You remember the start and end of a list, and forget the middle

Ask someone to recall a list moments after hearing it and two patterns appear every time: the first few items are recalled best (primacy), the last few almost as well (recency), and the middle is where memory goes to die. The two effects come from different mechanisms — early items get rehearsed into long-term memory, late items are still sitting in short-term memory — and each can be switched off independently in the lab.

— Bennet Murdock, The Serial Position Effect of Free Recall — Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1962