Why is it you can remember popular songs from your teenage years, but you can’t remember what you did yesterday? The answer lies in the way memory works.

A recent issue of Mayo Clinic Women's Healthsource newsletter highlights how memories are made:

Sensory memory: This registers the impact of sight, sound, touch, taste or smell for less than a second.

Short-term (working) memory: Storage here depends on how alert you are when you receive information. Most short-term memories are erased in a minute.

Long-term memory: This is where you store information crucial for functioning (and those old lyrics). Some short-term memory survives here. Long-term memories are explicit – those you consciously recall like phone numbers, and implicit – tasks you perform automatically, such as driving.

Memory loss isn’t limited to older people. Studies show that various types of memory failures are common in young and middle-aged people as well.

If you want to remember something, work at it. Pay careful attention to what you are trying to learn, get people to present information slowly and practice or repeat the information and associate it with other ideas. These strategies can help you consolidate information so that it passes into your long-term memory.