There is a saying in neuroscience, “cells that fire together, wire together”. This is talking about learning, which is a means of association between two or more things, concepts, or pieces of information.
Let’s take pavlov’s Dog as an example.
Every time Pavlov fed his dog supposedly, he would ring a bell. Over time, within the dogs brain, connections formed between hearing a bell noise and the presence of food.
There comes a point where, you can simply ring the bell, and the association between bell and food is so strong that the dogs mouth will salivate (presumably because they are now thinking of the food they will get) if the bell is ringing.
Now, to recall might be a similar process, but, it would depend on the information being recalled. There are different kinds of memory, which are encoded differently, with different propensities for recall.
I am going to post a quote here with some information regarding the process, which is explained in fairly rudimentary neuroscience terms.
Memory retrievalEdit
Memory networks can be fully or partially activated by associated stimuli, such as this picture of Friedrich Nietzsche
The basis of memory recall is a re-creation of that memory. As shown by the discussion of LTP in long-term memory, memories are stored as patterns of neural network activation across the brain, such that those networks encode the information of the event (information as in the sights, sounds, details, etc.). Once some sort of stimulus causes a part of one of these memory networks to become activated, the strength of the connections between members of that network cause the entire network to become activated too, thereby recalling the memory experience. In contrast to this full re-creation of the memory experience generated by complete activation of the memory network, partial activation of a network can lead to unconscious recognition or presque vu.
An example of recognition would be seeing a picture of Friedrich Nietzsche, then from that remembering his name, some basic facts about his life, etc. In this example, the picture acts as the stimulus which can crudely be seen as activating some part of your 'Friedrich Nietzsche network'. If the strength of the connections in this network is strong, then this stimulus will cause the whole network to reactivate, thus accounting for your ability to recall facts about Nietzsche, such as what books he wrote, when he lived, etc. If these connections are not as strong, there may only be partial activation of the Nietzsche network, leading to moments where the person's name is on the 'tip of your tongue', and the only way to access it is to try to activate more of the network. For example, just seeing Nietzsch's face may not be enough to trigger recall of his name, but add to that some vague recollection of 19th century philosophers, something about the word Übermensch, and then suddenly there is enough of the 'Nietzsche network' activated to be able to retrieve his name.
A secondary point which is worth mentioning is that because the brain is a dynamic, ever-changing system, memories are prone to be altered during recall. The reason behind this is that the memory network is being activated at the same time other networks are being activated by the present world. For example, you may recall a favorite camping trip you went on as a child at the same time you are happening to eat a graham cracker. If a neuron from the 'camping trip network' should form a strong connection during this time to a neuron associated with experiencing the graham cracker, then part of the experience of eating a graham cracker may accidentally fuse into the memory's network. So potentially years later when recalling that same camping trip, at the end you may distinctly remember eating graham crackers over the campfire, when in fact this never happened.|}
Taken from
https://en.m.wikiversity.org/w/index.ph ... §ion=5