Memory, the brain’s power to remember things, comes in different forms. Memory is not a tangible thing; it is not possible to ‘improve’ one’s memory, per se. A person can develop his or her memory skills through practice, like playing guitar. A person’s memory can be trained through active participation, paying attention to his or her weak areas of memory or remembering things and make a conscious effort to increase the capacity of his or her brain.

Different domains or types of memory exist in the brain. A person can be very adept at remembering events in the past with great detail but forget where they left their wallet or keys. Like a database, memory is organized in different areas of the brain. A person, without effort, can remember their phone number, birthdates, the taste of chocolate, the sound of children playing, the scent of a rose, the knowledge of how to ride a bike, the feeling of fear and the intention to remember to pick up milk on the way home. Cognitive psychologists believe these bits of information are stored in multimodal systems of memory. These domains of memory are useful when considering the process of improving one’s memory. Different memory strategies can be employed and matched with different memory tasks, using the knowledge of how pieces of information are encoded on the brain.

Knowledge memory, the information about the world or external things, and personal memory, the information people know about themselves, are two fundamentally distinct domains of memory. In the domain of knowledge memory, information about music, numbers, language, stories or facts are stored. This includes a person’s ability to remember words or a subject he or she has studied. Identity memory refers to the ability of a person to match a name with a face, attempting to remember who that person is, where and how that person is known by them and what the details of that person’s life are.

Event memory refers to a person’s ability to remember whether or not they have done something, where they have put something, when and where something happened to them and remembering dates. Planning memory refers to a person’s ability to remember to do something at a particular time or place, whether they can remember to remember to do something, for example, a person having the thought ‘I was supposed to do something, I know I told myself to remember it, what is it, why am I standing here?’ Skill memory refers to the ability to remember how something is done, a particular task, how to operate a camera, for example.

With personal memory, a person retains autobiographical information, skill information, social information and planning information. Autobiographical memory incorporates information about oneself, what that person’s details are that make them unique, the facts of their life, their experiences and their emotions. All of these bits of detail are processed differently and contained in different domains of memory in the brain. A person’s memory for emotions can help a person change their mood. When a person has a strong memory for a specific event that they have experienced, the memory includes details specific to that occasion. As humans, we experience much of life in a routine fashion; these memories are contained in a generic memory- one which includes the common elements of the routine experience.