Memory Clinic

Learning is the acquisition of new information or knowledge. Memory is the retention of learned information. 

The process starts with perception. You perceive the world through your five senses. The five senses are known to all – Seeing, hearing, touching, and appreciating smell and taste. Depending on the degree of attention you pay to the information the same gets encoded or not. Hence attention is an important pre-requisite for memory. Aspects of motivation and emotion get enhanced attention. Whether the information gets filtered at the sensory level or at the brain level is still debatable. 

A piece of information will have different sensory components and emotions. For example, if I want to learn and memorize this text then I need to store the information in the networks in my brain. The different modalities go to different parts of the brain. However, the areas get connected and form a dedicated circuit for that chunk of information. There is a slogan in Neurology ‘Neurons that fire together wire together’.

In memory consolidation, different sensory aspects get consolidated. It is like having different types of cut vegetables that go to make a dish. The preparation or consolidation is done in the part of the brain called hippocampus. This happens during REM sleep. Hence, a good refreshing sleep is essential for proper memory consolidation.