Mexico City.- Memory is essential to live, to remember things, to learn, to study, for everything. Without memory there is no time. Without memory, there is no before and there is no after.
However, human beings do not have the capacity to remember all, absolutely all, the episodes that we experience in our lives. The question is why a person remembers some situations in detail and others seem erased.
In the first place, memory is taking knowledge of something, through the process of attention, saving or storing it, and then, when one wishes, bringing it to the present, evoking it.
It is important to note that there is no single memory, but that human beings have several types of memory that we put into play in certain situations.
There are memories that are unconscious. You know how to drive a car and you don’t have to remember every step when getting into a vehicle. He gets on and drives. You don’t have to say I grab like this, I grab in this other way, no. He rides a bike and it’s the same. That is an unconscious memory, it is called implicit memory.
On the other hand, there are the types of explicit memory: semantic and episodic. In the first, the meaning of things is remembered, I remember that London is the capital of Great Britain, I remember that spinach is a green vegetable.
Episodic memory involves the vital history of each person: What did I do this morning? What did I have for lunch? Who did I talk to on the phone in the afternoon? It’s easy, the word says it, they are the episodes of my life.
They are all important. But, for example, in some neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, one of the first memories to be lost is the episodic one. You would not remember, then, when you lose your episodic memory, what you did yesterday or today in the morning.
But be careful, not to get too scared, most people forget where they put their keys or the cell phone charger, it happens to me, it happens to all of us.
These daily forgetfulness can occur when we have not paid attention. Memory is tested when one pays attention.
If a patient forgets things but when he wants to remember because he pays attention, then he remembers, we are not talking about a health problem. Remember that memory is paying attention, storing and recalling information.
Now, if you find yourself having recurring episodes of memory loss anyway, mostly episodic, what did I do this morning, yesterday afternoon, who did I go to the movies with, well, it’s probably not a big deal. but it is convenient that you make the medical consultation.
