Memorization Tactics: Tips for Enhancing Memory

[Moonbear]

I just write down the things I want to remember on a post-it note. I'll certainly remember whatever it was I wrote down long enough. Good thing, since I usually walk off and leave the post-it note sitting on my desk. (You'd think I'd just accidently get one stuck on me once in a while)

Works better if you stick the note to your jacket, car keys, wallet, front door, briefcase...whatever is going to go with you where you need the note or that you can't miss on the way out. Post-it notes stuck in the middle of my computer monitor remind me of the things I need to do first thing in the morning. Electronic reminders are a good idea in theory, except when I wander out of the office for a half hour and miss the 15 min reminder for a meeting, only to return to the office to discover I've already missed half of a meeting. I used to have my entire schedule memorized...would write everything down in a pocket calendar and never look at the calendar, just remembered everything, but my life has grown more complicated I suppose. Then again, with things like that, the bigger problem is realizing the time rather than remembering I have a meeting. (I thought that meeting was scheduled for 3:00? Is it really past 3 already?)

 

[quarkman]

Wow everyone seems to have spent a lot of time memorizing things. Simply reading the entire post has made me really dizzy. Personally I find that if I write things down I remember them better. And then write them over and over and over. After a while they just stick. But what's the point of memorizing things anyway? It doen't really indicate you are smart. I believe it is more important to be able to figure things out than to instantly reproduce them from memory. It's kinda like reading a mechanics textbook, memorizing all the equations and such, then having to solve a problem, but finding out you can't really do any mechanics because you only memorized things rather than came to a complete understanding! As far as science things go, I really think you should understand rather than memorize. If you really need to remember a meeting or a list of things to do, that's what's lists and appointment books are for. You only need to remember to have the book/list with you at all times. You do not really need to understand a list (like why your spouse wanted plum tomatoes or something) just be able to look at the things on it. I am sure some folks may disagree, but it is much more enjoyable to understand the world around you rather than simply memorizing all the stuff that's in it. Just my two cents anyway.

However, I am going to try to play with the peg technique, but that's just because I find it intriguing (it seems greek to me!)

 

[Math Is Hard]

I just used the peg technique this week to remember the room number of my class and it worked pretty well for me. I am looking forward to trying this out on some other things.

 

[Moonbear]

But what's the point of memorizing things anyway? It doen't really indicate you are smart. I believe it is more important to be able to figure things out than to instantly reproduce them from memory.

I agree that most of the time, it's much better to understand than to just memorize and regurgitate. However, memorization does occassionally come in handy, for things like timed tests where you don't have the time to work out everything from scratch, or just for remembering lists of things to do.

This thread triggered me to remember a seminar I attended a year or two ago. The person presenting had done some studies of what parts of the brain are used when we remember numbers and letters, faces, etc. There were some interesting things that came out of it...like it's harder to remember a list if it is mixed numbers and letters. If it's mostly numbers, you'll remember the numbers and not remember the letter in the middle of the list. And entirely different parts of the brain are used for different types of memorization tasks...faces, names, letters (words), numbers (zip codes). I'll look and see if I can find the name of the person who gave that talk and see if some of this has been published yet. If so, I'll post some references to look up. It was a pretty cool topic (at the end, I was left wondering if it had anything to do with why some people have such difficulty learning algebra, when letters are subsituted for numbers, it may be something that some people just can't connect).
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Aha! Found it! This isn't exactly what I was mentioning above, but it's by the same group and is part of what was discussed at the seminar I attended. Here's an abstract of one of their papers that says us older people don't learn the same way as younger people Actually, if I recall it correctly, I don't think I'm old enough for the "older" group in this study (I haven't gone back to read the full article yet).

J Cogn Neurosci. 2003 Nov 15;15(8):1122-34.
Working memory for complex scenes: age differences in frontal and hippocampal activations.

Park DC, Welsh RC, Marshuetz C, Gutchess AH, Mikels J, Polk TA, Noll DC, Taylor SF.
Age differences in frontal and hippocampal activations in working memory were investigated during a maintenance and subsequent probe interval in an event-related fMRI design. Younger and older adults either viewed or maintained photographs of real-world scenes (extended visual or maintenance conditions) over a 4-sec interval before responding to a probe fragment from the studied picture. Behavioral accuracy was largely equivalent across age and conditions on the probe task, but underlying neural activations differed. Younger but not older adults showed increased left anterior hippocampal activations in the extended visual compared with the maintenance condition. On the subsequent probe interval, however, older adults showed more left and right inferior frontal activations than younger adults. The increased frontal activations at probe in older adults may have been compensatory for the decreased hippocampal activations during maintenance, but alternatively could have reflected the increased difficulty of the probe task for the older subjects. Thus, we demonstrate qualitatively different engagement of both frontal and hippocampal structures in older adults in a working memory task, despite behavioral equivalence.

PMID: 14709231 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]