For example, if you think of the items cat, dog, and zucchini, you don’t actually have a full conceptual representation of any of these items in your short-term memory. Instead, you have three links. For example, the first item (cat) leads to the neurons that encode your long-term understanding of a small, carnivorous, and highly manipulative life form that’s related to the lion, but has discovered a way to coax many more calories out of a single human

– Matthew MacDonald, in Your Brain: The Missing Manual (Chapter Five: Memory). (via The Quotation of the Day Mailing List)