Memory has often been compared to a muscle that needs to be trained, more recently to a computer hard drive. The most recent knowledge argues for no less than five different information storage systems.
The first memory would be episodic, it is that of personally lived memories, our individual history. If we lose it, we get amnesia. Then there is semantic memory. It is the one that is used to acquire general knowledge about the world, independent of our experiences, Washington capital of the United States for example, or how to order a meal in a restaurant. On the other hand, if very automatically you are able to drive a car in the middle of other vehicles – which requires a lot of information to manage – you owe it to your procedural memory. At her, the stored knowledge is based on learning by doing. So great musicians are aware of what they are doing but not how they are doing. Fourth memorization sector, that which makes it possible to store the form and structure of objects, faces and words, without any reference to their meaning, which itself depends – as we have seen – on semantic memory. Are you still following?
So, fifth and last memory, that of work which allows us to temporarily maintain a small amount of information to be able, for example, to follow a conversation or, quite simply, to perform a simple operation of mental arithmetic. Indeed, if I tell you: 50 + 72, before answering me: 122, you have to remember 50 when you add 72. It seems elementary, but this analysis of our memories has already required the reflection of dozens. rather well-organized brains. However, if this new approach proves to be correct, and it is likely that we are not very far from the truth, it is a real Chinese puzzle that will arise for specialists in charge of rehabilitation, for example after a head trauma or attack of paralysis. It is indeed necessary to take charge of five different mechanisms probably bringing into play five different parts of the brain… Yet it was so simple when we thought that memory was a muscle.
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