How does memory work in the brain?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: How does memory work in the brain?
Position‹2 of 5›: Memories are stored in multiple levels
Argument‹3 of 3: We store memory in our sensory memory

Sensory memory is a very brief storing of sensory information.

The argument

When our senses initially take in a stimulus, it is first stored in the sensory memory stage. Our entire surroundings are experienced by the senses, so sensory memory holds a vast amount of information about our environment — not a selection from it, but effectively all of what the senses register at a given moment. That completeness is what forces the trade-off that defines this stage: because it holds so much information, sensory memory retains that information for only a small period of time. A store that took in everything and also kept it would have nowhere to put the next moment's input. The durations differ by sense, and each is brief. Visual stimuli are stored in iconic memory as a brief image lasting a quarter to a half of a second. Auditory stimuli are stored in echoic memory as a sound lasting roughly four seconds. Haptic, or tactile, memory is the memory of touch, typically lasting around two seconds. In every case the window is long enough for the stimulus to be available for inspection, and short enough that it clears before the next one arrives. That brief availability is what the next step requires. With this large but fleeting store of information, our brains decide which stimuli are important to focus on — a judgement that can only be made about material already held somewhere, which is what sensory memory provides. The mind then focuses on the critical stimuli in sensory memory, encoding them and moving them to the next level, short-term memory. Everything not selected simply decays as its window closes. Sensory memory therefore functions less as a place where memories are kept than as the buffer from which the small fraction worth keeping is drawn.

Premises

[P1]Incoming stimuli are first held in sensory memory, which captures vast information about our whole environment but only for a very brief period. [P2] This brief store is subdivided by sense, iconic (visual, a fraction of a second), echoic (auditory, about four seconds), and haptic (touch, about two seconds), from which the brain selects important stimuli to encode into short-term memory. [C] Therefore, sensory memory is one of the multiple levels at which the brain stores memory.

Counter-arguments

Some proponents have suggested that sensory memory does not exist. The brain simply takes in sensory information and adds relevant information to the short term memory. Sensory memory is an unnecessary subgroup that over-complicates the matter; sensory information either moves through our senses and is forgotten or is focused upon and remembered.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Sensory memory isn't real; it is just the beginning of short term memory.