So, this is quite a famous diagram capturing one conception of how information travels through your head. So, you start off with sensory input what you see, what you hear, what you feel, and then it ends up in sensory memory, and sensory memory is a very short-term storage. If there's a flash of lightning, and you close your eyes and there's an afterimage, that's a form of sensory memory. If I say something to you and you hold the last words in your head, that sensory memory too, and sometimes if somebody says to you. "Well you're not listening to me," and then you can kind of reach back and parrot back what they said even if you really weren't listening to them, because some of this acoustic sensory memory exist. What you attend to ends up in your short-term memory or your working memory. This is of course short-term memory that is not somehow rehearsed or understood, gets quickly lost. You can hold things in short-term memory through what's called maidens rehearsal. So, if I give you a phone number, 5206889056, you can hold it in your head 5206689056889056, and you could walk around holding it in your head like that. Some of the stuff then goes on to long-term memory, and long-term memory is storage for a long duration. The connection between working memory, short-term memory and long-term memory goes both ways. Stuff from short-term memory could end up in long-term memory, and stuff that's in long-term memory could end backup into working memory. To some extent, many psychologists identify working memory with consciousness. So, working memory is your experience of what things are, of how the world works. Now the most obvious way in which long-term memory and short-term memory differ is their storage. Long-term memory has virtually unlimited storage. Every word you know the meaning of in every language you understand is in long-term memory, all of these faces you recognize, every story, every joke, the plot of every TV program all of the various episodes in your life are all stored in long-term memory. It has to have a limit because long-term memory as part of your finite rein, and finite things have a limit, but people will never reach that limit. Short-term memory in contrast has a very limited storage capacity. So, here it goes don't cheat, I'm going to give you a list of numbers 14, 59, 11, 109, 43, 58, 98, 487, 25, 389, 54, 16. So, try to remember them. You could try to rehearse it in your head frantically repeating the numbers, but it's actually too long to do so, and unless you somehow incorporate this into your long-term memory, you're going to lose it, it's going to slip away. In fact, the storage of short-term memory has been described by George Miller as seven plus or minus two, that's sometimes called the magic number, which means it ranges from five to nine depending on the person, and depending on the situation. Now, a perfectly good question at this point is seven plus one minus two, what? The answer is chunks, and chunks are basic memory units. Your knowledge of what counts as a unit, what makes a single thing determines how many chunks, something, a display or a list can break down into. You will get more efficient at packing information into chunks as a result of learning. So, take this example, suppose you don't know anything about French and you get the string of letters, L-A-M-A-I-S-O-N. Well, if you just try to remember each letter separately, that's eight chunks and you're pushing the limits of short-term memory. Another handy you could break it up into four English words, LA-MA-IS-ON, let's pretend la and ma are English words, now it's four chunks. But if you know French, It's LA MAISON, the house, and now it is a single chunk. In general, there's a lot of evidence suggesting that people's memory gets better as they become experts. Football coaches have an excellent memory for football diagrams, architects for logical floor plans, and chess players for chess patterns. So, if you don't know anything about chess and I show you this, it's impossible to memorize, it's a bunch of figures in an arbitrary location, but if you do know chess and the pieces fall into a logical sensible configuration, may be this is the 15th mover the Fibonacci attack. I just made that up, I don't know anything about chess. But if it makes sense to you, you could glance at this and memorize it, not because your short-term memory is more powerful in general than a non chess expert, but rather because you break this down into a single chunk. So, how much you store into your consciousness critically depends on your knowledge.
