How Human Brain Memory Works

Before you practice any exercise to improve your memory, you should have a clear understanding of how the human brain memory works. Learning about how your short-term and long-term memory functions will help you select the right exercises to train both of them. The short-term memory is also called the working memory. When you need to hold on to some information temporarily for completing a task, certain regions of your brain, especially the pre-frontal lobe, become very active. Remembering some digits as "carrying over" during a subtraction, holding onto the points of your persuasive argument during a debate when you are about to take the stage after another person finishes talking, or exploring several possible solutions in a game of chess etc are some examples where the prefrontal region of your brain is in charge. A complex part of human brain memory is the long-term memory, where information from the short-term memory gets transferred through the hippocampus - a part of the cortex. The hippocampus is situated in the temporal lobe's inner fold and resembles a seahorse's curved tail in shape. Various sensory regions of the cortex decode the information, which then converges in the hippocampus. These chunks of information are then sent back to where they came from. In other words, you can call the hippocampus to be a sorting centre, where new sensations are compared with those recorded earlier. The hippocampus plays an important role in improve memory as it also helps in creating association among the various properties of an object. Even when people use different mnemonic techniques to remember new facts or repeat data, they are actually passing the information several times through the hippocampus. Your hippocampus keeps strengthening such links among the new elements and after a while, a time is reached when it no longer needs to do the same. By then, the cortex has developed the power to connect these various properties itself and thus reconstruct what we know as memory. Apart from the cortex and the hippocampus, there are many other brain structures that are involved in long-term human brain memory and its various manifestations in the brain. So, learning about the human brain memory before embarking on your mission to enhance your brain power surely pays.