58215621010

Salud Mental
ISSN: 0185-3325
perezrh@imp.edu.mx
Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Ramón de la
Fuente Muñiz
México

Carrillo-Mora, Paul
Sistemas de memoria: reseña histórica, clasificación y conceptos actuales. Primera parte: Historia,
taxonomía de la memoria, sistemas de memoria de largo plazo: la memoria semántica
Salud Mental, vol. 33, núm. 1, enero-febrero, 2010, pp. 85-93
Instituto Nacionalde Psiquiatría Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz
Distrito Federal, México

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Salud Mental 2010;33:85-93

Sistemas de memoria: reseña histórica, clasificación y conceptos actuales

Sistemas de memoria: reseña histórica,
clasificación y conceptos actuales.
Primera parte: Historia, taxonomía de la memoria, sistemas
de memoria de largo plazo: la memoria semántica
Paul Carrillo-Mora1
Actualización por temas

SUMMARY
Memory is a fascinatingbrain function by means of which the nervous
system can codify, store, organize, and recover a variety of information
relevant to the subject. The formal study of memory started more
than a century ago, providing in this time a considerable amount of
scientific information on memory functioning. The actual knowledge
of memory allow us to consider it far from being unique, isolated or
staticfunction, but more as a complex net of memory systems working
in parallel for a common goal. Historic evolution of memory concepts
and their classifications have progressed simultaneously to our
knowledge on these systems.
The first empiric approaches to memory description were found
in ancient Greece by authors like Plato and Aristoteles, and were based
on philosophy, thinking, and introspection andlogic methods. However,
the first real scientific approaches appeared in the XIX century, by
authors such as Ebbinghaus and Lashley, who initiated the experimental
study of memory in humans and animals, respectively.
The contribution of the intellectual group known as «behaviorist»
in the beginning of XX century, was also relevant during this period,
and was represented by scientists like Pavlov,Watson, Skinner, and
Thorndike, who detailed a variant of learning recognized in our days
as associative learning. In turn, this variant can be divided into classic
conditioning (associates a stimulus with a response) and instrumental
or operant conditioning (associates a stimulus with a specific
behavior). Behaviorists claimed that only on observational basis of
behavior is possible to knowprocesses linked to learning. However,
these authors clearly made a mistake when they stated that knowledge
on processes occurring in the brain will always be far of the
understanding of the investigator.
Later on, one of the hardest evidences for the study of memory
processes came from clinic studies of patients with focal cerebral
lesions. Penfield, Scoville, and Milner, during the 60’s, documented
theeffects of surgical lesions of temporal lobe on declarative memory,
finding selective alterations, such as severe anterograde amnesia
and retrograde amnesia with temporal gradient. These findings were
accompanied also by a description of memory subsystems remaining
intact, despite of those temporal lobe lesions (procedural memory,

1

long-term memory, etc.). Based on these findings, medialtemporal
lobe was described as a key structure for the acquisition of declarative
information. In parallel to clinic studies, a first attempt to coordinate
psycho-psychiatric research with the knowledge and scientific protocol
of biology occurred in the 60’s, thus allowing the emergence of
disciplines known as cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology
or psychophysiology, both created in an...