Question: have any psychologists found out what our memory is or how it works?

Simone Bijvoet answered on 16 Jun 2011:

Hi there,
I must say I don’t know a lot of specifics about memory but I can tell you a bit about what I remember from a course I did in university.

When we do something, for example go to a music concert, all the things we experience – what we hear, see, smell etc. – activates neurons (sort of the wiring in the brain) that capture that information and send it to the right parts of the brain that process this information. What normally happens is that all this information together gets sent to a slightly deeper part of the brain called the hyppocampus. You can see this part as sort of the gatekeeper through which all memories have to go before it can be stored for a longer time. The hyppocampus sends the information through to yet another part of the brain where it will stay until you need to remember it again.

Now, sometimes things can go wrong within the chain of storing the memory. Each part of the brain involved can be damaged which will lead to different kinds of memory problems. Also, you could have temporary memory loss, for example after someone’s had a car accident. Probably what happened then is that information was sent to the hyppocampus but it didn’t have time to send it further to the ‘long-term storage’. This information will then be lost and the person won’t be able to remember the event.

Hope this answers your question a bit.