Are we conscious of everything we memorize?

Is everything we memorize the result of a conscious process? In this article we tell you about it.

What do we know about memoryIs everything we memorize the result of a conscious process? What types of memory are known? Let's see a brief explanation to better understand these questions.

What is memory?

From a neuropsychological perspective, memory could be defined as the cognitive function that allows us to store content in our mind after having carried out a process of encoding the information.. When we remember, we are recalling stored content, i.e. everything we have memorized.

But memory does not only refer to the past, since it is also related to the present and the future, because thanks to it we know who we are or what we are going to do based on what we know. It could be said that it is thanks to it that we form an identity identity.

Are all mnesic processes conscious?

Many of the associations, facts, learning, etc. that we store in our memory are not conscious. Memory is a capacity of which many aspects are still unknown. For the time being, two main types of memory are considered, the declarative memory (conscious) and non-declarative (unconscious), which, in turn, encompass various types of memory.

The declarative or explicit memoryis all the knowledge that we can bring to mind and that we can recall consciously and voluntarily. consciously and voluntarily. Declarative memory, in turn, encompasses many other types of memory, one of which is short-term memory. short term memorywhich is responsible for the immediate recall of something we have just perceived (for example, remembering a telephone number), the disadvantage is that, as we have seen, it fades quickly and is very sensitive to interference. On the other hand, we have the long-term memory long-termThis is involved in personal experiences and specific events with a time-space reference (episodic or autobiographical memory) and the general cultural knowledge at our disposal (semantic memory).

This type of conscious memory is usually impaired in neurodegenerative processes such as dementia, in which the person may not remember situations, places, objects, people, etc., that before the deterioration he/she remembered perfectly.

However, memory is not only a process of which we are aware, but there is also a type of unconscious memory.

Non-declarative memory and implicit memory

The non-declarative memory o implicit memoryis that which is governed by involuntary and involuntary and non-conscious mechanisms storage mechanisms. Evocation is carried out through perceptual-motor acts that require attention but are not directly accessible to consciousness, i.e. knowledge is only accessible through the execution of a procedure in which the knowledge has been impregnated, unlike explicit memory, of which we can consciously and voluntarily declare its content.

Procedural memory

Generally, memorization and learning through unconscious memory is a process that is internalized with practice and requires time, unlike declarative memory, in which learning is usually fast and a single rehearsal may be sufficient. Let's look at an example of this, specifically of the procedural memorySuppose we want to learn to drive a car, every time we practice driving the car, the connections between neurons in that motor area will be reinforced and these skills will be recorded in a non-conscious way, the same thing will happen if one of the things we want to learn is to park, we will realize that with practice we will do the same action but in a faster and more skillful way. This type of memory can be found in thousands of daily events, such as making a potato omelet, dancing samba, or simply writing on the cell phone.

Another very interesting type of implicit memory is the so-called classical conditioningIt is common to make associations and unconscious learning, for example, to associate a smell to a person or a sound to a memory, which will provoke positive or negative emotions when involuntarily remembering that experience.

It is surprising to see that people who have suffered from amnesia (partial or total loss of memory) keep their implicit memory preserved. This fact is due to the fact that implicit memory is stored in different structures from those used by declarative memory, which is mainly governed by the hippocampus.

For the moment, and by way of conclusion, we can think of the existence of a great variety of memories, conscious and unconscious, and that many of the things we remember, such as the most remote memories, do not have a single store but, once consolidated, are distributed throughout the cerebral cortex depending on the degree of consolidation and the type of information processed.