When something leaves short-term memory, it either goes into oblivion and is likely lost forever, or is passed into long-term memory. Long-term memory is built up over a lifetime and is vitally important for pattern recognition and general cognitive processing. Long-term memory is the aggregate of visual and verbal memory, which act differently. Verbal memory is accessed by a neural net, where the path becomes important for being able to recognize or recall. Visual memory, on the other hand, functions with specialized structures.
