some sleeping pills, alcohol is notorious for temporarily shutting down our hippocampus. However, the state of blackout caused by alcohol is not the same as a temporary loss of consciousness: a person is conscious (although incapacitated), but does not encode what is happening in an explicit form. People who experience such memory lapses may not remember how they got home or how they met the person they woke up with in the morning in the same bed.

The hippocampus also shuts down in anger, and people suffering from fits of uncontrollable rage are not necessarily lying when they claim they don't remember what they said or did in this altered state of consciousness.

How to test your memory

Psychologists use different techniques to test memory. Some of them you can do yourself at home.

1. Verbal memory test. Have someone read 15 words to you (only unrelated words: bush, bird, hat, etc.). Repeat them: people under 45 usually remember about 7-9 words. Then listen to this list four more times. Norm: reproduce 12–15 words. Go about your business and after 15 minutes repeat the words (but only from memory). Most middle-aged people cannot reproduce more than 10 words.
2. Visual memory test. Draw this complex diagram, and after 20 try to draw it from memory. The more details you remember, the better your memory is developed.

How is memory related to the senses?

According to scientist Michael Merzenich, “one of the most important findings from recent research is that the senses (hearing, sight, and others) are closely related to memory and cognitive abilities. Because of this interdependence, the weakness of one often means, or even causes, the weakness of the other.

For example, Alzheimer's patients are known to gradually lose their memory. And one of the manifestations of this disease is that they begin to eat less. It turned out that, since visual impairment is among the symptoms of this disease, patients (among other reasons) simply do not see food ...

Another example concerns normal age-related changes in cognitive activity. Aging, a person becomes more and more forgetful and absent-minded. This is largely due to the fact that the brain is no longer as good as before, processing sensory signals. As a result, we lose the ability to retain new visual representations of our experience as clearly as before, and subsequently we have problems using and recovering them.

By the way, it is curious that exposure to blue light enhances the response to emotional stimuli of the hypothalamus and amygdala, that is, the brain regions responsible for organizing attention and memory. So looking at all shades of blue is useful.

Techniques and exercises for training memory

The first and most important thing you need to know in order to have a good memory is. Studies have shown that the hippocampus responsible for spatial memory is enlarged in taxi drivers. This means that the more often you do activities that use memory, the better you pump it.

And here are some more tricks that will help you develop your memory, improve your ability to remember and remember everything you need.

1. Go crazy!

All living beings have memory, but it has reached the highest level of development in humans. Memory connects the past with the present. It is memory that allows a person to be aware of his "I", to act in the world around him, to be who he is. Human memory is a form of mental reflection, which consists in the accumulation, consolidation, preservation and subsequent reproduction by the individual of his experience. Ours is a functional education that does its job through the interaction of three main processes: memorization, storage and reproduction of information. These processes not only interact, there is a mutual conditionality between them. After all, you can save only what you remember, and reproduce - what you have saved.

Memorization. Human memory begins with the memorization of information: words, images, impressions. The main task of the memorization process is to remember accurately, quickly and a lot. Distinguish between involuntary and voluntary memory. Arbitrary memorization turns on when the goal is to remember not only what is itself imprinted in his memory, but also what is necessary. Arbitrary memorization is active, purposeful, and has a volitional beginning.

What is personally significant, connected with the activities of a person and his interests, is in the nature of involuntary memorization. With involuntary memorization, a person is passive. Involuntary memorization clearly demonstrates such a property of memory as selectivity. If you ask different people what they remember most at the same wedding, then some will easily talk about who and what gifts presented the newlyweds, others - what they ate and drank, others - what music they danced to, etc. However, at the same time, neither the first, nor the second, nor the third set themselves a clear goal of remembering something specific. Memory selectivity worked.

It is worth mentioning the “Zeigarnik effect” (it was first described in 1927 by the Soviet psychologist Bluma Vulfovna Zeigarnik (1900-1988): a person involuntarily remembers unfinished actions much better, situations that have not received a natural resolution.

If we were unable to finish something, finish eating, get what we wanted, while being close to the goal, then this is remembered thoroughly and for a long time, and successfully completed is forgotten quickly and easily. The reason is that an unfinished action is a source of strong negative ones, which are much more powerful than positive ones in terms of their impact.

Many scientists have studied memory techniques. In particular, the German psychologist G. Ebbinghaus formulated a number of patterns of memorization. He believed that repetition (indirect or direct) is the only relative guarantee of the reliability of memorization. Moreover, the result of memorization is in a certain dependence on the number of repetitions. Ebbinghaus' law states that the number of repeated presentations needed to memorize the entire series grows much faster than the object of the presented series. If the subject memorizes 8 digits from one presentation (display), then to memorize 9 digits he will need 3-4 presentations. The scientist also emphasizes the importance of the volitional factor. The higher the concentration of attention on any information, the faster memorization will occur.

However, it has been found that rote repetition is less effective than meaningful memorization. The direction of modern psychology - mnemonics - is developing numerous memorization techniques based on the principle of associative communication: the translation of information into images, graphics, pictures, diagrams.

Allocate four types of human memory in accordance with the type of memorized material.
1. Motor memory, i.e. the ability to memorize and reproduce a system of motor operations (driving a car, weaving a braid, tying a tie, etc.).
2. Figurative memory - the ability to save and further use the data of our perception. It can be (depending on the receiving analyzer) auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory and gustatory.
3. Emotional memory captures the feelings we experienced, the peculiarity of emotional states and affects. A child who was frightened by a big dog, most likely, even becoming an adult, will dislike these animals for a long time to come (fear memory).
4. Verbal memory (verbal-logical, semantic) - the highest type of memory, inherent only to man. With its help, most of the mental actions and operations (counting, reading, etc.) are carried out, the information base of the human is formed.

Different people have a more developed type of memory: athletes have a motor memory, artists have a figurative one, and so on.

Saving information. The main requirement for human memory is to store information reliably, for a long time and without loss. There are several levels of memory, differing in how long each of them can store information.

1. Sensory (immediate) type of memory. The systems of this memory hold accurate and complete data about how the world is perceived by our senses at the level of receptors. Data is stored within 0.1-0.5 seconds. The mechanism of action of sensory memory is easy to detect: close your eyes, then open them for a second and then close them again. The clear picture you see lasts for a while, and then slowly disappears.
2. Short-term memory allows you to process a huge amount of information without overloading the brain, due to the fact that it filters out everything unnecessary and leaves the useful, necessary for solving urgent (momentary) problems.
3. Long-term memory provides long-term storage and use of information. The capacity and duration of information storage in long-term memory can be unlimited. There are two types of long-term memory. The first is at the level of consciousness. A person in his own way can remember, extract the necessary information. The second type is closed long-term memory, in which information is stored at the subconscious level. Under normal conditions, a person does not have access to this information, only with the help of psychoanalytic procedures, in particular hypnosis, as well as irritations of various parts of the brain, one can access it and update images, thoughts, experiences in all details.
4. Intermediate memory is between short-term and long-term memory. It provides information storage for several hours. In the waking state during the day, a person accumulates information. So that the brain is not overloaded, it is necessary to free it from unnecessary information. The information accumulated over the past day is cleared, categorized and stored in long-term memory during a night's sleep. Scientists have found that this requires at least three hours of sleep a night.
5. Working memory is a type of human memory that manifests itself in the course of performing a certain activity and serving this one.

Playback. The requirements for the process of memory reproduction are accuracy and timeliness. In psychology, four forms of reproduction are distinguished:
1) recognition - occurs when the perception of objects and phenomena is repeated;
2) memory - is carried out in the real absence of perceived objects. Usually, memories are made through associations that provide automatic, involuntary reproduction;
3) recall - is carried out in the absence of a perceived object and is associated with active volitional activity to update information;
4) reminiscence - delayed reproduction of previously perceived and seemingly forgotten. With this form of memory reproduction, older events are remembered more easily and more accurately than those that occurred in the recent past.

Forgetting is the flip side of memory conservation. This is a process that leads to a loss of clarity and a decrease in the amount of data that can be updated in . Mostly forgetting is not an anomaly of memory, it is a natural process, which is due to a number of factors.
1. Time - in less than an hour a person forgets half of the information just received mechanically.
2. Active use of available information - first of all, what is not constantly needed is forgotten. However, childhood impressions and motor skills such as skating, playing a musical instrument, and being able to swim remain quite stable for many years without any exercise. It remains at the subconscious level, as if forgotten that disturbs the psychological balance, causes negative tension (traumatic impressions).

Information in our memory is not stored unchanged, like documents in an archive. In memory, the material undergoes change and qualitative reconstruction.

Human memory disorders. Various memory impairments are very common, although most people do not notice them in themselves or notice them too late. The very concept of "normal memory" is rather vague. Hyperfunction of memory is associated, as a rule, with strong excitement, feverish excitement, taking certain medications or hypnotic influence. A form of obsessive memories is a violation of emotional balance, feelings of insecurity and anxiety, creating a thematic orientation of memory hyperfunction. So, for example, we constantly remember our extremely unpleasant, unseemly actions. It is almost impossible to expel such memories: they haunt us, cause a feeling of shame and pangs of conscience.

In practice, there is a weakening of the memory function, a partial loss of storing or reproducing the available information. The weakening of selective reduction, difficulties in reproducing the material needed at the moment (names, dates, names, terms, etc.) are among the earliest manifestations of memory impairment. Then the weakening of memory can take the form of progressive amnesia, the causes of which are alcoholism, trauma, age-related and negative personality changes, sclerosis, diseases.

In modern psychology, the facts of memory deceptions are known, which take the form of extremely one-sided selectivity of memories, false memories and distortions of memory. Usually they are caused by strong desires, passions, unsatisfied needs. For example, when a child is given a sweet, he quickly eats it, and then "forgets" about it and sincerely proves that he did not receive anything.

Memory distortion is often associated with a weakening of the ability to distinguish between one's own and someone else's, what a person experienced in reality, and what he heard about, saw in a movie or read. In the case of multiple repetitions of such memories, their complete personification occurs, i.e. a person begins to consider other people's thoughts as his own. The presence of facts of deception of memory indicates how closely it is connected with the fantasy of a person.

It is known that each of our experiences, impressions or movements constitutes a certain trace, which can be preserved for quite a long time and, under appropriate conditions, manifest itself again and become an object of consciousness. Therefore, under memory we understand the imprinting (recording), preservation and subsequent recognition and reproduction of traces of past experience, which allows you to accumulate information without losing your previous knowledge, information, skills.

Thus, memory is a complex mental process, consisting of several private processes associated with each other. All consolidation of knowledge and skills refers to the work of memory. Accordingly, psychological science faces a number of complex problems. She sets herself the task of studying how traces are imprinted, what are the physiological mechanisms of this process, what techniques can make it possible to expand the volume of imprinted material.

The study of memory was one of the first sections of psychological science, where experimental method: Attempts have been made to measure the processes under study and to describe the laws to which they are subject. Back in the 80s of the last century, the German psychologist G. Ebbinghaus proposed a technique by which, as he believed, it was possible to study the laws of pure memory, independent of the activity of thinking - this is the memorization of meaningless syllables, as a result, he derived the main learning curves (memorization ) material. The classical studies of G. Ebbinghaus were accompanied by the works of the German psychiatrist E. Kraepelin, who applied these techniques to the analysis of how memorization proceeds in patients with mental changes, and the German psychologist G. E. Muller, whose fundamental research is devoted to the basic laws of fixing and reproducing memory traces in person.

With the development of an objective study of animal behavior, the field of study of memory has been significantly expanded. At the end of the XIX and at the beginning of the XX centuries. Thorndike, the famous American psychologist, first made the formation of skills in an animal a subject of study, using for this purpose an analysis of how the animal learned to find its way in the maze and how it gradually consolidated the acquired skills. In the first decade of the XX century. studies of these processes have acquired a new scientific form. I. P. Pavlov proposed method of studying conditioned reflexes. The conditions under which new conditional relationships arise and are retained and which affect this retention have been described. The doctrine of higher nervous activity and its basic laws later became the main source of our knowledge about the physiological mechanisms of memory, and the development and preservation of skills and the process of “learning” in animals constituted the main content of American behavioral science. All these studies were limited to the study of the most elementary processes of memory.

The merit of the first systematic study of higher forms of memory in children belongs to the outstanding Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, who in the late 20s. For the first time, he began to study the issue of the development of higher forms of memory and, together with his students, showed that higher forms of memory are a complex form of mental activity, social in origin, tracing the main stages in the development of the most complex mediated memorization. The studies of A. A. Smirnov and P. I. Zinchenko, who revealed new and essential laws of memory as a meaningful human activity, established the dependence of memorization on the task and identified the main methods of memorizing complex material.

And only in the last 40 years the situation has changed significantly. Studies have emerged that show that the imprinting, preservation and reproduction of traces are associated with profound biochemical changes, in particular with the modification of RNA, and that memory traces can be transferred in a humoral, biochemical way.

Finally, studies have emerged attempting to isolate the areas of the brain required for trace retention and the neurological mechanisms underlying remembering and forgetting. All this made the section on the psychology and psychophysiology of memory one of the richest in psychological science. Many of these theories still exist at the level of hypotheses, but one thing is clear that memory is a very complex mental process, consisting of different levels, different systems, and including the work of many mechanisms.

The most general basis for the allocation of various types of memory is the dependence of its characteristics on the characteristics of the activity of memorization and reproduction.

At the same time, individual types of memory are distinguished in accordance with three main criteria:

• by the nature of mental activity, prevailing in activity, memory is divided into motor, emotional, figurative and verbal-logical;
• by the nature of the objectives of the activity- on involuntary and arbitrary;
• by the duration of fixation and preservation materials (in connection with its role and place in activities) - for short-term, long-term and operational.

Direct imprint of sensory information. This system holds a fairly accurate and complete picture of the world, perceived by the senses. The duration of saving the picture is very small - 0.1-0.5 s.

1. Tap your hand with 4 fingers. Watch the immediate sensations as they disappear so that at first you still have the actual feeling of the pat, and then just the memory of what it was.
2. Move your pencil or just your finger back and forth in front of your eyes while looking straight ahead. Notice the blurry image following the moving subject.
3. Close your eyes, then open them for a moment and close them again. Watch how the sharp, clear picture you see lasts for a while, and then slowly disappears.

short term memory

Short-term memory retains a different type of material than the immediate imprint of sensory information. In this case, the retained information is not a complete reflection of the events that occurred at the sensory level, but a direct interpretation of these events. For example, if a phrase was uttered in front of you, you will remember not so much the sounds that make it up as the words. Usually the last 5-6 units from the presented material are remembered. By making a conscious effort, repeating the material over and over again, you can keep it in short-term memory for an indefinitely long time.

Long term memory.

There is a clear and compelling difference between the memory of an event that has just happened and the events of a distant past. Long-term memory is the most important and most complex of the memory systems. The capacity of the first named memory systems is very limited: the first consists of a few tenths of a second, the second - a few storage units. However, there are still some limits on the amount of long-term memory, since the brain is a finite device. It consists of 10 billion neurons and each is capable of holding a significant amount of information. Moreover, it is so large that it can practically be considered that the memory capacity of the human brain is not limited. Anything that is retained for more than a few minutes must be in the long-term memory system.

The main source of difficulties associated with long-term memory is the problem of information retrieval. The amount of information contained in the memory is very large, and therefore fraught with serious difficulties. However, you can quickly find what you need.

RAM

The concept of operative memory denotes mnemonic processes that serve actual actions, operations. Such memory is designed to store information, followed by forgetting the relevant information. The storage life of this type of memory depends on the task and can vary from several minutes to several days. When we perform any complex operation, for example, arithmetic, we carry it out in parts, pieces. At the same time, we keep “in mind” some intermediate results as long as we are dealing with them. As you move towards the final result, a specific “waste” material may be forgotten.

motor memory

Motor memory is the memorization, preservation and reproduction of various movements and their systems. There are people with a pronounced predominance of this type of memory over its other types. One psychologist admitted that he was completely unable to reproduce a piece of music in his memory, and he could only reproduce an opera he had heard recently as a pantomime. Other people, on the contrary, do not notice motor memory in themselves at all. The great importance of this type of memory lies in the fact that it serves as the basis for the formation of various practical and labor skills, as well as the skills of walking, writing, etc. Without memory for movement, we would have to learn to carry out the appropriate action every time. Usually a sign of a good motor memory is the physical dexterity of a person, skill in work, “golden hands”.

emotional memory

Emotional memory is the memory of feelings. Emotions always signal how our needs are being met. Emotional memory is very important for human life. Feelings experienced and stored in memory manifest themselves in the form of signals that either encourage action or hold back from action that caused a negative experience in the past. Empathy - the ability to sympathize, empathize with another person, the hero of the book is based on emotional memory.

figurative memory

Figurative memory - memory for ideas, pictures of nature and life, as well as for sounds, smells, tastes. It can be visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory. If visual and auditory memory, as a rule, are well developed, and play a leading role in the life orientation of all normal people, then tactile, olfactory and gustatory memory can in a certain sense be called professional species. Like the corresponding sensations, these types of memory develop especially intensively in connection with the specific conditions of activity, reaching an amazingly high level under conditions of compensation or replacement of the missing types of memory, for example, in the blind, deaf, etc.

Verbal-logical memory

The content of verbal-logical memory is our thoughts. Thoughts do not exist without language, therefore memory for them is called not just logical, but verbal-logical. Since thoughts can be embodied in various linguistic forms, their reproduction can be oriented towards the transmission of either only the main meaning of the material, or its literal verbal formulation. If in the latter case the material is not subjected to semantic processing at all, then its literal memorization turns out to be no longer logical, but mechanical memorization.

Arbitrary and involuntary memory

There is, however, such a division of memory into types, which is directly related to the features of the most currently performed activity. So, depending on the goals of the activity, memory is divided into involuntary and arbitrary. Memorization and reproduction, in which there is no special purpose to remember or recall something, is called involuntary memory, in cases where this is a purposeful process, they speak of arbitrary memory. In the latter case, the processes of memorization and reproduction act as special mnemonic actions.

At the same time, involuntary and voluntary memory represent two successive stages in the development of memory. Everyone knows from experience what a huge place in our life is occupied by involuntary memory, on the basis of which, without special mnemonic intentions and efforts, the main part of our experience, both in volume and in vital significance, is formed. However, in human activity, it often becomes necessary to manage one's memory. Under these conditions, an important role is played by arbitrary memory, which makes it possible to intentionally memorize or recall what is necessary.

Memory- processes of organization and preservation of past experience, making it possible to reuse it in activities or return to the sphere of consciousness. P. connects the past of the subject with his present and future and is the most important cognitive function that underlies development and learning. P.'s research is interdisciplinary in nature, since it occurs in various forms at all levels of life and includes not only the processes of preserving individual experience, but also the mechanisms for the transmission of hereditary information. The role of the organization of material in memorization was emphasized by Gestalt psychology. In psychoanalysis, an attempt was made to explain the phenomena of forgetting by the "repression" of unpleasant, traumatic impressions from the sphere of consciousness. The English psychologist F. Bartlett showed the complex reconstructive nature of the process of recalling stories and its dependence on the cultural norms existing in a given environment. The role of sociocultural factors in the formation of higher forms of human P. was revealed by the French psychologist P. Janet and the French sociologist M. Halbwachs. Along with voluntary memorization, the processes of involuntary memorization were also studied. So, P.I. Zinchenko and A.A. Smirnov studied the dependence of the success of memorization processes on their place in the structure of activity. In the course of ontogenetic development, there is a change in the methods of memorization, the role of the processes of highlighting meaningful, semantic connections in the material increases. Various types of P. - motor, emotional, figurative, verbal-logical - are sometimes described as stages of such development. The well-known analogy between the stages of information processing by a person and the structural blocks of computing devices had a noticeable influence on the formulation of the problem of P.. In the psychological analysis of P., it is important to consider that it is part of the integral structure of the human personality. As the motivational-required sphere of a person develops, his attitude to his past may change, as a result of which the same knowledge can be stored in a person's P. in different ways.

Memory- a cognitive process consisting in memorizing, preserving, restoring and forgetting the acquired experience. In the simplest form, memory is realized as the recognition of previously perceived objects; in a more complex form, it appears as a reproduction in the representation of objects that are not currently given in actual perception. Recognition and reproduction can also be voluntary and involuntary. Currently, memory is considered in the context of other cognitive processes (R. Atkinson, A. Baddeley, P. Lindsay, D. Norman, D. Rumelhart).

The study of memory began many centuries ago, when a person began, albeit vaguely, to guess that he was able to remember and store information. At the same time, memory has always been associated with the learning process (i.e., the accumulation of information), and attempts to explain memory have always coincided with the methods of information storage known in a given historical period.

So, the ancient Greeks, in accordance with the method of recording accepted at that time, believed that information in the form of some material particles enters the head and leaves imprints on the soft substance of the brain, like on clay or wax.

Two thousand years later, the French philosopher and naturalist R. Descartes, the creator of the "hydraulic" model of the nervous system, suggested that the frequent use of the same hollow tubes (as Descartes imagined the structure of nerve fibers) leads to their stretching and a decrease in resistance to the movement of "vital spirits", which is accompanied by the formation of skills - i.e. memorization. Later - already in the 19th and early 20th centuries - in connection with the creation of such systems as the telephone network, electronic computers, tape recorders and other devices, memory mechanisms were interpreted in accordance with the principles on which the mechanisms of action of the above devices are based.

Finally, in connection with the development of research in the field of genetics and molecular biology, the discovery of the mechanisms of storage of genetic information, biological analogies have already been attracted to explain the mechanisms of memory. In particular, it was assumed that the mechanisms of at least one of the types of memory have a molecular basis (the imprinting of information is accompanied by changes in the system of enzymes localized in nerve cells, an increase in the content of nucleic acids in them, etc.).

Types of memory

Traditionally, psychologists, who traditionally were the first to study memory experimentally, distinguish six types of memory:

• motor, associated with the memorization and reproduction of movements;
• figurative, the sphere of which is the memorization of sensory images of objects, phenomena and their properties (depending on the type of analyzer that perceives information, figurative memory is divided into visual, auditory, tactile, etc.);
• verbal-logical (a form of memory characteristic of a person) associated with memorization, recognition and reproduction of thoughts, concepts, conclusions, etc., this type of memory is directly related to learning;
• emotional memory responsible for remembering and reproducing sensory perceptions together with the objects that cause them.
• Not arbitrary, characterized by the fact that a person remembers and reproduces images without setting any goal to remember it and reproduce it.
• Arbitrary (deliberate), meaningful, thought out with a specific goal and task to learn and reproduce the material using certain techniques.

There are other classifications of types of memory:

• Immediate. It is kept for 0.25 sec. Allows for interconnection between successive time intervals.
• Operational. This is the section of memory that is currently working. It is characterized by the fact that the processing time of information can reach up to 20 seconds. The amount of this memory is much less than the immediate one.
• Long-term. It stores images of phenomena and objects of the external world that a person needs for a long time, which he uses periodically.
• Long-term memory is divided into:
  a) genetic memory - this is everything that our predecessors accumulated.
  b) hereditary memory - the memory of the closest relatives.