Memories are best recalled when they can be organized with "tags" of patterns, emotions, sensations, unexpected patterns or gists/generalizations. Unfortunately strings of information just by themselves often fail to get engraved deep in the brain with the necessary thick, linking neuron connections needed for effective brain cell recall.
This saving process is managed by the hippocampus, by translating short term memories to longer term ones. According to a New York Times article, researchers have shown that our buffer or caching process is limited to 5 to 9 chunks of data at a time. Anxiety and its related "danger" hormones can actually freeze recall by shutting down the frontal lobe process of accessing stored memories and enabling more energy for "fight or flight."
Practice, practice and more practice thankfully can strengthen and improve memory recall but the actual buffer or cache process itself is more resistant to improvement. In future posts we will investigate what can be done to improve how memories get temporarily cached and then recalled.- NeuBrain
Read more about this at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/17/science/17angi.html?_r=1 (may require an online account)
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