Enhance and Take Control of your Memory with these techniques
Based on "Learning how to Learn" by Barbara Oakley
Memory is one of the most fragile things that humans have, just think about the so many times that your memory changed things from what actually happened or when you weren't able to remember some very important information. Examples are endless, being the most common ones in academic scenarios such as when your brain seems to erase everything of what you studied a day before. Memory is a very powerful tool in the process of learning because it lets you store and retrieve information, statistics show that if converted into a Computer, human memory could hold up to 2.5 MIL Gigabytes. It is also widely used in daily life because it permits us to make better decisions with information learned from the past, without the correct management of this tool we will constantly repeat the same mistakes. However, if you learn how does your memory works, there are some techniques that you can apply to improve it, and in this article, we are going to review both matters.
Let's start by understanding how does Memory works, in simple terms Memory refers to the processes that are used to Acquire, Store and Retrieve information. Let's focus on these 3 steps:
- Acquisition. It refers to the process in which information is learned. There are usually 4 main ways in which this happens:
- Visually, the appearance of something
- Acoustic, how something sounds
- Semantic, what something means
- Tactile, how something feels
- Storage. It refers to how much information is stored and for how long would it be in memory. Remember that we have short and long-term memory and every new piece of information is always stored in the short-term memory, therefore the whole idea of improving your memory is to move information from the short-term to the long-term memory. This is because short-term is not reliable and can hold only 7 "items" of information, consequently as we exceed this number previous information gets forgotten or distorted. On the other hand, long-term memory is like an enormous Warehouse in which information is properly stored and basically can be there indefinitely.
- Retrieval. It refers to the process of accessing information stored in either the short or long-term memory. Sending all your knowledge to long-term memory isn't very useful if you don't know how to retrieve it when you desire to. Hence, it's also a crucial part of dominating your memory and usually defines the performance of a student in a test.
The differences between STM and LTM. (Adapted from: Roediger & McDermott, 1995)
Now that we understand the functioning of the Memory System, we know which parts we need to improve. Firstly, when acquiring new information, attention is key, remember that the human brain cannot pay attention for more than 20 minutes, therefore, attractive and surprising things are usually going to be remembered better by your Brain, if you want to memorize something the first step would be to make that information attractive for yourself, one way to achieve this is by relating a new concept to something that you like and know. Additionally, simplifying information is also crucial to learning a larger sequence of data (Short-term memory can only hold 7 items). For example, take into consideration when you were learning the Alphabet, the best technique to do it is by relating the Alphabet to a catchy song, hence is easier for your brain to remember just the song than instead remembering each of the Letters in the Alphabet which does not have any attractiveness for your brain at that age.
Secondly, when storing new information remember that it always goes first to the Short-Term memory, thus our goal here would be to send that piece of info to the Long-Term memory. The best way to accomplish this is by Practice and Repetition, specifically for more abstract matters. However, there is a common mistake that most people do when going through this process, which is that they practice and repeat everything a day before an exam or an important event, this definitely is counterproductive, the correct way would be by applying The Spatial Technique which basically consists in practicing the information several times throughout the week, letting days off for your brain to recover. Otherwise, it’s going to be like wanting to gain muscle by lifting 100kg in one day for 10 hours, it does not function in that way because is a whole process that has to be developed. It's even worse if you take hours of Sleep to continue practicing and repeating a day before a test since Sleep helps your brain to eliminate different toxins such as beta-amyloid, which is an identified toxin that patients with Alzheimer's disease have in abundance, which can be easily diminished by getting the correct hours of sleep.
Thirdly, to understand how to improve Retrieval, I would like to mention the "Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve" which is a study carried out by the German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus in which he gave some non-sense phrases to several individuals and days later he called them to see how much they remembered. Surprisingly he discovered that in just 1 week, they had almost forgotten everything.
He concluded that the effect of Memory Decay depends on how much time has passed since you learned something and the strength of your memory. Nevertheless, Testing yourself can prevent you to fall into this Forgetting Curve, the testing effect states that just by testing someones memory, it will become stronger. Therefore, we can improve the scenario and change into this different context:
For example in the case of a School Classroom, Tests are usually carried out after learning a whole chapter, usually on a monthly or trimester basis. However, modern psychologists suggest that it actually should be done after the end of each daily lesson, not with the aim of grading rather than Students improve their Retrieval capacity and hence achieve complete learning, storing the information properly in the memory so that in the Monthly Test they can perform outstandingly.
To sum up, Memory is a powerful tool that happens through 3 stages: Acquisition, Storage, and Retrieval of Information. Each of them is crucially important if we want to enhance our capacity of remembering information at a specific moment. Successful Acquisition can be accomplished by relating new knowledge to attractive ideas such as a catchy song. Additionally, one of the main goals in the topic is to send information from the Short-Term to the Long-Term memory since this last one is more reliable and can store large amounts of info for a very long period of time, while Short-term can only hold 7 items and information can be lost with distraction or passage of time. We can achieve this by Spatial Practice, which consists in practicing the knowledge on different days of the week, letting space for the brain to consolidate information which is usually done during Sleep. Furthermore, to improve your retrieval capacity, Testing could be your best option, just by daily testing yourself on something you recently learned, will enhance your recall capacity, consequently, in the Real Test, your performance will surely increase. Thus, the next time that you are learning something new, remember to apply these techniques and the performance of your memory will progressively increase.
