We always have an innate curiosity about how our brains function, how we learn and how we remember. It’s not surprising to discover throughout hundreds of years of history, theories have been generated to explain the elusive qualities of the human brain. Aristotle thought that the heart was the source of memory and the brain served to cool the blood. In the mid 1660s, Descartes proposed that fluids in the ventricles of the brain controlled motor activity but human mental capabilities existed outside the brain in the mind. And as late as 1850, Franz Joseph Gall “reading” the innate propensities of people by feeling the lumps and bumps on their skulls, was all the rage. We may smile at the naivete of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, or Gall but we have our own modern myths. The brain is the organ of memory (learning) but we haven’t understood how it works for memory. The study of human brain and memory is vast, and this article helps to orient knowledge of memory to the lay the land in memory research. Complete coverage of the entire world of memory studies would be impossible in a single article. This article focuses primarily on the review of human brain and memory within the field of cognitive psychology.
