Here’s a fact- Bunnies’ teeth never stop growing.

Our brain is constantly processing and negotiating with information it receives from the world around us. In everyday functioning, this requires remembering simple things briefly to be able to implement them in the next minute. This temporary storage of information for about 20-30 seconds is what we call short-term memory.

Can you recall which animal was mentioned at the start of this blog? No peeking! Chances are, your brain brings up a picture of a rabbit biting through something without having to read the first sentence again. This information is probably not critical for your life ahead and will be forgotten soon (unless I keep reminding you of it throughout this blog and signalling to your brain that it is of utmost importance).

Let’s talk about where this process takes place in the brain. Sights, sounds, smells, and all kinds of stimuli around us are converted into neural signals by the brain’s cortical regions. Next, the brain decides which of this information it should move to long-term storage. This job is mainly done by the hypothalamus and the medial temporal lobe. Lastly, the frontal cortex organises this information and helps us retrieve it whenever needed.

We’ve all been in situations where we walk into a room and forget what we were there for. This phenomenon is famously called the “doorway effect”. It happens because upon entering a new space, the brain pushes its refresh button so it can process information from the new environment better. Then, there’s the familiar dread of forgetting someone’s name right after they introduce themselves. All these experiences are everyday failings in our short-term memory.

There are some techniques that are commonly suggested when you want to remember something the brain can easily forget. For example, you remember all the letters of the English alphabet through the “ABC song”. You might still remember the order of planets in the solar system from an acronym like “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles”. When a friend asks you to remember a string of numbers, it helps if they chunk it into batches of 3. Then there’s the famous ‘Method of Loci’ or ‘Memory Palace’ method which can help you remember pointers by correlating each to a familiar checkpoint along a known physical route. These methods also work because they stress on the brain that this information needs to be remembered beyond the next few seconds and give it the tools to do so easily.

Our brain receives and sorts through immeasurable amounts of data all the time. Not all of it is important enough to be stored and reused in future. So, instead of wasting precious resources, the brain decides to prioritise. That is why all our memories are not directly stored long-term. You don’t need to remember every reel you’ve ever watched. Your brain does the filtering so that you can focus on what matters.

But what happens when there’s a complete blackout in our memories? Recently, researchers studied memory blackouts induced by the effect of alcohol through a real-time test. Participants were shown an image while they were actively drinking and were later asked to recall what they saw. A complete failure to recall after 15 minutes was an immediate indicator of an active blackout. This proves how alcohol induces brief periods where the brain is prevented from making new memories. They are often hard to detect as the person may continue to behave normally while this happens. It is dangerous because this may lead to instances of injury, assault, arrest, and overdose, which have grave consequences.

Short-term memories are how we process and understand the world. We make sense of our everyday lives in chunks, with memories from each passing minute defining how we react in the next. They’re like a trail of footsteps that stretch and grow into the days, weeks, and years of our lives. Much like the endlessly growing bunny teeth, don’t you think?