Make the Most of Your Memory by The Guardian

Author:The Guardian [Guardian, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ageing, memory, brain, psychology, neuroscience
ISBN: 9780852653128
Publisher: Guardian Books

Improving your memory function

How to maximise your memory

Forget rote learning: scientists have developed proven techniques to help you organise and retain information effectively. Jon Simons explains

If you’re revising for an exam, learning a new language, or just keen on maximising your memory for everyday life, here are some strategies that might help …

Rehearsal

The brain is often likened to a muscle, the suggestion being that if you exercise it, its function will improve. A bodybuilder can strengthen his biceps by repeatedly lifting weights and so, the argument goes, you can improve your memory by repeating over and over to yourself (either out loud or sub-vocally) the information you wish to remember.

For years, researchers considered that “rehearsing” information in this way was necessary to retain it in your short-term memory and transfer it into long-term memory. This view fits with our instinct that if we want to remember something like a phone number, we say it to ourselves again and again in the hope that it “sticks”. Generations of students have held fast to the principle that repeatedly reading through lecture notes and textbooks, attempting to rote learn the facts needed for exams, is the path to success.

There is evidence that the more an item is rehearsed, the greater the likelihood of long-term retention. In one study, participants were presented with a list of words and were asked to rehearse the list out loud. When asked to recall the words, memory retrieval improved as a direct function of the amount of rehearsal that was undertaken. However, in almost all circumstances, simple rote rehearsal is much less effective than strategies that involve thinking about the meaning of the information you are trying to remember.

‘Elaborative’ processing

Although many people imagine that actors memorise their lines using rote rehearsal, research conducted by the psychologist Helga Noice suggests that this is not always the case. Noice found that some actors learn their lines by focusing not on the words of the script, but on their underlying meaning and the motivations of the character who uses them. This is consistent with laboratory evidence – although rehearsing a list of words improves long-term memory for the material to some degree, a more effective strategy is so-called “elaborative” processing, which involves relating the information to associated facts and relevant knowledge. In one study, participants were asked to learn words using one of the following questions:

a) Is the word written in capital letters?

b) Does the word contain two or more syllables?

c) Does the word refer to an item of furniture?

Highest levels of recall were observed following question c, which involves deeper, more elaborative, meaning-based processing.

Another experiment involved participants learning sentences either by simply studying the sentence (eg “The doctor hated the lawyer”) or by generating an elaborate continuation to the sentence (eg “The doctor hated the lawyer because of the malpractice suit”). The elaboration method improved memory for the sentence significantly, suggesting that the cognitive effort involved led to deeper encoding of the original sentence.

One study compared different kinds of elaboration to investigate which might be most useful when revising for exams.

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