Your Hippocampus turns short-term memories into long-term ones

As you read this article, you store
the words at the beginning of each
sentence in your short-term memory
while you work your way through to
the end, enabling you to understand
the text. At the same time, you are
probably ignoring the feeling of the
glossy pages against your skin as you hold
the bookazine.
Short-term memory acts somewhat
like a gatekeeper between incoming
sensory information and long-term
storage. You are constantly bombarded by
information, and the incoming traces from
your sensory receptors last for just
fractions of a second before they are lost.
You don’t have time to process all of it; so
short-term memory allows you to pass
small amounts of important information in
a temporary loop while your brain decides
what to do with it.
Short-term memory has two major
limitations; the fi rst is that you can only
store a small amount of information, and
the second is that the memory decays
over time. If you pay attention, your shortterm
memory can hold around four
chunks of new information for between
ten and 20 seconds, but if you are
distracted, you will rapidly forget it all.
Rehearsing the information inside your
head effectively resets the timer and
restarts the memory loop, allowing you to
extend this time. A part of the brain called
the hippocampus then decides which bits
are important enough to be committed to
longer-term storage, and the others are
quickly forgotten.