Even if you left school or university determined never to take another exam, life continues to throw up occasions when you have to rely on your abilities to commit things to memory. Combining what you know about memory processes with mnemonic strategies and techniques makes you equal to the trickiest memory tasks.
In any discussion about good or bad memory, people will usually refer back to their performance in examinations. There will be a few who coasted through the school year and then crammed for a few days before the exams, while others slogged away diligently term after term. Some will have found that they went blank as soon as the exam room fell silent. Whichever group you fall into, those early experiences may be from your perception of your memory for much of your life beyond school. Paradoxically, even when people have experienced little success with learning material in the past, they tend to stick to the flawed methods that failed them. When people are confronted with new procedures to learn for their job, a driving theory test, or even formal exams, they tend to fall back on reading the material repeatedly and hoping for the best. However, there are better methods – as well as basic overall strategies fromemorising – that make use of what is known about the way memory works.
- First, find a quiet place to learn where it is easy to concentrate and get here each time you try to learn the material. Re-establishing the context helps to put you back in the right frame of mind for remembering.
- Make sure you understand the material that you are learning – it is far harder for the mind to encode information that is meaningless because you cannot connect it to what you already know.
- Aim to practice the material for short periods regularly over several days rather than in long sessions with long periods in between.
- Revise as soon as possible after you have learned something. Material is forgotten most rapidly in the first few hours after learning.
- Once you feel you know the material, go one stage further and learn it all over again. The firmer your grasp on it, the less likely you are to lose some or all of it over time.
Reading to remember
The problem with reading is that it gives the impression that material is being committed to memory when, on average, only a small percentage is retained. You may, for example, have had the experience of picking up a novel that you read recently and realizing that you cannot remember a thing about it. Usually, this is not a problem – most of us would not find it useful to recall every story that we had ever read. But there are other times when we read something intriguing and later feel infuriated because we can remember very little about it.
One of the most effective ways of improving the memory of written material is the PQRST method. This was developed to help students revise, but it can be applied to anything that you want to read and remember. The letters stand for Preview, Question, Read, recitation, and Test. Say, for example, you wanted to make a study of Chapter 2 of this book, ‘The Mind ‘s Memory Stores.’ You would begin previewing the chapter by reading the introduction and then s· m ming through each topic. Taking- one subject at a time, pose questions that arise from your preview, for example, ‘What is sensory memory?’ Now, read through each topic carefully, trying to answer your questions. This is a way of elaborating on material that helps to fix it in memory. Now for the self-recitation stage – try to repeat the main ideas on each topic in your own words, preferably aloud. Finally, the Test: summarise the whole chapter, including as many facts and details from each topic as you can. You may be surprised at the amount you can recall.
Preparing for exams
Many people go into exams armed with some half memorized facts and only decide how to organize them into answers when they see the questions. It is far better to think about the important points to make on possible topics before the exam. Doing this organizes topics in memory so they can be accessed quickly and applied to the questions. Mnemo nic systems (memory techniques) can be extremely useful – they help you to hold on to the relevant points in the exam, and using a technique requires you to organize your thoughts. For example, if you decide to use the peg system to remember ten facts to support a particular argument, you first need to select the important points and then plan how they will lead to or link with other ideas. You have to ask yourself, ‘What evidence will I need to bring in to support my arguments?’ and’ How does this lead on to the second point in my peg system?’ and so on.
Here is an example of how you might use the peg system to remember to make points about poverty, justice, and liberty in an essay on the French Revolution. Abstract words like poverty are not easy to visualize directly but can be turned into something that is. Picture poverty as a child begging and imagine giving a begging child a bun (one). Now, picture a judge in a wig – representing justice – and imagine him banging a shoe (two) on a table. For liberty, imagine the Statue of Liberty with a tree (three) growing out of the top of it. Alternatively, you could use the first-letter strategy, which involves taking the first letter of each point to be remembered and making them into a phrase or sentence. Research studies show that supplying the first letter of a word triggers foil recall in 50 percent of cases where the word appears to have been forgotten.
Multiple uses for mnemonics
Mnemonics have a wide range of uses beyond the examination room. They are particularly valuable in situations such as job interviews, where you want to make points or ask questions, but it is inappropriate to use notes. The method of loci or the peg system can help you anchor your handful of items into memory. If the points are hard to visualize as images, you could use the initial letters to make an easily remembered sentence. So, if you wanted to ask about prospects, training, overtime, and pension (PTP), you might come up with Please The Other Person (which is what you are trying to do in the interview!). You would need to practice the mnemonic so that it brings the information to mind instantly.
Mnemonics can also be useful in job training. Trainee salespeople, for example, are sometimes taught the mnemonic AIDA. They use this example of a first-letter strategy to help them remember to gain their clients’ Attention, show Interest in their needs, foster Desire for an item, and then get them to Act on it.
Surprisingly, one group of individuals who might be expected to use mnemonics to help them learn by heart do not usually do so. Actors face a huge memory task when learning lines, but although they pay particular Attention to cues from the other actors, most do not use mnemonic techniques. Instead, they try to get involved in their characters and think about why and how they commit them to memory; I would say the lines in order to help commit them to memory.
The Memory Benefits Of Amateur Dramatics
Two American psychologists, Tony and Helga Noice, studied a group of older adults who took part in amateur dramatics. The Voices found that the mental activity and possibly the social stimulation involved in learning lines 3rd rehearsing together resulted in much-improved memory performance in other tasks, such as recall and recognition of words, even a considerable time after the event. So, it may be that one good antidote to memory loss in old age is to take part in stimulating memory-related activities.
