Memory - an integrated mental reflection of a person's past interaction with reality, the information fund of his or her life activities.
Ability to store information and selectively update it, to use it to regulate behavior - the main property of the brain, providing the interaction of an individual with the environment. Memory integrates life experience, provides continuous development of human culture and individual life activity. On the basis of memory a person is guided in the present and anticipates the future.
The beginning of experimental study of memory was laid in the end of XIX century by researches of German psychologist G. Ebbingaus (1850-1909), generalized in his work "About memory" (1885). This was the first time that a psychological experiment had gone beyond sensory processes. G. Ebbingaus drew a "forgetting curve" that graphically illustrates the largest percentage of forgetting in the period immediately following the memorization of new material. Nowadays, due to the actualization of the problem of machine accumulation and search for information, memory becomes the object of interdisciplinary research. But human memory differs from machine and electronic memory in its active-reconstructive preservation of material. Human memory is subject to the influence of socio-cultural factors.
In the process of development, an individual is more and more oriented to the semantic and semantic connections of the structures being remembered. One and the same material is stored in memory in different ways depending on the structure of a person, his or her needs and motivational features. The memory of the machine is mechanical memory. Human memory - value-integrated storage of information. Material accumulation in memory (archiving) is carried out in two blocks: in the block of episodic and in the block of semantic (semantic) memory. Episodic memory is autobiographical - it contains various episodes from an individual's life. Semantic memory, on the other hand, is aimed at categorical structures formed in the cultural-historical environment. All historically formed rules of logic of mental actions and language construction are also stored here.
Features of human memory
Depending on the characteristics of the material to be memorized, there are special ways to codify, archive and extract it. Spatial organization of the environment is encoded in the form of schematic formations from semantic reference points that characterize our physical and social environment.
Consistently emerging phenomena are captured in linear memory structures. Formally organized structures are imprinted with associative mechanisms of memory, which provide grouping of phenomena and objects according to certain features (household and labor items). All semantic meanings are categorized - refer to different groups of notions, which are in hierarchical interdependence.
The possibility of its quick actualization and extraction depends on the organization of the material in memory. Information is reproduced in that connection, in which it was initially formed.
Many people complain about poor memory, but do not complain about a bad mind. Meanwhile, the mind, the ability to establish interrelationships is the basis of memory.
Extraction of the learned material from the memory for the purpose of using it in recognition, remembrance, recollection is called actualization (from lat. actualis - real, real). We look for the necessary material in memory in the same way as we look for the necessary thing in the storeroom: for the objects in the neighborhood. Figuratively speaking, everything in our memory is hanged on the hooks of associations. The mystery of good memory is in establishing strong associations. That's why people remember best what is related to their everyday concerns, their professional interests. Encyclopedic erudition in one sphere of life can be combined with ignorance in other spheres. Some facts linger in our consciousness by force of other well-known facts. Mechanical "crushing", "cramming" is the most ineffective way to remember.
The possibilities of actualization in a person are much wider than it seems to him. Difficulties of memory, rather than difficulties of reproduction, are difficulties of preservation. There is no absolute oblivion of impressions.
The fund of human memory is plastic - with the development of personality there are changes in the structural formations of his memory. Memory is inextricably linked to the activity of the individual - what is included in the active activity of a human being is firmly remembered and corresponds to his or her life strategy.
The operational system of behavior and activity of a person, i.e. his or her skills and abilities are the images of optimal and adequate actions imprinted in the memory. Repeated repetition of necessary actions eliminates unnecessary and unnecessary movements, fixes the image of optimal action in memory, and integrates separate operations into a single functional complex.
The memory, intellect, feelings and operational sphere of an individual is a single system formation.
Memory is a psychic mechanism of human orientation both in the external and in the internal, subjective world, the mechanism of localization