Short-term Memory - The Brain’s Sticky Note

The Brain’s Sticky Note

Perhaps we are looking at it the wrong way. Sure, the fleeting nature of short-term memory is not of great use when trying to remember a phone number, or more importantly, an important bit of information for an upcoming exam, what it helps us when we are trying to work things out.

You can think of our short term memory as a blackboard, or even a sticky note. For things we want to write down and keep, we use books or sheets of paper. However, what do we do when we want to leave a message for a friend. We use a sticky note on his or her computer screen. They read it, and then get rid of it. Our short term memory is very similar.

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Try this on for size, take the following numbers, 1,4,7,5,2,3 and add them up.

Take your time, we can wait.

Most of you would have done something similar to this,

1 plus 4 is 5, plus 7 is 12, plus 5 is 17, plus 2 is 19 and plus 3 is 22. (ps I did check this with a calculator. It would be highly embarrassing to get this wrong in the book!)

Of all these number, the only important one is 22. The others need to be kept for as long as we need to use them. Like the sticky note, we use it and then get rid of it. Fortunately, dumping short term memory is better for the environment!