Dr Cathelijne van Heteren from University Hospital Maastricht said the study showed foetuses had both short and long-term memories.

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It is believed it "encodes" experiences so they can be stored as long-term memories in another part of the brain.

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In a world where every free moment is spent refreshing email or responding to text messages, there are fewer opportunities for long-term memories to form.

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When researchers zero in on electrical activity in yet another area, they can tell which parts of commercial messages, if any, are encoded in the experimental subjects' long-term memories.

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Berger has looked at how electrical signals travel through neurons there to form those long-term memories and has used his expertise in mathematical modeling to mimic these movements using electronics.

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Dr Ericsson believes that prodigies get such impressive mileage out of their working memories by placing important pieces of information into their long-term memories in a way that makes them accessible to working-memory processes.

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The scientists -- who bring varied skills to the table, including mathematical modeling and psychiatry -- believe they have cracked how long-term memories are made, stored and retrieved and how to replicate this process in brains that are damaged, particularly by stroke or localized injury.

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They concentrate on the hippocampus -- part of the cerebral cortex which sits deep in the brain -- where short-term memories become long-term ones.

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Three of these areas have previously been linked with the formation of episodic memories, which are a kind of long-term memory.

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