Then play the recording to check for accuracy. Several hours later, listen to the lists, pause, and then write down as many of those strings that you can recall. Next, put them aside for a while and clear your mind. You’ll probably want to group them so that all the five-digit strings are together, the six-digit strings are together, and so on.
Read a series of five, six, seven, and eight-digit strings into a recorder. Restak recommends the digit span exercise to strengthen auditory and visual short-term memory. Every day of our lives, we can strengthen our memory through active efforts to learn new information by reading or taking courses. Some of these short-term memories eventually get converted into long-term memories, and you then have that information stored in your brain and no longer have to make an effort to retrieve it. Short-term memory, by contrast, encompasses events in the near past and is maintained through active rehearsal-for example, you might keep going over science facts immediately before a test. Long-term memories are distant memories such as meeting your spouse or ingrained skills such as riding a bike. Memory falls into two categories: short-term and long-term. Photo by romeovip_md / Shutterstock Short-Term Memory Digit span memory usually holds between five to seven numbers in a sequence for a brief time in short-term memory before it is forgotten. Restak describes our brain’s capacity for memorizing numbers and how we can give our brains-and memory-a boost. By Richard Restak, MD, The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences Edited by Kate Findley and proofread by Angela Shoemaker, Wondrium Daily Have you ever wondered why phone numbers are structured the way they are? Dr.