MEMORY

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Exodus 20:8,11

"What is memory?
The general consensus is that memory is a multitude of cognitive systems which allow us to store information for certain periods of time so that we can learn from our past experiences and predict the future.
Whereas retrospective memory is about remembering what happened in the past, prospective memory is about reminding yourself to do something in the future.

Without prospective memory, you would not remember to go to work in the morning and you would forget to set your alarm clock in the evening.
One way to divide up retrospective memory is in the kinds of things it stores.

Implicit memory is essentially skill memory – the ability to do a task. If your implicit memory failed, you would not be able to brush your teeth, take a shower, drive your car or ride a bike. This kind of memory shows up in our abilities, but we can’t always articulate what it is we know in words and concepts.

Declarative memory, in contrast, is either memory for facts and meaning (semantic) or memory for events (episodic). Without semantic memory, you would not understand the content of what your colleagues or friends were saying. Without episodic memory, you would struggle to recount your day later to someone else.

Working memory (WM) manipulates and stores information for

short periods of time. Talking with your colleagues, discussing a point at a meeting and planning your weekend would be entirely impossible without WM. In contrast, long-term memory (LTM) serves as a long-term storage of information. Almost all of our everyday activities depend on LTM, such as remembering our way home or how to drive a car.

We need to break the act of remembering things into its atomic parts. Those parts are: 

Encoding—the process of putting the information into your brain.
Storage—the process of keeping the information in your brain.
Retrieval—the process of getting the information out of your brain when you need it.
Encoding is a process of imprinting information into the brain. Without proper encoding, there is nothing to store and attempting to retrieve the memory later will fail. 

One way to improve encoding is simply to repeat the information more times. Scientists who study memory call these repetitions “rehearsals” of the information.

For a memory trace to become permanently established in our long-term storage systems, structural biological changes must take place in brain tissue. New connections between neurons must be

formed and firmly established.
In scientific terms, the mechanism through which recent memories become permanent memories is called ‘consolidation’. Although some consolidation occurs during wakefulness, the primary time for consolidation is sleep.

Retrieval is the mechanism of accessing information stored in memory. Successful retrieval of a memory trace hinges on its

associations with cues. A cue is anything that is connected to the memory trace (physical object, situation, time period, word, question). 

Scientists believe that memories are retrieved through the process of ‘spreading activation’. 

Once a cue is activated in the brain, the activation spreads from the cue to the target memory. A single memory trace can be connected to an infinite number of cues." 

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