Long Term Memory

Our brain's storage vault: long term memory

Long term memory is often referred to as our brain's storage vault. It's where we store, protect, and retrieve our valuable information and memories when we need them.

Memories are passed to the long term memory from the short term by rehearsing it. This means that you give it constant attention and add meaning to the information in question. The brain is said to sort long term memory according to the meaning associated with the data. So if you see a sequence of 7 numbers, your brain will think of the meanings associated with 7 digit numbers and come up with local phone numbers.

Unlike Short Term Memory, the capacity of our long term memory is said to have no know limits. Instead, in order to keep our memories, we need to occasionally rehearse them, or in other words remember them, in order to retain them. If we fail to do this, our memories are then forgotten.

There are also different types of long term memories. The basic types are semantic, episodic, and procedural. Semantic long term memory consists of facts that we have come across and memorized over time such as people's names. Episodic memory refers to events and different episodes we have encountered and procedural memory refers to instructional memory such as how to drive or swim.

Deletion of long term memory is usually through decay of memory over time, interference by other memories, and the failure to retrieve memory. Interference by other memories is why we sometimes mistake things for something else, get confused over what really happened, etc. The concept of failure to retrieve is actually pretty interesting. This means that there are some things in our long term memory that we thought we'd forgotten but still exist. This is where things like hypnosis come in. Hypnotists delve into our long term memory and retrieve those memories we thought that we had forgotten.

Long term memory is the last to be affected my natural memory loss, but there are other things that can affect long term memory. For example, the drug, "ecstasy", has been found to damage long term memory with frequent use.