In our work, we study how short-term memory and long-term memory work together. We use laboratory tasks that ask people to look for a certain object. This task is like looking for your lost keys in your house. We have people look for a specific object in array after array of objects. As you would expect, people get better as this task each time they do it. What our measures of brain activity allow us to do is see how short-term memory and long-term memory simultaneously contribute to the performance of this task. What our studies have been showing is that both of those types of memory storage contribute to how we process information at the same time. Our more recent experiments have looked at how brain stimulation improves task performance and accelerates learning. What our simultaneous measurements of brain activity show is that long-term memory appears to be the source of this accelerated learning, even though it is unfolding across just a matter of seconds to minutes.

via Could This ‘Thinking Cap’ Help You Learn?.
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