Human Memory Pathways

By: Eric Hartwell

In the field of neuroscience, the most pertinent issue is how one can gain a fuller understanding of the human mind’s cognitive faculties. These faculties include language, perception, emotion, action, learning, and, most importantly, memory. This is why a set of techniques to fully understand the mechanisms of memory and learning have been set in place. Since there have been so many advances in this area of research in recent times, one concern of the scientific community has been that neural science’s molecular aspects – chiefly those that have to do with neuronal signaling – will become severed from the systems of cognition – those that tend to deal with higher mental functions as well as behavioral aspects. What was once a field dealt with primarily by neurologists and psychologists has now become the domain of molecular biologists. Nowadays, there is a strong argument that molecular approaches should be applied to the mental functions of animals, and for those results to subsequently be tested on humans through the use of analysis as well as neuroimaging and other advanced tools. At Columbia University in New York, they have even coined a new discipline for this approach to the study of the human brain’s memory pathways; they call it the molecular biology of cognition.

The idea behind this new field is to study the human brain on the levels of cells and molecules through a rigid analysis of the behavior of both animals and humans. The focus of these studies, of course is on memory and learning. Each human being’s ability to remember something is contingent not on a single system of memory but on the combination of two or more strategies employed by the human brain. Explicit memory is a strategy that entails the individuals conscious participation in an event; it makes use of the cerebral cortex’s temporal lobes as well as the hippocampus. Then there is implicit memory. This is the strategy where in motor skills as well as perceptual skills are encoded. The implicit memory process does not entail conscious participation. It utilizes non-cortical structures. Both of these mechanisms – implicit and explicit memory – are involved in the task of learning.

The vast majority of us take memory for granted. We scarcely realize that memory is involved in nearly every single task we perform each day in the world. The way memory works is related to such parts of the brain as the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe, the cortex, and the hippocampus. These disparate parts of the brain work together, thereby allowing us to formulate and store information in the form of memories. The memories connect us to the external world – the data stored might be about a specific environment, a person, or an object. So how does memory work? If we did not understand the way memory worked, then we would not be able to comprehend why we perform such day to day routines as taking a shower, doing homework, or even communicating. We would thus not be able to comprehend such phenomena as forgetting and photographic memory.

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