Watch this video, How memories form and how we lose them by Catherine Young, to help you understand why you might have answered these two questions as you did.

The key here is that memories are made in complex ways through different senses and that is why your memories won’t just be one ‘thing’ but a web of ‘things’. For example, you might have thought of a childhood memory when you were on a beach with your family, you remember what the weather was like. You might remember the smell of the sea, the strong blue colour of the sky and the feeling of the hot sun on your skin. When this experience is related to positive emotions, such as happiness, feeling safe and relaxed, and when they are connected with a special moment, these memories will last longer, also, because you might think of them more often and when doing so, your brain ‘rewires’ the neurons in the same way as it did when this memory was made.

Download this as a Word document:  Model Answer Unit 3, Activity 1.1B What is Memory? (7.5 KB)

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