A MULTITUDE OF MEMORIES
Posted on February 13, 2018 by Sydney Ceruto, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Memory and life coaching.
We arrive in this world with the elements of our nature ready and able to develop in response to experience – the nurturing of our potentials – to enable the emergence of the individual we eventually become. We are each an extraordinary symphony, unique in melody, tone and key, even though we all use, pretty much, the same instruments.
Each life is a unique expression of the complex interplay of nature and nurture. Within this seemingly infinite number of possible outcomes, many people will fnd themselves opening the fridge door, seeking tasty treats, at the end of a long day. So different and yet so similar – how fascinating!
Not only does experience shape the development of our biology from gene expression to neuronal pathways in the brain, but experience can also be recorded, remembered and recalled to help us manage the better in the future. In short, we can learn. Learning is possible because of our capacity to remember. Memory is a fundamental quality of being human.Memory is a quality that links the past to the present. It has three essential functions: encoding of information; storage of that information; and retrieval. (The term ‘information’ is being used here in the generic form of ‘anything new’ not just isolated semantic facts). We generally think of memory as a neurological process and that is usually how we experience memory – in our thoughts – but memory is ubiquitous that manifests in many places and many ways throughout our biology.
Some memory is explicit – in our conscious, reflective awareness. This memory is mostly brain based and comes to us in facts, details, stories, images, sounds and smells in a way that we can think about the memory and consider how to best utilize it. Much of our memory, however, is implicit – it occurs beneath our conscious awareness – and we find ourselves acting out behaviors, emotions and feeling where we don’t really know why we are doing that action or feeling that emotion. This is one of the fundamental issues in therapy. We often need to help clients bring memories that are implicit into the explicit where we can employ our conscious thinking to have a beneficial effect. Implicit memory is stored in various brain areas such as the amygdala (fears and emotion), the striatum (habituated thoughts and behaviors), as well as the cerebellum (automatic procedural actions) and fusiform gyrus (face recognition). But there is much more.
