Humans have been preoccupied to store and process information for a very long time. It allows humans to use the experience of the past generations and that of the others. The memory of each person defines him/her. Losing memory is like losing past and future, living in a continual present.

Brain researches show that we do not have a unique memory and reveal that there are actually various types of memory, differentiated and complementary.

The immediate memory lasts just milliseconds and allows you to memorize rapidly things like a phone number or a name, for example.

The short term or working memory is a temporary easy accessible storing of information that is useful in a particular activity, like the shopping list or dialing a phone number after having looked in your agenda. It has subdivisions like a space-visual register for mental images and phonological loop for the verbal elements.

The long-term memory makes it possible for an 100-year-old person to recall in detail an episode from his/her childhood. Researches showed that the short term and the long term memories are controlled by different brain areas.

Another classification assigns memory in its working fields.

The declarative memory means all the memories that can be recovered voluntary.

The episodic history memory preserves all the happenings in the personal history. It makes possible the storing and turning into conscious events of the lived episodes (like "yesterday I made that thing"). This is the support of our individual history.

The semantic culture memory represents what remains recorded in the brain after forgetting things following a learning process, from exams to experiences and decoding processes. It allows us to have a general knowledge about the world. In the end, culture is what persists after we have forgotten it all.

The proceeding memory leads all the habits and automatic behaviors. This memory is used when you are typing on the keyboard or by an experimented driver when changing speed levels on the gearbox. This allowed the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Spillzman (whose life was portrayed in the movie "The Pianist") to escape from the Warsaw's ghetto, to remember without hesitations, after 6 years, the recording of a Chopin nocturne, interrupted by the German bombardments in 1939. This type of memory is based on practice - perceptive, motor or cognitive.

The perception representation systems (PRS) have the function to store shapes and structure of the objects, faces and words, making abstraction of their semantic meaning. Of course, the base of the memory is formed by sensations - olfactive, visual, gustative, tactile and auditory. The sensations reach the brain's emotional center, the amygdala. In the amygdala, the brain decides the faith of the sensory information in a matter of seconds. Now the autobiographic and emotional meaning of a sensation is decided.

The right half of the brain cortex stores the biographic memory, emotional recalls, autobiographic and time-related memories, like the first day of the high school or the 9/11 attack. The left half of the brain cortex stores the cognitive and factual memories (like Paris is the France's capital, words, numbers and so on). The cerebellum stores the memory involving movement, like playing guitar or swimming. The centers for positive recollections were detected in the center of the brain's cortex, while the center of the negative recollections is at the edge of the cortex.