30 Days to a More Powerful Memory

Chapter 2. How Your Long-Term Memory Works

In the last chapter, 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 ...