Mrs. Reilly
English III
21st of April 2018
How the Human Brain Stores and Retrieves Memories The human brain is arguably the most fascinating and most complex organ in the body. With the brain being no larger than the size of two fists, it is able to perform many strange acts such as manipulating how one may perceive reality, or even sacrificing one’s own body parts in order to keep itself alive in a stressful environment or even a potentially fatal situation. Though it is not a separate agent living in one’s head, the brain is an integral part of the body. This organ drives a person to follow through with many entities like eating, speaking, smelling, and even thinking. When it comes to absorbing new information, “Different …show more content…
An example of this could be placing down car keys because it involves the usage or short term memory. Respectively, many older people have trouble recalling these little things due to deficiencies in neural firings in the brain because of the lack of thinking similar to how students do in school. One way to help improve short term memory is suggested by Steve E. Peterson in his work How to Aid Short-Term Memory: “We found those people who silently repeated words over and over performed better than those who attempted to remember what the words looked like” (Peterson). In other words, some people can retrieve lost memories of words by silently repeating the sound of the word in opposition to just attempting to remember what the word looks like. Exercising one’s brain with academic questions from a higher level of education slowly is arguably a good way to connect with one’s self to aid in their process of improving memory. Using senses such as sight can also help with improving memory. “…the group of poor performers would still rely on visualization to remember spoken words” (Peterson). Peterson suggests that relying on visualization for spoken words can trigger a response on how to pronounce that specific words. Even writing things down like on a calendar or even in a book may help in processing memories though the hippocampus, which is the basis for short term memory. With old age, following some of these studies will keep the hippocampus involved in solidifying what the person has learned. A different way of working the brain’s memory chambers is through physical exercise. Simply going on a run, swimming, or anything that gets blood flowing through the body is healthy, but more importantly healthy for the brain. The reason behind this is that blood flow increases as exercise occurs, therefor a greater abundance of