Optimal Recall ™

Memory Research

Researchers have been working on the problem of how memory works for years. Current theories identify that we have different types of memory - broadly classified as sensory, short-term & long-term memory. Each of these types of memory acts as a filter, feeding through from sensory to short-term to long-term memory.

Sensory memory can only hold memory for very short lengths of time (up to half a second), but it can hold a large amount of information and detail. Items held in the sensory memory can be transferred to the short-term memory, which can hold items for up to 60 seconds, however short-term memory has the ability to only store between 5 and 9 items. It is possible to trick the short-term memory to hold more items using a process called chunking.

Short-term memory then feeds facts into the most useful category of memory - long-term memory. Long-term memory can recall items for periods of time ranging from several minutes to several years, and it also have a very large capacity. Long-term memory can be be split into further categories, but we will consider it only as a single type of memory called semantic memory.