It’s one of the main functions of the brain whose objective is to pick up and keep the information coming from the external world to evoke it when it’s necessary. It’s the process of storing and recovery of information in the brain, essential in the learning and in the thought. It’s the cerebral function, result of synaptic connections between neurons, through which the human being can remember past experiences. The memories are created when the neurons integrated in a circuit reinforce the intensity of the synapses. The synapses is a point of union between neurons that allows to do the communication process base of the cerebral functioning, doing work the nerves impulses to generate the thought; it occurs through dendrites and axons, which are communicated between nerve cells, transforming an electric sign in another chemical. It’s a nervous system through which all the body systems are connected and controlled. The brain contains a vast number of synapses, which in children it reaches the 1000 billions. This number decreases with the passing of the years, being stabilized in the adult age. It’s estimated that an adult can have among 100 and 500 billions of synapses.
The human memory, unlike the animals’ memory, acts mainly on the base of their present needs; it can contemplate the past and plan the future. About your capacity, it’s been calculated that the human brain can store information that “will fill some twenty millions of volumes, as in the best libraries of the world.” Some neuroscientists have estimated that in a whole life it’s used a ten thousandth part (0.0001) of the brain potential (200 volumes).
The memory substrate is a functional system in which they take part different cerebral areas and where each one of them does a contribution relatively specific to the normal function. As an example we can say that, the hippocampus (in the internal side of the temporal lobes) is fundamental to maintain the information of what is happening in the moment; the left temporal lobe is important for the verbal memory and the right for the visuospatial memory; the prefrontal areas are important to establish strategies of memorization or evocation; in the left parietal lobe they are stored the acquired motor skills.