Introduction

Most of us, at some point in our busy lives, have trouble remembering things. This is

especially true of the events of the past–how much do you really remember about your own

childhood? What if you could remember nearly every day of your life? This rare ability is

possessed by individuals with a syndrome called hyperthymesia. To date there are only a few

people with hyperthymesia who are being studied by memory researchers. Without memory, we

are able to learn anything. The ability to learn is the key to our very survival, and we cannot

learn unless we can remember what happened the last time a particular situation arose.

Memory is an active system that receives information from the senses, puts the

information into a usable form, organizes it as it stores it away, and then retrieves the

information from storage. (adapted from Baddeley, 1996, 2003). In the information processing

model of George Miller, he proposed three stages that vary both in duration and capacity;

information must be processed effectively at earlier stages before long-term storage occurs.

Information processing model states that short-term memory has a capacity limitation of 3 to 5

items with duration of 12 to 30 seconds without rehearsal. There is also stated that chunking

and maintenance rehearsal can be used to increase capacity and duration respectively.

There is a way to “fool” STM into holding more information than is usual, thinking

of it as “stacking” related files on the desk. If the bits of information are combined into

meaningful units, or chunks, more information can be held in STM. This process of recoding or

reorganizing the information is called chunking. Chances are that anyone who can easily

remember more than eight or nine digits in the digit-span test is probably recoding the numbers

into chunks.