Memory can be broadly divided into three types: sensory (immediate) memory, working (short-term) memory and long-term memory.
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Sensory, or immediate memory, is of all present occurrences such as noises and events that are seen as pictures in your mind. A sensory memory exists for different types of stimuli received through the senses. These are iconic memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for aural stimuli and haptic memory for touch. The sensory memory filters all the different stimuli received at a given instant in time and only passes to short-term memory what is of interest.
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Working, or short-term, memory enables the brain to evaluate the mass of incoming stimuli, or information and select what is to be retained and memorised and what is to be rejected. It is this part of the memory which enables us to temporarily recall any information currently under process, for example, if someone is speaking to you, it is only possible to understand them if you can recall what they said when they started speaking..
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Because working memory decays rapidly it only has a limited capacity. There are ways in which short-term memory can be improved. One of these techniques is known as chunking, for example, this is why a hyphenated telephone number is easier to memorise than a single long number, and this technique can lead to an increase, albeit temporarily, in short-term memory capacity.
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A hindrance to short-term memory, which all of us will have experienced many times, is interference. This is when your train of thought is interrupted thus causing a disturbance in short-term memory retention. It is, therefore, desirable to complete tasks involving short-term memory as quickly as possible and without interruption.
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Long-term memory is intended for the storage of information over a long period and involves things like telephone numbers, holiday plans, names and addresses, and memories evoked from the past. Information from the working memory is transferred to long-term memory after a few seconds and, unlike working memory, there is little decay.
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Long-term memory is divided into two sub-divisions, episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory is our memory of events and experiences from which we can recall and reconstruct actual events that took place at a given point in our lifetime. Semantic memory, on the other hand, is the structured record of facts and skills which we have acquired during our lifetime.
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The three main functions of long-term memory are storage, deletion and retrieval. Once a piece of information has been passed to long-term memory from working memory it is stored until such a time that it needs to be retrieved. Deletion is mainly caused by decay and interference, although it is argued that once stored a piece of information is in our long-term memory forever, however, it may become increasingly difficult to access certain items, and this is why much information may be recalled only with prompting.
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There are certain techniques by which we are all able to improve our memory. While
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