My religion says that memory is stored within your soul…
But… I dont know how science explains it… and I would like to know…
So please reply if you know how…
That would entail scientists having a clue what consciousness is in the first place. Memory is obviously a subsidiary question of consciousness.
Perhaps Twiffy, who reckons that scientists have entirely and irrefutably worked out what consciousness is and how it works, would like to explain it all to us.
i forgot 
no seriously, i’m pretty sure that there are some pretty sound ideas and confirmations of these about memory but i should check the paperwork from my second year because i couldn’t find anything freely accessible (most of these valuable scientific works and texts are paying, unfortunately 
)
I don’t think that memory is well understood by science.
I think it is fairly well described. There are names for certain kinds of remembering, certain tricks that memory can play on us, and disorders of memory. There are also some neurological studies and models that give us a reasonable idea of what parts of the brain may be active in memory processes but I don’t think that anyone has solved memory.
I certainly don’t think that anyone knows how we remember, or how we forget. I remember hearing somewhere once that brain plasticity was a critical part of our being able to learn.
cheers,
gemty
If memory is part of the soul then are memory disorders a flaw in your soul?
hhahaha i like that…
but no, everything is here for a reason
and we beleive that all people with severe disabilitys go to heaven
weve learned much from them in the feild of science…
I don’t understand this response.
We know an impressive number of things about memory, from a host of psychological facts (7 ±2 memory registers, useful distinctions between short- and long-term memory) to the more detailed neurological facts (where memory is stored), but you guys are right, the jury is still out on exactly how memory is formed. The dominant theory is pretty obvious, and states that memories are simply links between concepts - the physical formation of what’s necessary for association. This is all well and good, but if memory is just the association of concepts, it begs the question of how concepts are encoded in the brain - which of course is a very important, poorly understood question.
Memory is actually a very different phenomenon from consciousness. We’re all pretty comfortable in saying that computers aren’t conscious - not yet at least. However, they have damn good memories. Now, we perceive, vaguely and intuitively, a link between the two, and well we should: when you study it precisely, you find that consciousness isn’t an integral component of memory; however, memory is a very important part of consciousness. Thus, you probably need to understand memory to fully understand consciousness; but you probably don’t need to understand consciousness in order to understand memory.
Interestingly, we understand how we forget (in the long term) very well. It’s simply degradation of the synapses, which happens with memories (or concepts / mental skills) you don’t use very often. However, the temporary forgetting of something you generally know very well - we don’t really understand that very well.
Anyway, neuroscience is one of the coolest things in the world, and I very much recommend that you guys look into it! If you get hard core, there are some mathematical models of neurons that work extraordinarily well, and are actually going to be used in computer models of THE ENTIRE BRAIN within the next 50 years! Amazing! And if you want something to read as an introduction, try “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat”, which is terrific.
Mod Comment - 3 post removed from this thread to prevent a Twiffy/SIATD war.
billfish, yes, we can edit, move or delete user posts, but SIATD was just being mischevous, he wouoldn’t actually do that (I hope!).
Basically, memory is electrical for short-term and protein-based for long-term:
pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl … tid=389756
As I recall, if the electrical patterns in the brain maintain themselves long enough, proteins start to form around them eventually making them into solid structures.
Makes sense, yes? 
First you have to be sure that memories are real. What if you didn’t exist yesterday and from nowhere you’re brain - mind was instantly programmed with all the memories you now have. How could you distinguish if they were simply downloaded to your brain or if they were “real” ?
Then again what is “real” ? If all the minds in the world were instantly programmed this morning all with coherent memories, but in fact nothing in those memories ever happened, who could tell the difference ?
Then again even admitting that all our memories are real and did happen, where is the past ? And what if the past never “really” happended ? What if the past simply doesn’t exist ? Isn’t the past simply an information structure in our mind ? What makes the past real ? We can’t touch it. So if the past is fake, then we can just invent any past at all and it is JUST AS REAL AS THE “REAL” PAST, THAT IS THEY ARE ALL FAKE, DON’T EXIST, OR ARE DREAMS AND VIRTUAL…
Another variant of the “hidden layers” theory. Can a computer discover that it is made up of transistors ? No, because it sees everything inside its own memory and operates on every item of information with instructions. So the transistor layer is hidden and so is the atomic layer of matter and the chip fabrication plant etc. So there are a host of hidden layers behind its operation.
Our memories are fake ? Maybe, and maybe we process information through hidden layers also, what we see and touch may already have gone through many layers of transformation functions before becoming conscious to us. Maybe behind all our information is just a kind of monolithic slab where we poke at some points of it and receive information from other points of it. And maybe the slab is made up of a material to us unknown and with laws of physics completely different and unknown.
It matters not how many transformations the outputs from our hands go through before reaching the fundament of reality, the operating “laws of physics”, and the inputs from this reality to our minds (eyes ?) . If there is no association between the universe of laws in which our mind and conscious and experience operates upon and the real laws of physics, it really doesn’t matter. We always operate within the laws our mind knows and has established between the inputs we get and the outputs we provide.
The cause and effects we experience may be arbitrarily associated through some of the hidden layers, but we operate within the laws we know. Maybe the fundament is actually a completely lawless physics ? maybe when we see two items they are in reality one and when we see one they are many ? Maybe there are infinite hidden layers each one associating cause and effects in completely arbitrary ways, all the possible combinations of ways, but we receive just one quirky way for no reason at all.