Dr. Lauren Richmond

Short term is memory that lasts 15 to 30 seconds. Many people might wonder, what do we use short-term memory for? Even though short-term is very short, you are always using it. You use it to remember the beginning of this sentence as you get to the end. You use it to sustain a conversation, which involves listening, formulating what you are going to say, and then saying it. You use short-term memory when you are baking, to remember the quantity of flour you need to weigh out. At a restaurant your waitress will use her working memory to write down your order as you’re speaking it – but note that if she takes the whole table’s order and then goes to the machine to punch it in, she’s probably transferring your order to long-term memory.

The first patient to demonstrate a profound loss of long-term memory along with perfectly intact short-term memory was a person named H.M.. He was treated for epilepsy when he was in his 20s; since this was in the 1950s, the doctors removed part of his brain as an attempt to cure him of his fits. This did result in improvement in terms of epilepsy, but with huge consequences: H.M. also lost the ability to form new long-term memories. For the 40 years that he lived after his surgery, he didn’t form any meaningful new memories about his life. If he was asked what he did yesterday, he had no memory of it and if he was asked about how long he was suffering from memory loss he would say a year, even though many years have passed. H.M. would also always introduce himself to the researcher that has been studying his condition.