Picture the last time you went on holiday with your loved ones. You recall how high up in the sky the sun was, the beautiful scenery, and how relaxed you felt. The somewhat vivid imagery running through your mind is what we call a memory.
Your mind went through three processing stages so you could feel a sense of nostalgia for your vacation: encoding, when you received information; storage, when that information was recorded in your brain; and retrieval, when you just called back the stored memory of the delicious food you had during your vacation.
Short and Long-Term Memory
Short-term memory lets you recall information for a period of seconds to a minute without rehearsal. This memory is very limited and it decays over time, and it’s often referred to as the brain’s “Post-it note”. It’s when someone gives you their phone number and you memorise it until you introduce it into your phone, and then the information is gone.
To remember information longer, like how to drive a car or how to tie your shoes, information gets stored in the long-term memory. Facts and events can be stored for indefinite periods of time, in this final and semi-permanent memory process.
Long Lasting Memories
Even through rehearsal and repetition, there’s always a chance that you will be unable to recall memories exactly. While scientists are looking for ways to record your memories for posterity through Sci-Fi looking machinery, here at Cine2DVD we know it’s much simpler.
While memory is a masterpiece our brains have achieved, recalling every single detail isn’t possible for a regular person. Unless you have perfect, photographic memory, or eidetic memory, small details start to fade.
Many treasured family memories are on cine film; memories of older generations, like the great-grandmother you vaguely remember playing with. The fondness is still present, but did you play hide and seek, or did your brain make up the memories of more time together?
