Memory impairment is a disorder that significantly impairs the quality of life of individuals and is quite common. There are two basic types of human memory impairment, namely qualitative and quantitative disorders of memory function. The qualitative type of abnormal functioning is expressed in the occurrence of erroneous (false) memories, in the confusion of reality, cases from the past and imaginary situations. Quantitative defects are found in the weakening or strengthening of memory traces, and in addition in the loss of biological reflection of events.
Memory impairments are quite diverse, most of them are characterized by short duration and reversibility. Basically, such disorders are provoked by overwork, neurotic conditions, the influence of medications and excessive consumption alcohol-containing drinks. Others are generated by more significant reasons and are much more difficult to correct. So, for example, in combination, a violation of memory and attention, as well as mental function (), is considered a more serious disorder, leading to a decrease in the adaptation mechanism of the individual, which makes him dependent on others.
Causes of memory impairment
There are a huge number of factors that provoke disorders of cognitive functions of the psyche. For example, human memory impairments can be triggered by the presence of asthenic syndrome, manifested in rapid fatigue, exhaustion of the body, and also arise due to the individual’s high anxiety, traumatic brain injuries, age-related changes, depression, alcoholism, intoxication, and micronutrient deficiency.
Memory impairment in children can be due to congenital mental underdevelopment or an acquired condition, which is usually expressed in the deterioration of the processes of memorizing and reproducing received information (hypomnesia) or in the loss of certain moments from memory (amnesia).
Amnesia in young representatives of society is often a consequence of trauma, the presence of mental illness, or severe poisoning. Partial memory defects in children are most often observed as a result of the influence of the following factors in combination: unfavorable psychological microclimate in family relationships or in children's groups, frequent asthenic conditions, including those caused by persistent acute respiratory infections, and hypovitaminosis.
Nature has arranged it this way that from the moment of birth, infants’ memory is constantly developing and, therefore, is vulnerable to unfavorable environmental factors. Among such unfavorable factors are: difficult pregnancy and difficult childbirth, birth injuries to the child, long-term chronic illnesses, lack of competent stimulation of memory formation, and an excessive load on the children’s nervous system associated with an excessive amount of information.
In addition, memory impairment in children can also occur after suffering from somatic diseases during the recovery process.
In adults, this disorder can occur due to constant exposure to stress factors, the presence of various ailments nervous system(for example, encephalitis or Parkinson's disease), neuroses, drug addiction and alcohol abuse, mental illnesses.
In addition, somatic diseases are considered to be an equally important factor that strongly affects the ability to remember, in which there is damage to the vessels supplying the brain, which leads to pathologies of cerebral circulation. Such ailments include: hypertension, diabetes, vascular atherosclerosis, pathologies of the thyroid gland.
Also, impairment of short-term memory can often be directly related to a deficiency or failure to absorb certain vitamins.
Basically, if the natural aging process is not burdened by any accompanying ailments, then the decline in the functioning of the cognitive mental process occurs very slowly. At first, it becomes more difficult to remember events that happened a long time ago; gradually, as an individual ages, he cannot remember events that happened quite recently.
Impaired memory and attention can also occur due to iodine deficiency in the body. With insufficient thyroid function, individuals develop excess weight, apathy, depressed mood, irritability and muscle swelling. To avoid the problems described, you must constantly monitor your diet and eat as many iodine-rich foods as possible, for example, seafood, hard cheese, and nuts.
Not in all cases, individuals' forgetfulness should be equated with memory dysfunction. Often the subject consciously seeks to forget difficult life moments, unpleasant, and often tragic events. In this case, forgetfulness plays the role of a defense mechanism. When an individual represses unpleasant facts from memory - this is called repression; when he is sure that traumatic events did not occur at all - this is called denial; displacing negative emotions on another object is called replacement.
Symptoms of memory impairment
The mental function that provides recording, preservation and reproduction (playback) of various impressions and events, the ability to accumulate data and use previously acquired experience is called memory.
Phenomena of the cognitive mental process in equally may be related to the emotional and cognitive domains, recording motor processes and mental experience. According to this, there are several types of memory.
Figurative is the ability to remember a variety of images.
Motor determines the ability to remember the sequence and configuration of movements. There is also memory for mental states, for example, emotional or visceral sensations such as pain or discomfort.
Symbolic is specific to a person. With the help of this type of cognitive mental process, subjects remember words, thoughts and ideas (logical memorization).
Short-term involves imprinting in memory a large amount of regularly arriving information for a short time, then such information is eliminated or stored in a long-term storage slot. With selective saving on long time The most significant information for an individual is associated with long-term memory.
Volume random access memory consists of current this moment information. The ability to remember data as it really is, without creating logical connections, is called mechanical memory. This type of cognitive mental process is not considered the foundation of intelligence. With the help of mechanical memory, proper names and numbers are mainly remembered.
Memorization occurs with the development of logical connections during associative memory. During memorization, data is compared and summarized, analyzed and systematized.
In addition, involuntary memory and voluntary memorization are distinguished. Involuntary memorization accompanies the activity of the individual and is not associated with the intention to record anything. A voluntary cognitive mental process is associated with a preliminary indication of memorization. This type is the most productive and is the basis of learning, but requires special conditions (comprehension of the memorized material, maximum attention and concentration).
All disorders of the cognitive mental process can be divided into categories: temporary (lasting from two minutes to a couple of years), episodic, progressive, and Korsakoff's syndrome, which is a violation of short-term memory.
The following types of memory impairment can be distinguished: disorder of memorization, storage, forgetting and reproduction of various data and personal experience. There are qualitative disorders (paramnesia), which manifest themselves in erroneous memories, confusion between the past and the present, real and imaginary, and quantitative disorders, which manifest themselves in a weakening, loss, or strengthening of the reflection of events in memory.
Quantitative memory defects are dysmnesia, which includes hypermnesia and hypomnesia, as well as amnesia.
Amnesia is a loss from the cognitive mental process different information, skills for a certain period of time.
Amnesia is characterized by spread over time periods that differ in duration.
Gaps in memory can be stable, stationary, and in most cases, memories partially or completely return.
Acquired specific knowledge and skills, such as the ability to drive a car, can also be affected by amnesia.
Loss of memory for situations preceding a state of transformed consciousness, organic brain damage, hypoxia, or the development of acute psychotic syndrome is called retrograde amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia manifests itself in the absence of a cognitive mental process for the period before the onset of pathology. For example, an individual with a skull injury can forget everything that happened to him for ten days before the injury occurred. Loss of memory for a period after the onset of the disease is called anterograde amnesia. The duration of these two types of amnesia can vary from a couple of hours to two to three months. There is also retroanterograde amnesia, which covers a long stage of loss of the cognitive mental process, which includes the period of time before the onset of the disease and the period after.
Fixation amnesia is manifested by the subject’s inability to retain and consolidate incoming information. Everything that happens around such a patient is perceived adequately by him, but is not stored in memory and after a few minutes, often even seconds, such a patient completely forgets what is happening.
Fixation amnesia is a loss of the ability to remember and reproduce new information. The ability to remember current, recent situations is weakened or absent, while previously acquired knowledge is retained in memory.
Problems of memory impairment with fixation amnesia are found in the disturbance of orientation in time, surrounding persons, surroundings and situations (amnestic disorientation).
Total amnesia is manifested by the loss of all information from the individual’s memory, including even data about himself. An individual with total amnesia does not know his own name, does not suspect his own age, place of residence, that is, he cannot remember anything from his own past life. Total amnesia most often occurs with a serious injury to the skull, less often it occurs with ailments of a functional nature (under obvious stressful circumstances).
Palimpsest is detected due to a state of alcoholic intoxication and is manifested by the loss of individual events from the cognitive mental process.
Hysterical amnesia is expressed in failures of the cognitive mental process related to unpleasant, unfavorable facts and circumstances for the individual. Hysterical amnesia, as well as the protective mechanism of repression, is observed not only in sick people, but also in healthy individuals who are characterized by accentuation of the hysterical type.
Gaps in memory that are filled with various data are called paramnesia. It is divided into: pseudoreminiscences, confabulations, echonesia and cryptomnesia.
Pseudo-reminiscences are the replacement of gaps in the cognitive mental process with data and actual facts from the life of an individual, but significantly shifted in the time period. So, for example, a patient suffering from senile dementia and staying in a medical institution for six months, who was an excellent mathematics teacher before his illness, can assure everyone that two minutes ago he taught geometry classes in the 9th grade.
Confabulations are manifested by replacing memory gaps with fabrications of a fantastic nature, while the patient is one hundred percent sure of the reality of such fabrications. For example, an eighty-year-old patient suffering from cerebrosclerosis reports that a moment ago he was interrogated simultaneously by Ivan the Terrible and Afanasy Vyazemsky. Any attempt to prove that the above famous personalities long dead, are futile.
Memory deception, characterized by the perception of events taking place in given time, as events that occurred previously, is called echonesia.
Ecmnesia is a memory trick that involves living the distant past as the present. For example, older people begin to consider themselves young and prepare for a wedding.
Cryptomnesias are gaps filled with data, the source of which the sick individual forgets. He may not remember whether an event happened in reality or in a dream; he takes thoughts read in books as his own. For example, often sick, quoting poetry famous poets, pass off as their own.
As a type of cryptomnesia, one can consider alienated memory, which consists in the patient’s perception of the events of his life not as actually lived moments, but as seen in a movie or read in a book.
Exacerbation of memory is called hypermnesia and it manifests itself in the form of an influx of a large number of memories, which are often characterized by the presence of sensory images and directly cover the event and its individual parts. They appear more often in the form of chaotic scenes, less often - connected by one complex plot direction.
Hypermnesia is often characteristic of persons suffering from manic-depressive psychosis, schizophrenics, and persons in the initial stages of alcohol intoxication or under the influence of marijuana.
Hyponesia is a weakening of memory. Hypomnesia often manifests itself in the form of uneven various processes and first of all – preservation and reproduction of the information received. With hypomnesia, the memory of current events is predominantly significantly impaired, which may accompany progressive or fixation amnesia.
Memory impairment occurs in a certain sequence. First, recent events are forgotten, then earlier ones. The primary manifestation of hypomnesia is considered to be a violation of selective memories, that is, memories that are needed precisely at this moment; they can emerge later. Basically, the listed types of disorders and manifestations are observed in patients suffering from brain pathologies or in elderly people.
Treatment of memory impairment
The problems of this disorder are easier to prevent than to treat. Therefore, many exercises have been developed to keep your own memory in good shape. Regular exercise helps minimize the risk of disorders by preventing vascular diseases that cause memory impairment.
In addition, training memory and thinking abilities helps not only save, but also improve the cognitive mental process. According to many studies, there are far fewer patients with Alzheimer's disease among educated individuals than among uneducated individuals.
Also, intake of vitamins C and E, consumption of foods rich in omega-3 fatty acids reduces the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
Diagnosis of memory disorders is based on two key principles:
- to establish the disease that led to the violation (includes collection of anamnestic data, analysis of neurological status, computed tomography, ultrasound or angiographic examination of cerebral vessels if necessary, blood sampling for the content of thyroid-stimulating hormones;
— to determine the severity and nature of the pathology of memory function using neuropsychological testing.
Diagnosis of memory disorders is carried out using various psychological techniques aimed at examining all types of memory. For example, in patients with hypomnesia, for the most part, short-term memory deteriorates. To study this type of memory, the patient is asked to repeat a certain sentence with a “line addition”. A patient with hypomnesia is unable to repeat all spoken phrases.
First of all, the treatment of any violations of this disorder depends directly on the factors that provoked their development.
Drugs for memory impairment are prescribed only after a full diagnostic examination and exclusively by a specialist.
For correction mild degree dysfunctions of this disorder, various physiotherapeutic methods are used, for example, electrophoresis with glutamic acid, administered through the nose.
Psychological and pedagogical correctional influence is also successfully used. The teacher teaches patients to remember information using other brain processes to replace the affected ones. So, for example, if a patient is not able to remember the name of objects spoken out loud, then he can be taught to remember by presenting a visual image of such an object.
Medicines for memory impairment are prescribed in accordance with the illness that provoked the memory disorder. For example, if the disorder is caused by overwork, then help medicines tonic effect (Eleutherococcus extract). Often, when memory functions are impaired, doctors prescribe nootropic drugs (Lucetam, Nootropil). 
In psychology, memory is a set of information that reflects events, emotions, and any knowledge experienced by an individual previously.
What is memory and its impairment
Thanks to it, we have experience, and a person is the person that others know him to be. Memory loss or memory impairment causes great discomfort to the individual.
Memory impairment in psychology is a fairly common disorder that brings a lot of problems to a person and, of course, worsens the quality of his life. This disorder underlies many mental illnesses.
Main types of memory disorders
There are two main types of human memory impairment.
Qualitative dysfunctions involve confusion in the patient's mind due to the inability to distinguish true memories from fantasies. The patient does not understand which events are real and which are a figment of his imagination.
Quantitative defects are reflected in the strengthening or weakening of memory traces.
There are a huge number of types of memory disorders. Most of them are characterized by short duration and reversibility. They can be caused by such trivial reasons as overwork, frequent stressful situations, abuse medicines, as well as alcoholic beverages.
Others require a serious approach to treatment.
Causes of memory disorders
What are these reasons that can cause memory impairment? In psychology, there are several of these.
For example, a person has asthenic syndrome, which is accompanied by rapid fatigue and exhaustion of the body. It can be a consequence of traumatic brain injury, long-term depression, vitamin deficiency, alcohol and drug addiction.
In children, memory disorders are most often the result of brain underdevelopment, physical or mental head trauma. Such children have problems with memorizing information and its subsequent reproduction.
Types of Memory Disorders
What are the symptoms of memory impairment? This is forgetting and the inability to reproduce events from personal or other people's experience.
Paramnesia is a loss in time, when an individual confuses the events of the past and the present, cannot understand which events in his head took place in the real world, and which are fictitious, projected by the brain based on information once received.
Dysmnesia is a disorder that includes hypermnesia, hypomnesia and amnesia. The latter is characterized by forgetting certain information and skills for a certain period of time. Memory problems are episodic, after which memories partially or completely return. Amnesia can also affect acquired skills, for example, the ability to drive a car, ride a bicycle, or cook any dishes.
Types of amnesia
Retrograde amnesia manifests itself in forgetting events for a certain period of time preceding the occurrence of the trauma. For example, a person who has suffered a head injury may forget everything that happened to him a week or more before the accident.
Anterograde amnesia is the opposite of the previous one and involves memory loss for a period after injury.
Fixation amnesia is when the patient is unable to remember incoming information. He perceives reality quite adequately, but forgets information within a few minutes or seconds after receiving it. This causes problems in time orientation, as well as in remembering surrounding people.
With total amnesia, a person is unable to remember anything from his past life. He doesn't know his name, age, address, who he is or what he did. As a rule, such a mental disorder occurs after receiving a severe skull injury.
Palimpsest occurs as a result of alcohol intoxication, when the individual cannot remember certain moments.
With hysterical amnesia, a person forgets difficult, painful or simply unfavorable memories. It is characteristic not only of mentally ill people, but also of healthy people of the hysterical type.
Paramnesia is a type of memory disorder in which the gaps that arise are filled in with different data.
Ecmnesia and cryptomnesia
Ecmnesia is a phenomenon when a person experiences long-past events as a phenomenon of the present time. It is typical of older people who are beginning to perceive themselves as a young person and are preparing for university, marriage, or other events that were experienced at a young age.
Cryptomnesia is a disorder in which a person passes off heard or read ideas as his own, sincerely believing in his authorship. For example, patients can appropriate the books of great writers they have read in their imagination, assuring others of this.
A type of cryptomnesia can be a phenomenon when a person perceives an event from his own life as something he read in a book or saw in a movie.
Treatment of memory disorders
The classification of memory disorders is a fairly large amount of information in psychology; there are many works on the study of such phenomena, as well as on methods of their treatment.
Of course, it is easier to engage in preventative actions than the treatment itself. For these purposes, experts have developed many exercises that allow you to keep your memory in good shape.
Proper nutrition and lifestyle also contribute to normal brain function.
As for the direct treatment of memory disorders, it will depend on the diagnosis, the degree of neglect and the causes of occurrence. Treatment with drugs begins only after a thorough diagnosis carried out by a medical specialist.
Explaining to the developer that opening a form above the current page is generally better than moving to another page, since moving to another page is a division in time, he received a question about the basis of such judgments. I answer it with pleasure.Psychologists distinguish two models of memory - short-term, similar to RAM in a computer, and long-term, which is similar to a hard drive.
Both types of memory have advantages and disadvantages.
It’s easy to put something into short-term memory and the fresh information there is very clear. However, short-term memory has a small capacity (see George A. Miller, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information). Due to the low capacity, new data placed in it can squeeze out old ones. If a person is interrupted by a phone call while working, it is not easy to remember what was done before the call and return to work. Also, short-term memory fades. That is, over time, the information contained in it becomes unclear and disappears. This time is in units of seconds.
A few quotes from Jeff Raskin's book The Human Interface regarding this phenomenon:
It may seem strange that we can only have one locus of attention. Let's try to consider the reasons for this. Baars (1988) eloquently answers this question by trying to find a biological explanation for why we have evolved in such a limited way and argues that
“Consciousness and the mechanisms associated with it call into question functional explanations of the problem, since the capabilities of consciousness are paradoxically limited. Why can't we experience two different "things" at the same time? Why can short-term memory (STM) only accommodate half a dozen unrelated items? How do such limited opportunities turned out to be acceptable? How wonderful it would be if we could read one book and write another, talk with a friend and also enjoy some delicious food, all at the same time. Certainly, the capacity of our nervous system seems sufficient to perform all these actions at the same time. The standard answer about some "physiological" limitation - that we have only two hands and one mouth - seems unconvincing, because it leads to another question that further complicates the problem: why did organisms endowed with the most advanced brains in the animal kingdom not develop hands and mouths to properly handle multiple parallel processes? And also, why does our ability to process information in parallel increase with automaticity and decrease as consciousness is involved in the process? (p. 348)"
It takes about 10 seconds for a person to switch from one context to another or mentally prepare for an upcoming task (Card, Moran, and Newell, 1983, p. 390)...
Usually, having interrupted some work, you then return to it. If the break lasts only a few seconds—within the decay period of short-term memory—no additional stimulus is required to get you back to the task at hand. If the period is longer, then returning to the interrupted task must be triggered by something - for example, the sight of unfinished work lying in front of you. These clues are as common in everyday life as they are with computers: a banana peel left on the kitchen counter by your 4-year-old becomes a clue that the peel needs to be thrown away.
Long-term memory is the opposite: it can be considered to have an infinite volume and allows you to store information forever. But, as luck would have it, it’s not easy to put something there (that’s why people came up with books, schools, universities, etc.), and it’s hard to find something old (that’s why we have cameras and video cameras).
In the example discussed, we were talking about how to provide the user with the opportunity to copy the code to confirm the registration of the site (a similar code needs to be copied in Yandex.Metrica). If the code was copied on a page separate from the list of sites, then the information would inevitably be separated in time. Because of this, the user would have to for a long time remember what he did on the first screen and what state it was in (the screen was in), switch to the second, perform the necessary actions of copying and pasting the code onto the site, and then come back and remember everything.
Knowing about the properties of short-term memory, we can confidently say that while working with the code, information about the state of the list of sites would probably be erased. In this case, there is also no need to talk about the use of long-term memory; it is not possible to put anything there so quickly.
It follows that it is better to copy the code not on a separate page, but in a window, so that when returning to the list of sites the user can remember that he stopped at copying the code for site N.
Edward Tufte also explains about the division in time and space:
Envisioning Information "Narratives of Space and Time", p. 97.
Beautiful Evidence "Words, Numbers, Images - Together", c. 85.
Also see Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday things. About short-term memory - p. 126, 127, 191, about long-term - 67, 189.
There is some information about the division and structure of memory in my notes and lectures:
It is also worth paying attention to the posts.
Short-term and long-term memory are interconnected and work as a single system. One of the concepts describing their joint, interconnected activities was developed by American scientists R. Atkinson and R. Shifrin.Short-term memory is characterized by limited capacity (on average 7±2). When the capacity of a person’s short-term memory becomes full, newly arriving information partially displaces the information stored there, and the latter disappears irrevocably. Short-term memory acts as a mandatory intermediate storage and filter, processing the largest amount of information, immediately filtering out unnecessary information and leaving potentially useful information.
The memorization process can be more effective if you focus on the material you are learning. It has been established that information that is the object of attention and consciousness and acts as a goal is better absorbed. This reduces the amount of initial information and makes the work of processing it easier.
Another mnemonic device is memorization through repetition. This mechanism is based on the fact that the memorized material, through conscious repetition, is retained in short-term memory for a longer period than a few seconds; the chance of transferring information to long-term storage increases. Usually, without repetition, only what is in the sphere of attention ends up in long-term memory.
One of the possible mechanisms of short-term memorization is temporary encoding, that is, the reflection of the memorized material in the form of certain, sequentially located signs in the human auditory and visual system. Typically, information is recoded into acoustic form and then stored in long-term memory in semantic form. It is the meaning of what is remembered that comes to mind first; we can ultimately remember what we want, or at least replace it with something that is close enough to it in meaning. This, in particular, is the basis for the process of recognizing something once seen or heard.
A feature of long-term memory is that, according to R. Atkinson and R. Shifrin, it is practically unlimited in the volume and duration of information storage in it.
The memory scheme according to R. Atkinson and R. Shifrin describes the work of short-term memory quite well, but does not take into account at all feedback long-term memory with short-term. The fact is that both types of memory work in conjunction and in parallel. There is constant work in memory to refer to past experience, to supplement it new information, as well as correction of acquired information. In other words, a person does not need to memorize what he already knows well. This is what associative memory is based on.
