A large part of the reason we seem to forget so much may well be that, whilst our long term memory is virtually limitless, our short term, or ‘working’ memory has a much, much smaller capacity. The original research into short term memory says we can only remember 5 to 9 pieces of information there at any given time, though more recent experiments suggest it may even be as low as 4! Not convinced? Try it yourself with this quick experiment! Study the list of words below for 2 minutes, then (without looking back at them) write down as many words as you can remember.