Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it. Exodus 20:8,11
"What is memory?
The general consensus is that memory is a multitude of
cognitive systems which allow us to store information for certain
periods of time so that we can learn from our past experiences and
predict the future.
Whereas retrospective memory is about remembering what
happened in the past, prospective memory is about reminding yourself to
do 
something in the future.
Without prospective memory, you would not
remember to go to work in the morning and you would forget to set your
alarm clock in the evening.
One way to divide up retrospective memory is in the kinds of
things it stores.
Implicit memory is essentially skill memory – the ability to do a task.
If your implicit memory failed, you would not be able to brush your
teeth, take a shower, drive your car or ride a bike. This kind of memory
shows up in our abilities, but we can’t always articulate what it is we
know in words and concepts.
Declarative memory, in contrast, is either memory for facts and meaning (semantic) or memory for events (episodic).
Without semantic memory, you would not understand the content of what
your colleagues or friends were saying. Without episodic memory, you
would struggle to recount your day later to someone else.
Working memory (WM) manipulates and stores information for short periods
of time. Talking with your colleagues, discussing a point at a meeting
and planning your weekend would be entirely impossible without WM. In
contrast, long-term memory (LTM) serves as a long-term storage of
information. Almost all of our everyday activities depend on LTM, such
as remembering our way home or how to drive a car.
We need to break the act of remembering things into its atomic parts. Those parts are:
- Encoding—the process of putting the information into your brain.
- Storage—the process of keeping the information in your brain.
- Retrieval—the process of getting the information out of your brain when you need it.
Encoding is a process of imprinting information into the brain. Without
proper encoding, there is nothing to store and attempting to retrieve
the memory later will fail. One way to improve encoding is simply to
repeat the information more times. Scientists who study memory call
these repetitions “rehearsals” of the information. 
For a memory trace to become permanently established in
our long-term storage systems, structural biological changes must take
place in brain tissue. New connections between neurons must be formed
and firmly established.
These changes are not immediate and take time. In scientific
terms, the mechanism through which recent memories become permanent
memories is called ‘consolidation’. Although some consolidation occurs during wakefulness, the primary time for consolidation is sleep.
Retrieval is the mechanism of accessing information stored in
memory.
Successful retrieval of a memory trace hinges on its associations with
cues. A cue is anything that is connected to the memory trace (physical
object, situation, time period, word, question). Scientists believe that
memories are retrieved through the process of ‘spreading activation’.
Once a cue is activated in the brain, the activation spreads from the
cue to the target memory. A single memory trace can be connected to an
infinite number of cues. If none of the relevant cues is activated, the
memory trace cannot be retrieved, even though it may be well stored in
memory." ePocket
 |