Remembering: Function, Tasks, Role & Diseases

Throughout life, humans inevitably go through an uncountable amount of events and experiences. The memory of these experiences is what makes a person and shapes him or her in later life. Thus, remembering is significantly involved in developments and changes – consciously or subconsciously.

What is remembering?

The memory of diverse experiences makes up a person and shapes him in his later life. Thus, remembering is significantly involved in developments and changes. Mistakes are there to be learned from. Memory and remembering are jointly responsible for this. The term refers to the storage and retrieval of past events. These are divided into experiences (episodes) and knowledge about these experiences (events). Recalling can be active or passive. Active recollection occurs when a person consciously tries to remember something that happened in the past. The reasons for this can vary, but are often related to narratives about the past or recapitulation of what happened. Passive and spontaneous memory, on the other hand, occurs randomly. This can happen when certain connections in the brain are triggered by associations, similar situations come up again, or a certain feeling is repeatedly evoked. Memories are thoroughly subjective and manipulable. They go hand in hand with the assessment and evaluation of experiences. Certain anchor points remain in memory, things that seem important and trigger emotions. Catastrophes, global events and private incidents that touch emotionally or remained active for a long time are stored in long-term memory. In addition, what a person stores depends on his or her current state of mind and what the brain selects and considers unimportant.

Function and task

Memories are not static, but changeable. Thus, above all, they fulfill an important social function. In social coexistence and everyday life, it is not always relevant what really happened: conversations about the past and the mutual influence of memories often shape social interaction and thus friendships and acquaintances. Moreover, remembering plays a significant role in growing up. If a person makes mistakes that burden him or trigger unpleasant consequences, he will remember them. This memory inevitably triggers a negative feeling and, at best, prevents the same mistakes from being made again. Thus, memory is a basic component of the learning process. Remembering, experiences and events make a person what he is. The past determines how a person is in the present, what experiences he has had and how he has dealt with them. Moreover, it is memory that makes interaction with other people possible. If the brain were to immediately delete what has been experienced, people would not be able to remember people. And this applies not only to people, but to everything that seems to be taken for granted in everyday life: the memory of places, trips, one’s own apartment, events, meetings – right down to the place where the refrigerator is located. Without memories, people would not even be able to remember what a refrigerator is for. In short, almost no living being is viable without memories. The span of the memory capacity is different however from living being to living being. Nevertheless, nobody will be able to remember everything he has experienced, because the brain also has a limited storage capacity. Unimportant things are forgotten over the years to make room for new memories.

Diseases and ailments

There are various factors that influence remembering. The individual’s current emotional state at the time of the event or the recording of events is often responsible for this. Memories are stored in multimedia form. This means that they run as images or films in the person’s memory. But smells, feelings and colors are also stored. The long-term memory (episodic memory) compresses the information. To access it, the brain has to reprocess the information. In this reprocessing, the period of time that lies between the moment of the event and the recollection plays a major role. In the meantime, various factors distort the relative authenticity of the experience.In addition, there may be an adaptation (assimilation) of different events that were experienced differently but evoked similar feelings. The similar perception leads to the fact that they can no longer be perceived separately from each other later on. Impaired memory is triggered, for example, by alcohol or drug use. Likewise, memories created during hypnosis are not reliable. The same applies to memories from infancy, as perception is different until the age of three.


A memory is particularly critical when it is associated with strong emotions. Over the years, emotions can accumulate and change. This leads not only at the time of the event to a possibly already distorted recording, but in the future to an even more disturbed memory. However, various diseases can also affect memory. For example, deficiency symptoms and stress are a frequent reason for lapses in memory. In addition to diseases such as dementia, which primarily affect the memory, accidents with craniocerebral trauma or strokes can also be reasons for lapses or amnesia. This also applies to almost all diseases that affect the brain. Even meningitis can cause memory loss. In the case of amnesia, physicians differentiate between various degrees of severity. Often the memory loss is only short-lived, but sometimes it is irreparable. In this case, memories cannot be restored.