The all-time retention organisation may not be the one inside your head. Scientists are learning more than every day about the delicate nature of memories, including the rather sci-fi fact that they can be functionally erased. In one case you know that, information technology might brand you lot wonder only how much you can trust the wet stuff you use every day.

The answer is that you tin't really trust it, unless you really know how to use it. Then accept a moment to reflect on the critical flaws in your onboard wetware–and how to troubleshoot it.

Your temporary storage is mostly less than 10 things

How many things can you remember at any i time? The virtually-cited number is "seven, plus or minus two," as George Miller put information technology in a classic research newspaper. It was a stab at determining exactly how many things–digits, shapes, names, what have y'all–can be stored in what's called "working memory." Working memory is where your encephalon puts things that it'due south holding and processing temporarily. As soon every bit you're on to the next matter–conversation, browser tab, street cake–our brain dumps those previous seven things to work on the next set. Some people can shop nine things, some people just five, but the big median curve, every bit Miller saw it at the fourth dimension, was around seven items.

Since its publication and spread, the idea of a common number of things for every homo has been refuted and moved past. But the fact remains that your brain isn't the place to go on anything you can't human activity on very quickly.

The most accessible mode of optimizing your short set of things is to "chunk" those things, or compress many things into single things related to things stored in your long-term memory. Information technology's hard to remember a string of messages: FABOTWTRFOSQINGR. It's much easier to remember "Four each from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram." It's why telephone numbers are usually broken into three and 4-digit sequences.

It sounds simple, goofy, and more like a party trick than a existent strategy. But equally Joshua Foer notes in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, that exact chunking is the major (and maybe the only) difference in the thinking of chess grandmasters and the innumerable amateurs. When grandmasters expect at a board, they're looking at whole clusters of pawns and compressing them into "structures" and arrangements they know, making whole swaths of the board into single parts of their 7-item working memory. They could, therefore, retrieve entire boards at a time on a remarkably consistent basis. But evidence those chess masters random arrangements on a board, and they're but slightly better at recalling them than brand-new players. Chunking matters.

False memories can exist as strong as true memories

When something happens that'southward notable and unique, or emotional and stressful, our encephalon tends to write it to our long-term memory. That's good, merely the fashion it's written can pb to confusion after on. Information technology's something that constabulary detectives and prosecutors know all too well.

Dr. Caroline Racine, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of California San Francisco, says that our brains organize their neurons around associated features. If yous recite a listing of related words to a grouping–"dream, bed, midnight, tired"–and give it some time, most people will study they heard the discussion "sleep" in the list.

"We base many of our retentiveness judgements on information that seems familiar, even if nosotros tin can't specifically recall detaills from a detail fact or event," Racine wrote in an electronic mail. "[And so] if related information is introduced when discussing a particular retentiveness, that information can exist co-opted into that previous retentivity, because neurons that are firing together get wired as a specific memory." The more that parcel of neurons is accessed, either for recalling or hearing the story over again, the more real the fake parts will seem, according to Racine.

It'southward the same principle as to why memories can be "erased," why memoirs are so rife with falsities, and it's why y'all should (hopefully) call up to check your facts and archives, especially on the things you think you accept downward common cold.

Your mental library has a faulty card catalog

That said, your context-obsessed brain tin can recall information it learned just a brusk while ago, or sometimes farther dorsum. It simply needs the correct reminder, simply more than chiefly, it needs it at but the right time.

Sunil Vemuri, PhD graduate of the MIT Media Lab, studied the effectiveness of what's called spaced repetition, or feeding someone reminders and hints about something at specific intervals. Information technology powered his personal studying on "personal long-term retentiveness aids," and information technology'southward what somewhen became reQall, an app that works on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, but too through email, IM, voicemail messages, and nigh anywhere you can blazon or say annihilation.

"The case we're really driving toward is … having a computer system handle your day-to-day reminders, so your biological memory can stay in its optimal state," Vemuri said.

When you lot can't recall anything about that guy Ken you met with before, and whom you lot're meeting with again at iii p.chiliad., the memory's usually not lost, Vemuri said. "It'due south like losing the card for your memory in a massive card catalog." Vemuri's app and other spaced reminders work best past giving y'all clues well-nigh that person in staggered intervals leading up to the coming together. Ken is from Dallas. You met with Ken terminal in March, when you were in San Francisco. Ken last emailed you one calendar week ago–and, all of a sudden, everything about that cab ride you shared with Ken after the conference comes into focus.

For specific sets of knowledge to blast downward, y'all could plow to wink-card-like spaced repetition software, or fill out a calendar with specifically spaced reminders. But fifty-fifty if you fail to remember something crucial, look on the bright side–the event might be then traumatic, you'll definitely call up the side by side time.