Short And Long Term Memory

This is going to be a fun one.

Let’s talk about long term and short term memory.

In order to understand how our brains work how efficient learning happens we need to understand these

two topics.

So what are they.

Well long term memory is stored in different regions of our brain.

These memories are all over our brain in different spots the way we create long term memories is to

create that memory and then continue to revisit it a few times in order to make that stronger and stronger

connection in our neurons.

We need to practice and repeat.

Just like riding a bicycle right.

We learned to ride a bike by practicing it practicing it practicing it over and over.

And although you might take five years in between riding a bike you’ll always know how to ride that

bike because you’ve done it over and over and over long term memory is formed by practicing and repeating

and long term memory is extremely important when it comes to knowledge and learning because that’s where

you put fundamental concepts and principles that guide your life.

When you learn something new in school you usually use your long term memory to remember things that

you’ve learned in the past.

Maybe basic math concepts maybe geography and using those concepts and principles to learn something

new.

These fundamental concepts and principles are stored in your long term memory so that as we grow older.

In an ideal situation we’re able to learn things better and faster and connect them to different parts

of our brain.

But how do we get this long term memory in the first place.

Right.

Well we need to start off with a short term memory and short term memory is also sometimes called a

working memory although they’re slightly different for our purposes and working memory and short term

memory actually described different processes.

Short term memory and working memory usually involve our prefrontal cortex.

So that is the front part of our brain unlike long term memory which is all over our brain working memory

and short term memory is just involved in the front part of our brain.

And scientists discover that we can usually hold what we call for chunks of information when working

with short term memory.

That’s why when we need to go to the grocery store and somebody told us hey can you buy apples carrots

oranges and grapes.

You have to repeat those in your mind to not forget or when you’re given a phone number.

It’s often easy to remember four numbers but any more than four it becomes difficult.

For example 4 7 1 9 if you repeat that you should be able to repeat it now.

But if I gave you 8 1 7 2 3 0 5 6 and tell you to repeat that one minute from now that second one is

gonna be a lot harder because our brain can hold usually just for chunks in short term memory or working

memory.

But the connection between this short term and long term is important.

You want to move this short term memory to long term memory.

That’s how long term memories form.

Initially there in the short term and then over repeated use it gets stored in long term memory.

Now you can do this using a technique called spaced repetition which we’re going to talk about a lot

in this course.

The idea is to repeat something over several days which means doing something 20 times in one day is

not going to be as good as doing something 20 times over 20 days each day doing that one thing once.

That’s why we don’t want to cram for an exam.

We want to do small things repeatedly over time.

Remember what we learned about neurons and strengthening the connections of those neurons in our brain.

That’s the process of putting things into long term memory.

The more things you can connect a concept with the more connections form the stronger those connections

form.

Let’s use an example let’s say we want to learn about the God Ra the god of sun when it comes to ancient

Egyptians.

How can we store raw into long term memory.

Well we now hold raw into to our short term memory and one of our four chunks.

But now we need to connect raw and repeat the idea that is raw into different parts of our brain now

we might revisit this speech tomorrow and then the next day and then the next day until that memory

sticks but we can also connect it to different concepts that we have already in our brain and our long

term memory.

For example Egypt and the God of RA how can we remember him.

Well you can associate it with that time that you went to Egypt to see the pyramids or maybe associated

that time that you met somebody at Halloween who was wearing this exact skirt or maybe you remember

that time that you had Rahman and it was really really hot.

And that Rahman kind of sounds like Ra and RA sun it’s hot ramen you make those weird connections in

your brain and that’s how you’re going to remember rock.

And I guarantee you by the end of this course you’re going to remember ra as the god of sun because

I just talked about hot ramen so let’s go back.

We know that short term memory is for something that you’re currently working on and when you need to

bring long term memory into something like working memory you can sometimes solve problems that are

currently in the working short term memory by using the concepts and principles you learned that are

stored in your long term memory.

So the process is often that the long term memory we use recall to recall some long term memory and

then we use the short term memory to consolidate and reconcile our knowledge and then we practice and

repeat over several days to add things into long term memory just like we learned our brain needs to

be trained and memory is just like a muscle our brain is a muscle that can be trained.

Now the sad thing is as humans we forget a lot of things that we learn over our lifetime and research

shows that within just one hour if nothing is done with new information that most people have forgotten

about 50 percent of what they learned after 24 hours this amount increases to 70 percent.

And if a week passes without that information being used up to 90 percent of it could be lost.

That’s scary right.

So to improve knowledge acquisition and learning and retention new information must be consolidated

and securely stored in our long term memory.

You will notice that what we’ve learned up until now actually helps with this the idea of sleep of focus

and diffuse mode the idea of the Feynman technique to teach something to check that you know it.

To repeat it the idea of spaced repetition.

An important technique will discover in an upcoming video all allow us to move from short term memory

to long term memory so that we don’t lose what we’ve just learned.

I’ll see you in the next one.

By.