informal learning experience

The human memory is an incredible thing. There are three different stages, or categories, of memory with specific functions. Which category a memory is stored, depends on several factors, such as the kind of information it is and how the information is encoded and how meaningful the information is to you. The first stage of memory is known as Sensory Memory. Sensory memory is a short term memory and decays or degrades very quickly, typically in the region of 200 – 500 milliseconds. Humans have five main senses; sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. Sensory memory allows individuals to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. There are three types of Sensory memory; iconic memory, echoic memory, and haptic memory. Information is passed from the Sensory memory into Short term memory by process of attention, which effectively filters the stimuli to only those which are of interest at any given time. The second stage of memory is known as Short-term memory which is often referred to as post it notes for the brain. According to “ Short term” memory acts as kind of a “scratch pad” (Mastin, 2010) for temporary recall of the information, which is being processed at any point in time (Mastin, 2010). Short term memory is in charge of the actions to remember and process the information around, if not at the same time. However, living up to its title of “short-term”, the brain is only able to hold limited information only about 6-7 times. In just the few moments that it stays in the mind and can be accessed just for a mere 10=15 seconds although is one is lucky enough the memory can last up to one minute. The third stage of memory is Long-term memory which is, intended for storage of information over a long period of time. There are many different forms of long-term memory. The two major subdivisions are explicit memory and implicit memory. Explicit memories are those that consciously remember, such as an event in your

References: Mastin L.(2010). The Human Memory: What it is, How it Works and How it can go wrong. Retrieved from http:://www.human-memory.net/index.html. What are the Three Stages of the Memory Process? By Jakki Rochelle, eHow Contributor: www.ehow.com