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01/29/2002 Archived Entry: "Memory"

How to double your memory
(also: Why it's worth going to Experimental Psychology lectures)

Imageable words such as brick, cup and dog have shown to have superior memory recall to that of non-imageable words such as love, silence and nostagia. This isn't necessarily anything to do with the fact that the brain can utilise the visual cortex for memory in those cases, it's mainly because imageable words have richer semantic representations. Therefore, if you treat memory as an autoassociative network (a network of nodes that can all link to each other), those words with more connections will have improved memory recall.

We can also see this in the cases of the 'peg-word' system, which is really a mnemonic system. Imagine you have to memorise a list of ten words, which might or might not be ordered, for example, cup, dog, lamp, etc. What you do is to link those words to your 'peg-words', an example list of which is below:

One is a bun
Two is a shoe
Three is a tree
Four is a door
Five is a hive...

So for cup, you'd imagine a bun in a cup. Or a bun next to a cup on a plate - whatever. For dog, you might imagine a dog wearing shoes. For a lamp, you could see a lamp with a picture of a tree on it.

Does this really work? Definitely. You get about a 40% increase in memory recall. This falls slightly when you have to do an 'interference' task, such as using a laser pointer to follow a moving dot on a wall, suggesting that this visual mnemonic system uses the visual areas of the brain, as you would expect. Mnenomic techniques such as these are best for arbitrary data though, not for meaningful information where organisation is the key.

Visual memory is pretty great, really. Psychologists in the past have discovered that if you have interacting images, it's even better. So if you want to remember, say, a piano and a cigar, the best thing to do is to imagine a cigar lying on a piano, not just a cigar and a piano separately. These psychologists also used to think that the more bizarre the image, the better the memory retrieval would be (e.g. a piano smoking a cigar). This turned out to be untrue - bizarreness (if such a concept could be measured quantitatively) has no effect on memory recall.

Another good and well known method is that of loci. It's also known as the renaissance museum model or something. Basically, you imagine the things you have to remember as having spatial locations. So for our cup, dog and lamp, you could imagine a cup sitting at the door to your house, a dog waiting at the gate of the path leading to your house, and a lamp sitting on your car outside. For this, you can either pick a well-learned route (e.g. drive to work) along which to scatter your objects, or you can imagine the rooms of your house holding the different objects. Again, this method is really superb and can show improvements of 50% to 120%.

The other issue in memory is spacing effects; should you cram all your learning into one block, or spread it out? Well, unless you are looking for short-term retention (immediate recall) then you should aim for spaced study. An ideal timetable might look like learning some data, then recalling it two minutes after first learning it, then 30 minutes, then two to three days, then a week. After that, the data should theoretically now be in your long term memory. Hurrah! If you do this, you can nearly double your memory retention and recall.

Finally, organise your data. Organising data which has to be learned significantly improves memory recall, even if you aren't doing it with the intention to recall! In fact, if you try to learn some data without organising it, you could end up doing worse than someone just organising it and not even trying to learn it. Clearly, this works best with highly structured material which lends itself to a great deal of organisation.

In conclusion: Use imageable words. When learning arbitrary data, use mnemonic techniques. When learning structured data, organise it. In all cases, use spaced practice, aka 'expanding rehearsal'.

In other news, I finished reading Sophie's World and just bought a hardback copy of the Collected Stories of Arthur C Clarke (all of his seven published collections plus all his stories from the last twenty years) for £4. I've probably read most of the decent stories in it already, but I've always had a soft spot for Clarke and it'll be good to have them all in one book.