The Science and Work of Remembering: Techniques for Creating a Lasting Memory

According to Robert Roy Britt of Elemental magazine, in an article on the art and science of memorizing that I share with you today, memorizing an entire text before an exam or repeating a person's name are not, in fact, the best techniques to strengthen your memory.

Memories do not arise, but are constructed

In the brain, this process involves putting memory to work by turning newly learned events into long-term memories. Scientists have known for years that the noise of daily life can interfere with the encoding of information in the mind so that we can't later recall those memories. Recent advances even suggest that forgetting isn't a memory failure, but rather a way for the mind to get rid of inconsequential information in order to focus on what's really important.

On the other hand, various studies show that the process of memorization is circular and not linear. “Every time a memory is recalled, that memory becomes more accessible in the future,” says psychologist Jeffrey Karpicke of Purdue University, who adds that only a few years ago it became clear how important recall is for forming a solid memory. This could explain why people remember an event from childhood, especially if they have recounted it several times, but cannot remember the name of the person they met yesterday.

How to Make Memories Stick

Image by Gerd Altmann

In 2011, Drs. Karpicke and Bauernschmidt conducted an experiment in which they demonstrated that recalling information learned through tests or quizzes is a technique that is definitely superior to simple repetitive memorization.

For the experiment, the students were divided into four groups and used different methods to learn to translate Swahili words that appeared on a computer screen.

• Group one was made to study each word and its translation once, without tests.
• Group two was tested until they could recall every word on the list and its translation.
• Group three were tested until they could recall each translation three times in a row after the initial achievement.
• The fourth group was tested like the third, but the tests were spaced out in time.

A week later, all students were given a test and here are the memorization percentages of what each group remembered according to the method:

• Group 1 = 1% studying each word and its translation once.
• Group 2= 25% studying and repeating until all translations were remembered in their entirety.
• Group 3= 25% repeating the translation of each word three times in a row after the initial achievement.
• Group 4= 80% repeating the translation of each word three times after the initial achievement, but each repetition spaced out over time.

Based on these results, Dr. Karpicke says that self-testing with flashcards or other means may be an efficient way to consolidate new knowledge in memory, but the most effective way is to space out the tests rather than doing them in one sitting .

The palace of memory

image by Open Clipart Vectors

For more complex cases of memorization, such as a speech, presentation, or lecture, there are ancient techniques that still prevail. In ancient Greece, they used an elaborate method to remember long and complex concepts. They called it “the memory palace” or also known as the method of loci. According to research, the method works because people remember things they can see better, rather than facts or abstract concepts.

The way to create the memory palace is to walk around a familiar place, such as your house, and make associations between objects you know well and things you want to remember. Let’s say you’re giving a talk about climate change and you’re going to use the memory palace technique to organize your thoughts: as you walk around your house you might associate the refrigerator with freezing winter storms; then you imagine seeing SpongeBob in your kitchen eating a Krabby Patty and you associate that with the negative effects of global warming on the health of crustaceans. During the talk, you take a mental walk around your kitchen and allow yourself to make slightly illogical but memorable associations.

In modern memorization competitions, where participants must remember entire poems or the order of several shuffled decks of playing cards, the memory palace technique is often used.

Science journalist Joshua Foer covered the U.S. memorization championship in 2005. Mr. Foer thought he would be better equipped to write about the competitors if he learned a little more about their techniques, and spent a year studying them. In a TED talk on YouTube, Mr. Foer explains how memorization boils down to associating trivial things with more interesting or weird ones:

“ And it is that, regardless of whether we are good at remembering names, telephone numbers or word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have exceptional visual and spatial memory… The idea of ​​the memory palace is to create this building with the eyes of the mind and populate it with images of the things you want to remember. The crazier, more far-fetched, funnier, more gruesome and stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it will be.”

Foer says that to understand what was going on in the brains of these memory competitors, he himself began spending 15-20 minutes a day in the morning exercising his memory, trying to remember a poem, or the names from a school yearbook he got at the flea market, and discovered that this exercise was, in fact, entertaining. And it was entertaining because it wasn't just about training memory, but actually what it was about doing was improving memory, the ability to create and imagine ridiculous, comical, provocative, unusual, absurd and hopefully unforgettable images in the mind's eye.

The fact is that Foer became so good at memorizing that, instead of covering the following year's competition, he participated in it. According to him, “The problem was that the experiment got out of control and I won the competition, which was not supposed to happen.”

“Distraction is the worst enemy of those who try to store something in their memory”

In the book “Moonwalking with Einstein,” Foer says that memory champions, himself included, don’t consider themselves to have exceptional memories. And that may be true. Research in 2002 that scanned the brains of world-championship memory competitors while they were memorizing detailed facts and images showed that superior memory wasn’t a result of exceptional intellectual ability or structural differences in the brain. Rather, the memory champions used a spatial learning strategy that incorporates brain regions like the hippocampus that are critical to memory, particularly spatial memory.

It's not that memory champions are smarter than other people, they simply work harder at storing things in their memory, putting more effort into their brains.

Some techniques to develop a good memory

1. Sleep . Some studies have shown that sleep is important for memory structuring and many others have shown that naps work like a full night's sleep for that purpose. ( study )

In one specific study, researchers had 84 college students learn some basic facts. Then, a first group was made to take a nap for an hour after learning. The second group was allowed to rest and watch a movie that had nothing to do with the subject matter. The third group was made to review and revise the material that had been given to them for learning.

When the different groups were tested immediately after the experiment, both the napping group and the review group performed better than the resting and movie group. But when they were tested again the week after the experiment, only those in the napping group retained the most information. ( study )

2. Wakeful rest . This is a technique in which the time following a learning process is crucial for it to become established in memory. Taking a break may be the best way to retain information.

 

A study conducted in the UK in 2012 involved elderly people aged 61 to 87. These people were asked to listen to two short stories and were given a test immediately afterwards in which details from the stories were mentioned. The people were then divided into two groups. For 10 minutes, half of the group was told to play a computer game that required a certain amount of attention, while the other group was told to sit in a dark room, alone, with their eyes closed. Neither group was instructed to try to remember anything about the stories.

They were given the test again half an hour later and then a week later. In both tests, the people who sat without doing anything for 10 minutes “remembered significantly more,” the researchers concluded in a report in the journal Psychological Science. ( report )

Researchers suggest that memories are fragile and vulnerable to distractions and interruptions, and that rest or stillness is required for them to be consolidated into memory.

Findings in both rodents and humans indicate that the brain consolidates new memories when they are “recalled” in the minutes following learning. The report adds that rest while awake can be very beneficial for memory because it facilitates the “recall” of new memories in the brain.

Recall is not conscious, it is an automatic biological process, says one of the researchers. After the memory tests were carried out on the participants, the research team asked the people what they had been thinking about during the waking rest period. The answer was that they were not thinking about anything in particular, as happens when one is not engaged in a specific task. People rarely think about the study material during these periods, concludes the researcher.

3. Connect and link . This memorization technique involves creating associations between items in a list and assigning images to each connection to aid in better memorization.

4. Create a story . While creating images for each element, the linking method is used to combine everything into one big story. This technique helps memorize the sequence of the images and therefore the order of the elements.

5. Associating objects with known places . This involves associating terms or items on the list with known places. It can also become a sensory adventure that incorporates sounds, smells, tastes, or whatever is necessary to obtain better results.

6. Associating words with a number and thus remembering ordered objects . This system is useful for remembering lists of words in a particular order and can be carried out in two steps: the first step requires memorizing words that are easy to associate with numbers using words that rhyme with the number or shapes that resemble the series. Once the list is memorized, the second step involves associating the words with the list of objects that we actually need to memorize.

7. Mind maps . This method is used to memorize concepts or any structured information. Mind maps work when a structure must be maintained and at the same time allow the flow of information to be clearer. There are many templates, some free, on the Internet that can help you with projects, presentations and ideas to develop.

But as Joshua Foer says, “These techniques can be thought of as shortcuts to memorization, but they are not even really shortcuts. They work because they make us function, they bring out in us a kind of deep processing, a particular attention that most people don’t bother to exercise, but the truth is that there are no shortcuts.

Things become memorable because life is the sum of our memories .

How much of our already short existence are we willing to waste, distracted by smartphones and iPhones, not paying attention to the human being in front of us, the one walking next to us?

Are we so lazy that we don't even bother to process things in depth? There are prodigious memory capacities latent in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, you must be the kind of person who remembers to remember.