August 2026

Do you remember? Do you recall the things that happened before? Do you wonder about the meanings of words as you use them or the specific scents of things as you distinguish them? Maybe that song you like easily plays in your head and you think of the tune and the lyrics. Do you contemplate the things that just happened moments ago? Do you ever wonder about the ease when you think about these somewhat simple things? Or maybe the difficulty? How you just heard a name and can’t simply remember it? Where you left the keys when you’re trying to leave the house? Maybe what happened a couple years ago at that family gathering or concert? Or maybe when you started to have faith and/or what that persons face actually looked like? I’m not sure if you ever wonder about these things or maybe they are just a part of each of us that we take for granted; that it’s just a part of the way we are. I suppose it’s only when we can’t remember do we appreciate these things. If you haven’t already figured it out I’m speaking about our memory. Earlier in the year I woke with the words episodic buffer on my mind, I knew it was to do with psychology and remembered that it was some aspect of memory. I think memory is such an interesting concept, to just have these stores of information and know how on various topics and experiences. What I think is cool is how as you just exist it’s not like you’re flooded with everything you’ve ever learned and experienced in that instant moment, I think we’d go insane cause you can’t keep up with everything. Even if your memory is really good you’re not thinking of everything in this moment, you just have more ease in retrieving or remembering things. We hear of long and short term memory and we kinda understand them vaguely. Short term memory (STM) involves what you’re thinking of right now. Then long term memory (LTM) is a large store of information that we maintain of all information that is generally available to us. Some people have theorised models for how they think memory works but this episodic buffer I woke thinking about is from a model called working memory by Baddeley Alan and Graham Hitch. Their focus was on how short term memory isn’t just a passive storage box, they defined it as an active multi-component system that temporarily holds and manipulates information during complex cognitive tasks like reasoning, learning and comprehension. I think it’s interesting how they thought about the details, like yeah long term memory has the stores but how are we accessing them in our conscious awareness? How do we know what’s what and how do we manipulate and recognise all sorts of things in our day to day lives? Their model answers such questions through the 4 working memory systems. The first is the central executive (CE) which is the supervisor system, It focuses our attention and controls/directs the flow of information. It is goal directed, if the memory isn’t available the CE must direct the search for it. Your conscious brain generates strategy and the CE sets up the mental filters, tests different cues and evaluates if the retrieved information is correct. Second is the phonological loop (PL) which stores your mental representations of sound like speech, words, and numbers. When you sound out a word or have a song stuck in your head, it is the area active. Third is the visual spatial sketchpad (VSS) which permits us to temporarily hold and manipulate visual images and it is believed to be essential for mental imagery and spatial reasoning. It’s what you use when you form a mental image of someone’s face or the spatial layout of your bedroom. Then the star of the show the episodic buffer (EB), it bridges STM and LTM and is the conscious workspace where your brain and/or central executive pulls relevant memories into conscious awareness. You can say it allows for conscious awareness to trade information with semantic and episodic memory from your LTM. Semantic memory (SM) being your factual knowledge about the world and language like meanings of words and concepts, facts about grammar, history, music, manners, scientific principles, religions, beliefs, names and faces, it is like a database. Then episodic memory (EM) consists of our memory for events or episodes in our lives. It’s about when, where and what happened, like an internal diary for experiences you’ve had and its details. The Episodic buffer provides temporary storage for information from the subsidiary systems and LTM then integrates it into a single episodic representation. It is also a workspace where new personal experiences are shaped before being stored into long term episodic memory. The episodic buffer was the most interesting piece from the research, yes it kinda relies on the central executive to work but not all the time. An analogy was given that it is like the movie screen of the mind. The central executive is the projector operator, since your LTM has so much information the CE directs attention and requests for specific files from it and then we only consciously see or view what is currently projected on the screen. I know it’s a bunch of definitions but let’s try and see how it might play out when you’re having two different kinds of conversations. The first with someone new, from the onset you know you won’t give them every piece of information and so your CE actively directs and filters through what information you’re okay with giving. It will tap into your SM for the factual information and loads it in the EB, you then consciously decide what to share. The more you converse with the person your filters reduce, if you like them you replay the conversations and the sound of their voice in your head. Here your PL will maintain the acoustic codes and they’ll be in your EB and you’ll consciously be aware of them. Another thing happening when you do that is without you realising, you’re encoding and storing. Essentially encoding is the process of converting information into a form that can be usable/stored in memory and storing is retaining the stored information over varied periods of time. If you’re more intentional you could do some deep processing where you’ll include what the things they said meant to you. Maybe you might make associations between the person and past information about others and you could even make elaborate connections with existing information about whatever pattern they are showing and what that might say about them. Then now think of a conversation with a close friend you met at the mall, the filters are little to none and the retrieval of information that’s going into the EB is automatic. Who they are to you, the triggers in your environment or the things you’ve experienced recently get dropped into your EB from you EM and bypass your CE. The information is taken from your LTM without any effort and placed in the EB where you have the easy conscious access and the CE just notices what lands there. You’ll notice this with most of your long term relationships or situations where you are comfortable. The downside of this automatic retrieval is when one is stressed, fatigued or having intrusive thoughts but even worse the people with trauma. The CE losses control leaving the EB vulnerable to being flooded by automatic memory retrieval. You can imagine what that might be like if the memories are negative. Back to the conversation, think about that ease in the way information flows as you speak with them, it’s something called associative Chaining. It talks about how whatever idea is currently sitting in your EB automatically acts as a search term for the next thought. The output of your last thought becomes the input trigger for your next one which could explain how you often don’t have to think much and keep branching into different topics as you catch up after a while. The conversation is done and you try to remember where you parked, your VSS will be active bringing in the mental image of where you parked and the CE forces the mental retracing of your steps and the specific area is the cue that then flashes the image of your cars location into your EB. It’s interesting when you think about how all this plays out; from you in an exam to someone asking you a question on the spot about the specifics of an event you attended a couple months ago. How you encoded will matter whether you had any retrieval cues set or if you went through deep processing. Maybe you just repeated the information which doesn’t quite make for effective encoding and later retrieval. It’s fascinating when you think about how it seems like a regular conversation and getting to know someone but your mind is working hard until it doesn’t really have to or till you make some mistake and start to evaluate things further. I do love the inner workings of the human and how thought out everything about us is. I hope you do see how all this works, your memories matter from the ones you consciously retrieve and entertain to the ones of experiences silently affecting how you interact in the world. But you have a story up there and vast stores of things that help you function. So do remember and store as much as you can, take the pictures, make the videos, create, listen, interact and experience things so they can help you retrieve the memories from those great stores when the ease goes away.