by Bryan Sherwood

Created on: March 09, 2009

"The world-renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini memorized every single note written for every single instrument in some two hundred and fifty symphonies and all the music and lyrics for more than 100 operas. Once, when he could not locate a score of Joachim Raff's Quartet No.5, he sat down and reproduced it entirely from memory- even though he had not seen or played the score for decades. When a copy of the quartet turned up, people were astonished to discover that, with the exception of a single note, Toscanini had reproduced it perfectly" (Morris 183). Amazing stories of seemingly normal people with outrageous abilities to remember cause many to question the very nature of memory. Unlike Toscanini, most people have trouble remembering things now and then, and experience forgetfulness once in a while. People forget as a result of certain biological factors of memory, as well as a failure in one of the processes necessary for remembering information through the sensory, working, and long term memories.

The first step of taking in new information occurs in sensory memory, which has an unlimited capacity. Raw, unprocessed information flows into the brain's sensory memory through the five senses (Morris 184). However, sensory memory only holds incoming information for one to two seconds. New information quickly fades and becomes forgotten when one fails to keep thinking about it and does not select the information for further processing within the brain (Loftus 392). As stated by Kasschau in Understanding Psychology, "the first step in narrowing input is selective attention, while the second step is feature extraction, which involves locating the outstanding characteristics of incoming information." All new information receives at least some initial processing, but people can shift their attention to something that strikes them as being potentially meaningful through selective attention (Morris 185). Sensory memory can be thought of as a sorting area, where unnecessary information is forgotten and useful information moves on to the next part of the memory system.

After one selects information for further processing in sensory memory, the information gets transferred to working memory. Also referred to as the short-term memory, the working memory processes all information, new and old (Morris 186). Every single piece of information a person thinks about gets thought about in working memory, although working memory can generally only hold about five to ten chunks

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