Memory Long-term 

The storage in sensory memory & short-term memory generally have a strictly limited capacity & duration, which means that information is available only for a certain period of time, but is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, long-term memory could store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration . Its capacity is immeasurably large. For example, given a random seven-digit number we might remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in our short-term memory. On the other hand, we could remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition this information is said to be stored in long-term memory.

While short-term memory encodes information acoustically, long-term memory encodes it semantically - Baddeley discovered that after 20 minutes, test subjects had the most difficulty recalling a collection of words that had similar meanings .

Short-term memory is supported by transient patterns of neuronal communication, dependent on regions of the frontal lobe & the parietal lobe. Long-term memories, on the other hand, are maintained by more stable & permanent changes in neural connections widely spread throughout the brain. The hippocampus is essential to the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory, although it does not seem to store information itself. Without the hippocampus, new memories are unable to be stored into long-term memory, & there will be a very short attention span. Furthermore, it might be involved in changing neural connections for a period of 3 months or more after the initial learning. 1 of the primary roles of sleep is thought to be improving consolidation of information, as several studies have demonstrated that memory depends on getting sufficient sleep between training & test. Additionally, data obtained from neuroimaging studies have shown activation patterns in the sleeping brain which mirror those recorded during the learning of tasks from the previous day, suggesting that new memories might be solidified through such rehearsal.