How Does Human Memory Work?

Memory is the human brain's memorization, maintenance, reappearance or re-recognition of things that have been experienced, and it is the basis for advanced mental activities such as thinking and imagination ^[1] . Human memory is related to the structure of the brain's hippocampus ^[2] and changes in chemical components inside the brain ^[3] .

The basic process of memory is

Representation is the image reproduced in the mind of past perceptions ^[22]

^{Main article: Memory}

In the 6th century BC, the ancient Greek Parmonides believed that human memory is a mixture of light and dark (or hot and cold) substances. As long as the mixture is not disturbed, the memory is complete. Amnesia will occur ^[27] .

The first person to put forward an important concept on the question of memory was Plato, a thinker in the 4th century BC. His theory is called the "wax plate hypothesis". He believes that people get an impression of things, just like the imprints of angular hard objects on a wax plate. After people get an impression of things, the impression will gradually fade away or even disappear completely over time. It's like the wax surface is gradually smooth. The so-called "smooth wax plate" is equivalent to total oblivion. Although this theory is not perfect and accurate, it still affects many people ^[28-29] .

Until the 17th century, there was little progress in the study of memory. In the mid-17th century, the "associative" psychological school represented by Hobbes and Locke appeared in Britain. Hobbes made a materialistic analysis of the memory phenomenon; Locke first proposed an important memory phenomenon in the history of European psychology-the word "association", after which "association" became a specialized term ^{[30 -34]} .

The first systematic experiment on memory in the history of psychology was the famous German psychologist Ebbinghaus. His main contributions to the study of memory are firstly to strictly quantify the memory, and secondly, to make an important study on the retention of memory and draw the famous "Ebbinghaus memory forgetting curve". On Memory. Since then, memory has become an important area of psychological research ^[5] .

After the Second World War, especially since the 1960s, memory research has received increasing attention. Countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Soviet Union have either set up colleges of memory law or established correspondence education, and have begun to popularize education for people to improve their memory.