Our brain is an extraordinary powerhouse that processes information at the speed of light! Let's take a cool example of "Iconic memory", a part of sensory memory. Back in 1960, a guy named Sperling did an exciting experiment to test this.

Concept Note: Iconic memory is like a quick snapshot our brain takes when it sees something new. Imagine if your eyes were like a high-speed camera, clicking pictures every time you blinked.

In Sperling's experiment, participants were shown a grid of numbers and letters (imagine a tic-tac-toe board filled with random characters) for a lightning-fast 50 milliseconds (like a camera flash!). Then two different things were tested.

Participants were asked to remember and recreate the entire grid. It was like a mental snapshot and guesswork when they were unsure. The result? They remembered an average of 4 out of 12 characters. That's like 35% – imagine trying to recall a picture after seeing it for a split second!

• Now, the participants were asked to remember just one row from the grid, and which row to recall was hinted by a sound (a high, middle, or low tone). This hint came right after the visual disappeared. The participants did better here, recalling three or four characters – that's 75-100% of a row!

These results suggest that we hold a fleeting image of everything we see in our sensory memory, ready to be moved to short-term memory if we pay attention to it. But if we don't focus, poof! It decays and disappears.