Memory disorders - causes, types and treatment. Lectures on psychology Violation of memory for current events is called

Memory disorders
Pathopsychological mnestic disorders underlie many mental illnesses.
Allocate such memory disorders:
1. Amnesia - a memory disorder in the form of a violation of the ability to remember, store and reproduce information.
Types of amnesia:
- retrograde amnesia- memory impairment, in which it is impossible to reproduce information acquired before the episode of impaired consciousness that arose with a person;
- Anterograde amnesia- playback difficulties relate to the time after the episode of disturbed consciousness;
- Anteroretrograde amnesia- memory impairment, in which it is impossible to reproduce information acquired before and after an episode of impaired consciousness.

2. Partial memory disorders (memory disorders of a partial nature):
- Hypomnesia- memory loss
- Hypermnesia- boosting memory
arise on the basis of emotional disorders, forming, respectively, a depressive and manic spectrum of symptoms.

3. Paramnesia:
- Confabulations- deceptions of memory, in which the inability to remember events and reproduce them leads to the reproduction of fictitious events;
- Pseudo-reminiscences- violation of the chronology in memory, in which individual events of the past are transferred to the present;
- Cryptomnesia- memory disorders in which a person appropriates other people's thoughts, actions to himself.

The law of the formation of Ribot's mnestic disorders: violation (loss) of memory (as well as its recovery) occurs in chronological order - first, memory is lost for the most complex and recent impressions, then for the old ones. Restoration occurs in reverse order.
According to Mr. Connery, memory disorders due to their causes are divided into:

1. Not caused by obvious physiological reasons - dissociative:
- dissociative amnesia(inability to remember important events or information related to personal life, usually of an unpleasant nature, that is, people suffer from retrograde amnesia, they rarely have anterograde amnesia);
- dissociative fugue(a person not only forgets the past, but can also go to an unfamiliar place and present himself as a new person), usually follows a strong stress, such as military operations or a natural disaster, although it can also be caused by personal stress - financial or legal difficulties or a depressive episode . Fugues only affect memories of one's own past, not universal or abstract knowledge. Most people with dissociative fugue regain full or near full memory and do not relapse;
- Organic dissociative personality disorder (a person has two or more different personalities who cannot always remember each other's thoughts, feelings and actions).

2. The physiological reasons for their occurrence are obvious. - organic. Organic causes of memory impairment can be: traumatic brain injury, organic diseases, improper use of drugs. Memory disorders caused by physiological causes - amnestic disorder (mainly affect memory). People with amnesic disorders sometimes have retrograde amnesia, but they almost always have anterograde amnesia.
Anterograde amnesia is often the result of damage to the temporal lobes of the brain or diencephalon, areas that are primarily responsible for converting short-term memory into long-term memory.

For severe forms of anterograde amnesia, new acquaintances are forgotten almost instantly, and for problems solved today, it is possible to take on the very next day.
Korsakov's amnestic syndrome- people constantly forget just learned information (anterograde amnesia), although their general knowledge and intellectual abilities remain unchanged. Characteristic symptoms: clouding of consciousness, disorientation, tendency to confabulations. It is caused by chronic alcoholism in combination with poor nutrition and, as a result, a lack of vitamin B and (thiamine).
Note. In TV shows and movies, blows to the head are portrayed as a quick way to lose one's memory. In fact, after mild traumatic brain injuries - concussions, for example, do not lead to loss of consciousness - people rarely have large memory lapses, and those that do appear, of course, disappear after a few days or months. Conversely, nearly half of all severe traumatic brain injuries cause chronic learning and memory problems, both anterograde and retrograde. When memories finally return, the earlier ones tend to return first.
- dementia(affect both memory and other cognitive functions, such as abstract thinking or speech).
Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia and usually affects people over the age of 65. It may first manifest itself in middle age, but more often it affects after 65 years, its prevalence increases sharply among people aged 80 years. It can last 20 years or more. It begins with minor memory impairment, weakening of attention, speech and communication problems. As symptoms worsen, the person begins to have difficulty completing complex tasks or forget important appointments.
In the end, patients have difficulty performing simple tasks, they forget about events that are more distant in time, and personality changes often become very noticeable in them. For example, a person may become unusually aggressive.
People with Alzheimer's disease may initially deny that they are experiencing any difficulties, but soon become anxious and depressed due to their mental state. With the development of dementia, they become less aware of their shortcomings. In the later stages of the disease, they may refuse to communicate with others, have poor orientation in time and space, often wander aimlessly and lose their sanity. Gradually, patients become completely dependent on the people around them. They may lose almost all their previous knowledge and the ability to recognize the faces of even close relatives. They sleep worse at night and doze off during the day. The last phase of the disorder can last from two to five years, and patients need constant care.
Victims of Alzheimer's usually remain in fairly good health until the advanced stages of the disease. But with the weakening of their mental functions, they become less active and spend most of their time in a sitting position or lying in bed. As a result, they become prone to various diseases, such as pneumonia, which can end in death.
Most organic memory disorders affect mainly declarative memory (memory for names, dates, what facts) than procedural memory (learned techniques that a person performs without having to think about them: walking, cutting with scissors, or writing).

Memory disorders are one of the complex neuropsychiatric disorders that complicate life. Memory lapses in older people are a natural process of aging. Some disorders are correctable, others are a symptom of a more severe comorbidity.

Memory impairment in psychology

Mental memory disorders are a group of qualitative and quantitative disorders in which a person either stops memorizing, recognizing and reproducing information, or there is a noticeable decrease in these functions. In order to understand how certain disorders affect a person's memorization of information, it is important to understand what memory is. So, memory is the highest mental function that includes a complex of cognitive abilities: memorization, storage, reproduction.

The most common memory disorders are:

• hypomnesia– decrease or weakening;
• paramnesia– errors in memory;
• – event dropout (before or after).

Causes of memory disorder

Why are memory disorders observed? There are many reasons for this, both psychological and pathological, a traumatic effect on a person. Memory impairment - psychological causes:

• psycho-emotional overstrain;
• overwork due to mental or hard physical work;
• a psychotrauma that once occurred that caused a defensive reaction - displacement;

Disorders of memory functions - causes of an organic nature:

• prolonged toxic effects on the brain of alcohol, drugs;
• unfavorable ecology;
• various circulatory disorders (stroke, atherosclerosis, hypertension);
• brain oncology;
• viral infections;
• Alzheimer's disease;
• congenital mental illnesses and genetic mutations.

External influences:

• traumatic brain injury;
• difficult childbirth with the imposition of forceps on the baby's head.

Types of memory impairment

Many people are familiar with the concept of amnesia, because the word itself very often appears in various films or TV shows, where one of the characters loses his memory or pretends not to remember anything, but meanwhile, amnesia is just one type of memory impairment. All types of memory disorders are usually divided into two large groups:

1. quantitative hypermnesia, amnesia, hypomnesia.
2. quality– confabulation, contamination, cryptomnesia, pseudo-reminiscence.

Cognitive memory disorder

Memory refers to the cognitive functions of the human brain. Any violations of memory disorders will be cognitive and leave an imprint on all human thought processes. Cognitive memory disorders are usually divided into 3 types:

• lungs- amenable to medical correction;
• medium- occur earlier than in old age, but are not critical, often associated with other diseases;
• heavy- these disorders occur with general brain damage, for example, as a result of progressive dementia.

Quantitative memory disorders

Memory impairment - dysmnesias (quantitative disorders) are divided into several types by psychiatrists. The largest group is made up of various kinds of amnesia, in which memory loss occurs for a certain period of time. Types of amnesia:

• retrograde- occurs on the events preceding the traumatic, painful situation (for example, the period before the onset of an epileptic seizure);
• anterograde(temporal) - there is a fallout of events after a traumatic situation has occurred, the patient does not remember the period when he got to the hospital;
• fixative- memory impairment, in which current impressions are not remembered, a person at this moment can be completely disoriented in space and after a few seconds all actions in the current moment are forgotten by the patient forever;
• congrade - loss of state memory during delirium, oneiroid, amnesia in this case can be total or fragmentary;
• episodic - it also happens in healthy people when tired, for example, in drivers who are on the road for a long time, when they remember, they can vividly remember the beginning and end of the path, forgetting what happened in between;
• children's- the inability to remember events that occur before the age of 3 - 4 years (normal);
• intoxication- with alcohol and drug intoxication;
• hysterical(catatim) - exclusion from the memory of traumatic events;
• affective- loss of events occurring during the affect.

Quantitative memory disorders include the following disorders:

• hypomnesia("Hidden memory") - the patient remembers only important events, in healthy people this can be expressed in weakness of memory for dates, names, terms;
• hypermnesia- an increased ability to remember past events that are irrelevant at the moment.

Short-term memory impairment

Psychiatry associates short-term memory disorders with many factors and causes, more often with concomitant diseases and stress factors. Short-term or primary, active memory is an important component of memory in general, its volume is 7 ± 2 units, and the retention of incoming information is 20 seconds, if there is no repetition, the trace of information after 30 seconds becomes very fragile. Short-term memory is very vulnerable, and in amnesia there is a loss of memory of events that happened from 15 seconds to 15 minutes ago.

Memory and speech impairment

Hearing-speech memory is based on the images captured by the auditory analyzer and the memorization of various sounds: music, noise, speech of another person, pronounced memory and speech disorders are characteristic of mentally retarded children and due to damage to the left temporal lobe of the brain during trauma or stroke, which leads to acoustic syndrome. - mnestic aphasia. Oral speech is poorly perceived by patients and out of 4 words spoken aloud reproduces only the first and last (edge ​​effect).

Thinking and memory disorders

All cognitive functions of the brain are interconnected, and if one function is disturbed, over time, others begin to suffer along the chain. Memory and intelligence disorders are observed in Alzheimer's disease, senile dementia. If we consider how a violation occurs, it can be cited as an example that a person performs many operations in his mind, which are stored in the form of experience with the help of short-term and long-term memory. With memory impairments, this experience synthesized by memory and thinking is lost.

Memory and attention disorder

All disorders of attention and memory have a negative impact on the memorization of events, situations and information. Types of impaired memory and attention:

• functional- occur when it is impossible to focus on a certain action, which is manifested by a deterioration in memorization, which is typical for ADHD in children, stress;
• organic- with oligophrenia, Down's syndrome, the development of dementia in the elderly.

Memory disorders in brain lesions

With the defeat of different parts of the brain, memory disorders have different clinical manifestations:

• defeat of the hippocampus and the "Peypets circle" - there is a gross amnesia for current everyday events, disorientation in space and time, patients complain that everything falls out of memory, and they are forced to write everything down in order to remember;
• damage to the medial and basal parts of the frontal lobes - characterized by confabulations and memory errors, patients are uncritical of their amnesia;
• local lesions of the convexital departments - a violation of the mnestic function in any particular area;
• memory impairment after a stroke can be verbal (the patient cannot remember the names of objects, names of loved ones), visual - there is no memory for faces and shapes.

Memory impairment in a child

Basically, memory development disorders in children are associated with asthenic syndrome, which together represents high psycho-emotional stress, anxiety and depression. An unfavorable psychological climate, early deprivation, hypovitaminosis are also provoking amnesia in children. Often, children manifest hypomnesia, expressed in poor assimilation of educational material or other information, while along with memory impairment, all cognitive functions suffer.

Memory impairment in the elderly

Senile dementia or senile memory disorder, popularly referred to as senile insanity, is one of the most common memory disorders in the elderly. Dementia is also associated with diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Pick's. In addition to amnesia, the extinction of all thought processes is observed, dementia sets in with the degradation of the personality. Adverse factors in the development of dementia are cardiovascular disease, atherosclerosis.

Symptoms of memory impairment

The symptoms of disorders are varied and depend on the forms in which memory disorders are manifested, in general, the symptoms can be as follows:

• loss of information, skills, both ordinary (brushing teeth) and related to the profession;
• disorientation in time and space;
• stable gaps for the “before” and “after” events;
• palimpsest - loss of individual events when intoxicated;
• confabulation - the replacement of memory gaps with information of a fantastic nature, in which the patient believes.

Diagnosis of memory disorders

The main memory disorders should be diagnosed by a doctor in order not to miss a serious concomitant disease (tumors, dementia, diabetes). Standard diagnostics includes a comprehensive examination:

• blood tests (general, biochemistry, hormones);
• magnetic resonance imaging (MRI);
• computed tomography (CT);
• positron emission tomography (PET).

Psychodiagnostics of memory disorders is based on the methods of A.R. Luria:

1. Learning 10 words. Diagnosis of mechanical memory. The psychologist or psychiatrist slowly calls out 10 words in order and asks the patient to repeat in any order. The procedure is repeated 5 times, and when repeated, the doctor notes how many of the 10 words were correctly named. Normally, after the 3rd repetition, all words are remembered. An hour later, the patient is asked to repeat 10 words (normally 8-10 words should be reproduced).
2. Associative series "words + pictures". Violations of logical memory. The therapist names the words and asks the patient to pick up a picture for each word, for example: a cow - milk, a tree - a forest. An hour later, the patient is presented with pictures with a request to name the words corresponding to the image. The number of words and the complexity-primitiveness in the compilation of the associative series are estimated.

Memory is the mental process of remembering, as well as the preservation and ability to subsequently reproduce past life experience. Memory is the most important adaptation tool. It allows a person for a long time, sometimes for many years, to retain thoughts, past sensations, conclusions, acquired skills. Memory is the main mechanism of the intellect and its support.

Memory disorders most often occur in the presence of organic pathologies and are persistent, sometimes irreversible. Pathologies can be symptomatic, accompanying other areas of the psyche. Temporary memory impairment most often occurs with impaired consciousness.

The main classifications of disorders, memory disorders

Usually they are divided into quantitative (dysmnesia) and qualitative (paramnesia). The first group includes hypermnesia, hypomnesia, various types of amnesia. That is, memory disorders are not only perceived by society in everyday life. The second group includes pseudo-reminiscences, confabulations, cryptomnesia, echomnesia. Let's take a closer look at this classification:

Dysmnesia:

Hypermnesia

It is characterized by involuntary, disorderly actualization of past experience. At the same time, past memories emerge in great detail, interfering with the assimilation of everyday information. The patient is distracted from new impressions, his thinking productivity worsens.

Hypomnesia

The condition is characterized by a significant weakening of memory, and all components suffer. The patient hardly remembers names, dates. A person forgets and cannot remember the main details of past events. People suffering from hypomnesia cannot reproduce information from the recent past. They try to write down simple data that they previously could remember and recall without difficulty. The cause of this pathology is most often vascular diseases of the brain, for example, atherosclerosis.

Forms of amnesia

Amnesia is understood as a collective term denoting a whole group of memory disorders with the loss of some of its parts.

retrograde amnesia

Means a disorder that develops before the onset of the underlying disease. Often found in acute vascular diseases of the brain. It is characterized by the loss of memories of the period of time that immediately precedes the development of the disease.

Congrade amnesia

With it, memory is lost almost completely for the entire period of the disease. it is not so much a consequence of certain memory disorders as it is considered the inability to perceive any information. such a disorder is observed in patients in a coma.

Anterograde amnesia

It develops against the background of events that occurred after an acute period of manifestations of the disease. At the same time, a person is quite accessible to contacts, can quite adequately answer questions. However, after some period of time, he can no longer remember the events that occurred the day before.

Fixation amnesia

This disorder is characterized by a sharp decrease or complete loss of the ability to retain information received in memory. Such people do not remember very recently events, some words. But they remember well what happened before the main disease, and they also retain their professional skills well.

progressive amnesia

This disorder is most often observed with progressive organic brain damage. It is characterized by successive loss of ever deeper layers of memory. In this case, hypomnesia first occurs, then amnesia for recent events is observed, after which the person begins to forget events that have occurred long ago. Organized knowledge, emotional impressions, as well as the simplest automatic skills are the last to be erased from memory.

Paramnesia

These memory disorders include distortions or distortions of the content of past memories.

Pseudoreminescences

Characterized by the replacement of lost memories with others when the events actually happened, but they were in a different time period.

Confabulations

They are observed when memory lapses are replaced by fictional events. They are evidence that a person is losing the ability to critically comprehend the situation, evaluate it. Such patients forget that the events that pop up in their memory never happened, they never happened. Patients are sincerely sure that such fantastic events definitely took place.

Cryptomnesia

A pathological disorder of memory, in which the missing ranks of memories are replaced by fictitious events, once read, heard, seen in a dream. In this regard, cryptomnesia is not so much the loss of information itself, but the loss of the ability to determine its source. In this state, patients can sincerely appropriate the creation of any works of art, scientific discoveries.

Echomnesia (Pick's reduplicating paramnesia)

It is characterized by the feeling that what is happening in the present moment has already happened in the past. Such conditions often accompany organic diseases of the brain, especially when the parietotemporal region is affected.

For the treatment of disorders, drugs are used that improve the microcirculation of the brain, restore the metabolism of brain cells, and stimulate active memorization.

Svetlana, www.site

Memory is one of the most important functions of the central nervous system, the ability to store, store and reproduce the necessary information. Memory impairment is one of the symptoms of neurological or neuropsychiatric pathology, and may be the only criterion of the disease.

Memory happens short-term And long-term. short term memory postpones the seen, heard information for several minutes, more often without comprehending the content. long term memory analyzes the received information, structures it and postpones it for an indefinite period.

The causes of memory impairment in children and adults may be different.

Causes of memory impairment in children : frequent colds, anemia, traumatic brain injury, stressful situations, alcohol consumption, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, congenital mental retardation (for example, with Down syndrome).

Causes of memory impairment in adults :

• Acute disorders of cerebral circulation (ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes)
• Chronic disorders of cerebral circulation - dyscirculatory encephalopathy, most often the result of atherosclerotic vascular lesions and hypertension, when the brain is chronically deprived of oxygen. Dyscirculatory encephalopathy is one of the most common causes of memory loss in adults.
• Traumatic brain injury
• Dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system. It is characterized by a violation of the regulation of the cardiovascular, as well as the respiratory and digestive systems. May be an integral part of endocrine disorders. It occurs more often in young people and requires consultation with a neurologist and endocrinologist.
• stressful situations
• brain tumors
• Vertebrobasilar insufficiency (deterioration of brain function due to reduced blood flow in the vertebral and basilar arteries)
• Mental illness (schizophrenia, epilepsy, depression)
• Alzheimer's disease
• Alcoholism and drug addiction
• Memory disorders in intoxication and metabolic disorders, hormonal disorders

memory loss or hypomnesia often combined with the so-called asthenic syndrome, which is characterized by increased fatigue, nervousness, changes in blood pressure, headaches. Asthenic syndrome, as a rule, occurs with hypertension, craniocerebral injuries, autonomic dysfunctions and mental illness, as well as with drug addiction and alcoholism.

At amnesia some fragments of events fall out of memory. There are several types of amnesia:

1. retrograde amnesia- a memory impairment in which a fragment of an event that occurred before the injury falls out of the memory (more often this occurs after a TBI)
2. Anterograde amnesia- a memory impairment in which a person does not remember the event that occurred after the injury, before the injury, the events are stored in the memory. (this also happens after a traumatic brain injury)
3. Fixation amnesia- poor memory for current events
4. total amnesia- a person does not remember anything, even information about himself is erased.
5. progressive amnesia Unmanageable memory loss from present to past (common in Alzheimer's disease)

Hypermnesia — memory impairment, in which a person easily retains large amounts of information for a long time, is considered a variant of the norm if there are no other symptoms indicative of a mental illness (for example, epilepsy) or evidence of psychoactive substance use.

Decreased concentration

Memory and attention disorders also include the inability to focus on specific objects:

1. Attention instability or distractibility, when a person cannot concentrate on the topic under discussion (often combined with memory loss, occurs in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, in adolescence, with schizophrenia (hebephrenia, a form of schizophrenia))
2. Rigidity- slowness of switching from one topic to another (observed in patients with epilepsy)
3. Lack of concentration(may be a feature of temperament and behavior)

For all types of memory disorders, it is necessary to consult a general practitioner (neurologist, psychiatrist, neurosurgeon) for an accurate diagnosis. The doctor finds out whether the patient had a traumatic brain injury, whether memory impairment has been observed for a long time, what diseases the patient has (hypertension, diabetes mellitus), whether he uses alcohol and drugs.

The doctor may prescribe a complete blood count, analysis of biochemical blood parameters and blood tests for hormones to rule out memory impairment as a result of intoxication, metabolic and hormonal disorders; as well as MRI, CT, PET (positron emission tomography), in which you can see a brain tumor, hydrocephalus, and distinguish between vascular brain damage and degenerative ones. Ultrasound and duplex scanning of the vessels of the head and neck are necessary to assess the condition of the vessels of the head and neck; MRI of the vessels of the head and neck can also be done separately. EEG is essential for diagnosing epilepsy.

Treatment of memory disorders

After establishing the diagnosis, the doctor proceeds to treat the underlying disease and correct cognitive impairment.

Acute (ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke) and chronic (dyscirculatory encephalopathy) cerebrovascular insufficiency are a consequence of cardiovascular diseases, so therapy should be directed to the underlying pathological processes of cerebrovascular insufficiency: arterial hypertension, atherosclerosis of the main arteries of the head, heart disease.

The presence of hemodynamically significant atherosclerosis of the main arteries requires the appointment of antiplatelet agents (acetylsalicylic acid at a dose of 75-300 mg / day, clopidogrel at a dose of 75 mg / day.

The presence of hyperlipidemia (one of the most important indicators of hyperlipidemia is elevated cholesterol), which cannot be corrected by diet, requires the appointment of statins (Simvastatin, Atorvastatin).

It is important to combat risk factors for cerebral ischemia: smoking, physical inactivity, diabetes mellitus, obesity.

In the presence of cerebrovascular insufficiency, it is advisable to prescribe drugs that act mainly on small vessels. This so-called neuroprotective therapy. Neuroprotective therapy refers to any strategy that protects cells from death due to ischemia (lack of oxygen).

Nootropic drugs are divided into neuroprotective drugs and direct-acting nootropics.

TO neuroprotective drugs include:

1. Phosphodiesterase inhibitors: Eufillin, Pentoxifylline, Vinpocetine, Tanakan. The vasodilating effect of these drugs is due to an increase in cAMP (a special enzyme) in the smooth muscle cells of the vascular wall, which leads to relaxation and an increase in their lumen.
2. Calcium channel blockers: Cinnarizine, Flunarizine, Nimodipine. It has a vasodilating effect due to a decrease in the calcium content inside the smooth muscle cells of the vascular wall.
3. Blockers of α 2-adrenergic receptors: Nicergoline. This drug eliminates the vasoconstrictive effect of adrenaline and norepinephrine.
4. Antioxidants — a group of drugs that slow down the processes of so-called oxidation that occur during ischemia (lack of oxygen) of the brain. These drugs include: Mexidol, Emoksipin.

TO direct acting nootropics relate:

1. Neuropeptides. They contain amino acids (proteins) necessary to improve the functioning of the brain. One of the most used drugs in this group is Cerebrolysin. According to modern concepts, the clinical effect occurs when this drug is administered at a dose of 30-60 ml intravenously per 200 ml of saline, 10-20 infusions are needed per course. Also this group of drugs includes Cortexin, Actovegin.
2. One of the first drugs to improve memory was Piracetam (Nootropil), belongs to the group of nootropics that have a direct effect. It increases the resistance of brain tissue to hypoxia (lack of oxygen), improves memory, mood in sick and healthy people due to the normalization of neurotransmitters (biologically active chemicals through which nerve impulses are transmitted). Recently, the appointment of this drug in early prescribed dosages is considered ineffective, to achieve a clinical effect, a dosage of 4-12 g / day is necessary, it is more advisable to intravenously administer 20-60 ml of piracetam per 200 ml of saline, 10-20 infusions are needed per course.

Herbal preparations to improve memory

Ginkgo biloba extract (Bilobil, Ginko) refers to drugs that improve cerebral and peripheral circulation

If it's about dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, in which there is also a violation of the nervous system due to insufficient absorption of oxygen by the brain, then nootropic drugs can also be used, as well as, if necessary, sedatives and antidepressants. With arterial hypotension, it is possible to use such herbal preparations as tincture of ginseng, Chinese magnolia vine. Physiotherapy and massage are also recommended. With dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, it is also necessary to consult an endocrinologist in order to exclude a possible pathology of the thyroid gland.

Therapy with nootropic drugs is used for any memory impairment, taking into account the correction of the underlying disease.

Therapist Evgenia Kuznetsova

Memory is a mental process of capturing, preserving and reproducing past experience.

The strength of memory depends on the degree of concentration of attention on the incoming information, the emotional attitude (interest) to it, as well as on the general condition of the person, the degree of training, the nature of mental processes. A person's conviction that the information is useful, combined with his increased activity in memorizing it, is an important condition for the assimilation of new knowledge.

Types of memory according to the storage time of the material:
1) instantaneous (iconic) - thanks to this memory, a complete and accurate picture of what the sense organs have only perceived is retained for 0.1-0.5 s, while no processing of the information received is performed;
2) short-term (KP) - is able to store information for a short period of time and in a limited amount.
Typically, most people have a CP volume of 7 ± 2 units.
In the CP, only the most significant information, a generalized image, is recorded;
3) operational (OP) - functions for a predetermined time (from several seconds to several days) depending on the task that needs to be solved, after which the information can be erased;
4) long-term (LT) - information is stored for an indefinitely long period.
DP contains the material that a practically healthy person must remember at any time: his name, patronymic, surname, place of birth, capital of the Motherland, etc.
In humans, DP and CP are inextricably linked.

Memory disorders

Hypomnesia- violation of short-term memory (memory loss, forgetfulness).
Fixation hypomnesia is a disorder in remembering current events.
Hypomnesia is normal with severe fatigue, psychopathy, alcoholism, drug addiction.

Amnesia- Violation of long-term memory (memory loss, memory loss).
Retrograde amnesia is the disappearance from memory of events preceding the trauma.
Anterograde amnesia is the disappearance from memory of events following the injury.
Congrade amnesia - loss of memory only for a period of direct impairment of consciousness.
Perforation amnesia (palimpsest) - loss of memory for part of the events.
Amnesia occurs in organic brain lesions, neurotic disorders (dissociative amnesia), alcoholism, drug addiction.

Paramnesia- distorted and false memories (memory errors).
Pseudo-reminiscences(illusions of memory, paramnesia) - erroneous memories of events.
Confabulations(memory hallucinations) - memories of what was not.
Cryptomnesia- inability to remember the source of information (the event was in reality, in a dream or a movie).
Paramnesias are found in schizophrenia, dementia, organic lesions, Korsakov's syndrome, progressive paralysis.

In addition, there is hypermnesia- pathological increased ability to memorize.
Hypermnesia occurs with manic syndrome, taking psychotropic drugs (marijuana, LSD, etc.), at the beginning of an epileptic seizure.

Ribot's Law

Ribot's Law- decrease in memory by the type of "memory reverse". With memory impairments, memories of recent events first become inaccessible, then the mental activity of the subject begins to be disturbed; feelings and habits are lost; finally, instinctive memory disintegrates. In cases of memory recovery, the same steps occur in reverse order.