How Your Long-Term MemoryWorks

In the last page, I described how your working short-term memory
takes in new information and then passes some of it on to your
long-term memory. In this chapter, I’ll describe how your long-term
memory works, so you will better understand the techniques used
for putting information into your long-term memory—and later, retrieving
information from there. Again I have drawn on the latest
findings from cognitive psychologists in writing this chapter.
You might think of your long-term memory as akin to a hard
drive on a computer, whereas your working memory is like your
RAM (random access memory), which you use in processing current
tasks and which has only a limited space. Your long-term memory
is very large, and contains everything you’ve ever put into it, from
experiences to images and information. You may have to do some
digging around to find specific information. Sometimes, as when
you’re struggling to recall something you haven’t thought about for
a very long time, you may think certain information has been deleted,
but it may well be there if you know how to retrieve it.