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The Role of Memory Exercises in Brain Function

memory exercises

Memory plays a role in all our activities, and HappyNeuron Pro offers memory exercises that help stimulate this area of cognition. Memory is essential in creating and developing our personality, is a direct witness to our past (episodic memory), and allows us to help historical information and common knowledge (semantic memory). It is, therefore, one of the most essential cognitive functions.


By saying we have a good or bad memory, we tend to consider it as a whole. But remembering what we had for lunch yesterday differs greatly from remembering the fact that Paris is the capital of France. The type of information being memorized or recalled engages the brain in different ways. We designed our memory care activities to specifically help treat the many capacities in which our brain interacts with information.

There is no brain area that can be identified as THE place where memories are stored. Whether a neural connection is formed depends on the simultaneous activation of neurons in various areas of the brain and also varies depending on the information to be memorized. Factors relating to fatigue, age, and stress may cause memory impairment or failure.

The major types of memory

Below we will break down the types of memory based on how long information has to be remembered for. With the support of HappyNeuron Pro’s brain exercises for memorytherapists and clinicians can help treat all these different areas.


Sensory Memories: the shortest form of memory. They record all the new information we experience in the space of a few hundred milliseconds (an example of visible persistence).

 

Short-term memory (STM): keeps information a little longer (for about a minute). This type of memory allows us to memorize a verbally communicated phone number until it has been dialed or written down. It is also necessary when reading and helps us to momentarily retain information from a sentence that has been read, to make sense of the next sentence. Short-term memory tends to get replaced by working memory. Our program’s short-term memory exercises help stimulate these abilities and skills.

 

Working Memory (WM): considered a “central administrator” that manages various cognitive mechanisms required to mentally deal with information. It is exactly the same as the “active” part of Long-Term Memory when carrying out a task requiring us to manage information. HappyNeuron Pro offers working-memory exercises that help users target skills used in sorting and managing various types of knowledge.  

 

Long-Term Memory (LTM): intervenes when we wish to memorize a piece of information for a longer period of time (or when we try to retrieve information from the past). This type of memory has an unlimited capacity and duration. It contains all lasting knowledge. There are several types of stored information.

Subsystems of long-term memory:

Episodic Memory: Remembering what we did the day before, a dentist appointment or a friend’s birthday party: episodic memory involves personal and autobiographical memories for which the memorization context is very important.

 

Semantic Memory: Knowing grammar rules or the names of capitals or objects involves general knowledge that does not depend on the memorization context. Although this knowledge is initially episodic knowledge, it becomes semantic knowledge since both the spatial and temporal context in which it was memorized are disregarded. This type of knowledge belongs to the semantic memory which allows us to make a list of flower names or to name the word that corresponds to a certain definition.

 

Implicit Memory: Along with the elements of “explicit” memory, which correspond to a conscious and voluntary search for stored information, there is also an “automatic” mode to retrieve data from our knowledge. These are “implicit” memory mechanisms that can group our know-how: knowing how to play the piano, riding a bike, driving … These are things we do automatically but that still requires us to consider the knowledge we have stored in our procedural memory (knowing that positioning your hands a certain way on the piano will render this or that chord, or that maneuvering your car a certain way will help you make a left turn).

Get Started With HappyNeuron Pro

Through HappyNeuron Pro’s memory training exercises, clinicians and medical professionals can help target patient memory skills. Our program offers stimulation tasks and activities specially adapted for use in treatment processes. If you’re interested in trying out our platform, then check out our free trial!

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Pulling from our decades of experience in Cognitive Therapeutics, we aim to help you enrich your practice through the use of digital and paper tools.