Category Archives: Genres

Version 0.1.0, 2012-03-29

• Motivation
• Sources
• Overview
• Components of Memory
  • Description
    • Items
    • Properties
    • Storage
    • Retrieval
    • Interference
  • Significance
    • Familiarity
    • Emotion
      • Internal emotional significance
      • External emotional significance
    • Expression
    • Timing
    • Interaction
      • Attention
      • Repetition
      • Recitation
• Memory skills
  • Focusing
  • Observing
  • Selecting
    • Important information
    • Memorable information
  • Enhancing
    • Translating
  • Organizing
  • Associating
    • Active association
    • Passive association
  • Rehearsing
  • Searching
• Applications
  • Holistic information
  • Dates and times
  • Names and faces
  • Experiences
  • Complex sets of information
    • Mnemonic systems
    • Rehearsal
  • Studying for an exam
  • Task management
• Next steps
• References
• Revision history

Motivation

My mind is like a murky lake. Along the shore are ropes leading into the water, and at the submerged end of each rope is a net. The ends I can see are questions life asks me that I need to answer from the contents of my mind, and the nets contain the answers I can provide. The ropes are of different lengths, and the nets are of different sizes. The big nets contain detailed and extensive answers, and the small ones contain little but ignorance. The short ropes lead to answers I know that I know and can pull to shore readily. The long ropes are the scary ones. Until the nets have emerged, I never truly know how long the ropes are or what will be at the end. Maybe the nets will have the answers I need; maybe they’ll be disappointingly, frighteningly lacking. Maybe the nets will reach the shore by the time I need the answers; maybe the ropes will be too long for the time I have to pull them. I don’t know how much information is in my mind to meet the needs of the moment or how long it will take to retrieve it.

All this would be fine, except that most of the things I like to do—synthesizing and discussing ideas, programming, being a resource of information for people—require a memory that is clear and reliable, if I want to do them well. And I do. Plus, I like the sense of clarity, awareness, and familiarity I get from knowing things about the world around me.

I’ve had this gripe against my mind for over a decade, and I’ve finally decided to do something about it. I’m studying memory improvement techniques. It’s turning out to be a much more complex topic than I expected, but at this point I’ve gotten far enough to shape my basic ideas on the subject and to form some goals. So to give myself a milestone and something to show for my work so far, I’m writing for you this summary. Since this is an interim report, I’ll continue to develop these ideas as the project progresses. The concepts, terms, organization, and agenda are all subject to change.

Sources

Where am I getting my information? Two kinds of sources interest me: reports of scientific research on memory and popular memory improvement literature. I look at the research because I want my techniques to be grounded in reality rather than marketing hype. And I look at the popular literature because it offers creative examples for applying the techniques, which I can then analyze and generalize to create a more expansive and flexible system.

For this project I started on the research end of the spectrum with Kenneth Higbee’s Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It and some of Alan Baddeley’s much more recent Your Memory: A User’s Guide. At some point I would also like to read Mnemonology by James Worthen and R. Reed Hunt, which I found while writing this essay, to see how my ideas about the principles behind mnemonics stack up against actual research. But in this summary I’ll mainly be citing Higbee and my own experience, because the material I’ve read in Baddeley has been more specialized and not as applicable to the topics I’m covering here. On the popular end, so far I’ve only dabbled in a few books and articles.

Overview

My project has a relatively narrow focus. Memory is a pervasive part of everything we do in everyday life, and there are several types of memory. But while it’s all important, I want to focus on ways to memorize information for long-term recall.

I’m partly aiming for a computer programming approach to human memory. Programming is an excellent grid through which to examine many areas of life, especially areas that involve problem solving or designing systems that will perform tasks intelligently. It’s helpful for these purposes because it involves breaking down a domain into parts, relating them logically, and performing operations on them to achieve specific goals. It’s concrete and practical.

Programming is especially good for dealing with human memory because computers have their own form of memory, and the tasks we need to perform with both types are largely the same. We need to store information, modify it, and retrieve it in various arrangements, though human memory certainly works differently from computer memory in some major ways. I’ll draw out these ideas as I go along.

My overall approach is to view memory as an interconnected set of components that can nevertheless be treated modularly so they can be assembled to solve a large variety of problems. I divide my analysis of memory into three parts: the basic components that are involved storing and retrieving information in memory, the basic skills of memorization that use these components, and the ways we can apply these skills to various memory tasks.

Components of Memory

By the components of memory, I mean the basic structures we create with information in the mind and the basic operations we perform to store and retrieve it.

Memory is a set of subsystems rather than a single structure in the brain {Higbee 2}, and each system handles a different type of information, such as visual or verbal {37-38}. It would be great if I could use the brain’s organization to lay out the principles of memory here. But I don’t know nearly enough about how memory is organized in the brain, and I’m not sure neuroscientists do either {Baddeley 11}. So I’ve attempted to come up with more of a functional framework for arranging the common memory principles and techniques. Most of psychology is about identifying the mind’s API, the things we do from the surface of the mind to achieve the effects we want, regardless of how the brain is doing things on the back end. Still, knowing the implementation can be useful, so I like to hear about the progress neuroscience is making on memory.

To memorize information for recall, you’ll need to transfer it from short-term to long-term memory. Short-term memory lasts only a few seconds and can contain only around seven items at a time. If the information in short-term memory goes through an encoding process, it’s stored in long-term memory and can potentially be accessed for a lifetime {Higbee 19, 20, 23}.

To make this transfer, you’ll need to put to work several factors. So far I’ve grouped them into three categories: description, significance, and maintenance. You’ll need to notice important characteristics and associations of the information, you’ll need to signal to yourself that the information is worth remembering, and you’ll need to keep your memory equipment in working order. The first two, which I’ll call the memorization components, relate to working with specific items of information, and the last relates to the overall operation of your brain’s memory systems. For this summary I’ll only discuss the memorization components, because I’ve done almost no research on the maintenance component, factors such as diet and rest.

Description

My view is that the mind stores information by indexing it according to its properties {50}, which amount to a description of the item. It retrieves information when it receives a reminder, which gives it one or more properties to search by. Memory researchers call the reminders cues {26}. A word, for example, is often recalled based on its first letter, its sound, or its meaning {30}. This is why you can often recall a word by reciting the alphabet, looking for the word’s first letter {100}. You can also see this property indexing at work when you remember the wrong word and find that it resembles the word you’re looking for in one or more of these ways.

Items

For the purposes of this project, an information item is any set of information you’re treating as a unit. It’s actually a stretchy concept. Our minds can almost always subdivide information into smaller pieces or group it into larger ones. Whatever you’re treating as a unit at the time is an item in that context. This expandability of information is a very important feature that makes it possible to create all kinds of useful associations for memory, as we’ll see later.

Some information is easier to think of as a single, simple unit, such as the translation of a single English word into another language, and some is easier to think of as a group of smaller items, such as a grocery list or a whole chapter of a book. I’ll call the simple items unitary items and the groups collective items. Since pretty much any information can be subdivided, it’s technically all collective. But these categories are meant to help you in memorizing. Hence, the way you categorize any particular item is somewhat subjective and relative to your purpose for it at the time. I’ll explore the ways these categories can help you later in the essay.

What kinds of information items are there? An item can be something more like an object or something more like a sentence, and really you could look at any item as one or the other. So you might memorize the flag of each country and treat each flag as an object, but in the back of your mind, you’re also memorizing a statement that goes something like, “The flag of Algeria looks like this.”

Properties

A property of an item of information is anything you can say about it. Really it’s just another piece of information that’s somehow related to the item you’re dealing with. In fact, I think of an item of information as being completely made of its properties. An information item is a set of information that someone has bundled into a package and maybe given a label, which is just another one of its properties. For the purposes of memory, there are at least a couple of ways to look at properties. You can think of a property as a handle for an information item that the mind can grab when it’s looking for the item. And you can also think of properties as parts of the item that you can then focus on as items in themselves.

I also like to think of properties as RDF triples. That is, a property can be stated in terms of three parts: a subject, a predicate, and an object. For example, one property of tree bark is that it’s rough. That is, it has a texture of roughness. “Tree bark” is the subject, “has a texture of” is the predicate, and “roughness” is the object. Splitting up a property in this way can help you think about enhancing and organizing the material you’re studying, which I’ll cover below.

I divide properties into a few somewhat fuzzy categories to help me get a handle on them. One division is between internal and external properties. An internal property is any characteristic that the item has on its own. I’ll call internal properties features. An external property is any connection it has with other information. I’ll call the external properties connections. If I’m looking at a tree, one of its internal properties is that it has green leaves. An external property might be another tree it reminds me of.

Another division I make is between natural and incidental properties. Natural properties are related to the item’s meaning, and incidental properties are any other kind. For example, a natural internal property of the word horse would be its definition in a dictionary or an image of a horse. An incidental internal property would be the way the word looks in a particular font. A natural external property would be the fact that a jockey rides a horse. An incidental external property would be the fact that horse and helicopter start with the same letter. The fact that an item’s storable properties can stray so far from its typical meaning becomes very useful when you’re memorizing information that has very little significance to you or that has no logical structure, such as a list of random words. Memory researchers call these incidental external properties elaborations {Higbee 94}. We will see this feature of memory come into play when we discuss mnemonics.

Storage

I also divide memory storage activity into two categories, active and passive. These categories apply to both description and the other memorization component, significance. Even without consciously trying, your mind engages in memorizing all the time. For example, people tend to remember where they were when a national tragedy took place. It might not always be the memorizing you expect or need, but you can take advantage of this passive activity and use it to supplement your conscious memorizing.

Retrieval

As I mentioned above, the mind retrieves information when it receives a reminder, called a cue. A cue is anything that either reminds you there’s something you need to remember or simply reminds you of something you do remember. It’s like a question for you to answer or a sentence with a blank to fill in. It provides you with some of the properties of the information and leaves you to find the rest of the item.

As with everything else, I divide retrieval of information into several categories. First, like storage, retrieval can happen passively or actively. I’ve observed that cues tend to happen in chains—one thing reminds you of another, which reminds you of another, and so on—and the chains tend to start with cues from your surroundings. The cues that bring up information from your mind without any effort from you are triggering passive retrieval. When the cues remind you of your need or desire to remember something and then you search your mind for the information, you give yourself a series of cues that could trigger your recall, and this search is a process of active retrieval. These cues can be either parallel or chained. That is, the cues may be independent of each other, or each cue may remind you of the next.

It can also happen at different levels of consciousness. Explicit learning is retrieval with a conscious awareness that you’ve recalled something. Implicit learning is retrieval that happens unconsciously; you simply act on the information you’ve retrieved without being aware that you’ve retrieved anything {Baddeley 21}.

And retrieval can happen more or less completely. Recall is the fullest level of retrieval, in which the whole item or set of information is brought to mind with only a starting cue. Recognition is less complete and more or less amounts to identifying the information you’re viewing as information you’ve seen before. Rate of relearning measures a subtle level of retrieval, in which you’re able to relearn information you’ve learned before in less time than you took to learn it at first. Your mind retains traces of the material from the first learning effort, so it doesn’t have to do as much work to learn it to the level of recall again {Higbee 26-27}.

In this project, as I’ve said, I’ll be focusing on conscious storage for recall.

Memory researchers have terms for several patterns of recall. When recall happens because it has been intentionally cued, they call it aided recall. Recall that happens in any order and without a specific external cue is termed free-recall {26}. Recall seems to be easier when it’s aided {100}, so it’s best to concentrate on memorizing specific properties of an item so they can reliably serve as cues. Most of my project will concern this strategy.

When you recall items in a specific order, memory researchers call it sequential learning. When one item cues your recall of a second, they call it paired-associate learning {26}. Most of the memory techniques I’ve seen amount to different forms of aided recall using paired-associate learning. Even sequential learning can be reduced to a series of paired-associate tasks, where each item is the cue for the next in the list {133}.

Interference

A persistent problem for memory is what memory researchers call interference, the problem of confusing parts of something you’ve learned with parts of something else you learned before or after it {34}. This is different from the problem of strong emotions blocking your ability to learn or recall things, which I talk about in the “External emotional significance” section below. That could be seen as another type of interference, but memory researchers don’t call it that.

To combat interference, each item you memorize needs to be unique in a memorable way. That is, it needs to have a unique set of properties. You can think of the items of information as being assigned unique addresses in your memory. The address is made of the item’s unique combination of properties. If two items aren’t meant to live at the same address, assign them different enough sets of properties that they’ll stay separate in your mind. Part of this memory improvement project will be to come up with ways to do that.

Significance

The second major aspect of memorization I identify is significance. For the mind to memorize something, it has to believe that it’s worth remembering. Here are some of the ways that can happen. Again, I’ve grouped them so they’re easier to remember. My categories for significance are familiarity, emotion, expression, timing, and interaction.

Some of the categories from the description discussion apply to various aspects of significance as well—passive and active, internal and external. I’ll expand on them in the sections that follow.

An item can gain significance as you discover its properties, such as other items that connect to it. For example, a man’s name may mean nothing to you and be quite forgettable until you learn he’s a brother you never knew you had. This ability of one item to elevate the significance of other items will be very important for the memory techniques I discuss later.

Familiarity

One obvious type of familiarity is knowledge. Information you’ve learned before is generally more significant to you than new information. This is important for two reasons. First, if you’ve already learned an item but you don’t remember it well, it will still be easier to learn than information you’ve never seen before {27}. Second, as we’ll see in the observation section, you can use more significant information, such as items you’ve already learned, to increase the significance of other information you’re learning {47}.

A different type of familiarity that carries significance is sense. That is, information you can understand is usually more memorable than nonsense. I think of sense as a type of familiarity in that you understand a piece of information when it conforms to your existing, familiar patterns of thought as well as connecting with your prior knowledge.

Emotion

Emotion can lend great significance to information, making it easy to remember, though in some cases emotion can be a hindrance to memory.

The emotion involved doesn’t need to be intense for it to help memory. In fact, it can be very slight. It just needs to be enough to make the material stand out as important in some way. Emotion that’s too intense may distort your understanding of the information anyway.

Internal emotional significance

In terms of emotion, I define internal significance as significance that is derived from the item’s properties.

Internal emotional significance means that the item has properties that catch your attention. The information could be funny, surprising, fascinating, outrageous, impressive, disgusting, frightening, exciting, sensible, or touching, for example. Any property of the information—internal or external, natural or incidental, passive or active—can have significance that aids in remembering that information.

Uniqueness, or novelty, while most important for separating similar information, also adds an element of significance to the information, if the item is unique in some way that feels significant {107}. It carries a sense of specialness: This item is worth paying attention to because it is one of a kind.

On a subtler level, simply having a purpose can make an item more significant, even if it gets its purpose simply from being placed in a list or given a name. These features convey the sense that the item is supposed to be there.

Internal emotional significance can be active or passive. Passive significance is reflected in the simple experience of emotionally reacting to the information you’re studying. The information is the type that is already important to you. Hence, I call this kind of significance reaction. Again, it doesn’t have to be a strong reaction, just a distinct one. A reaction doesn’t necessarily cement the details in your mind, so you may need to supplement your reaction with specific memorizing techniques, but it makes a difference.

Taking the right attitude toward the material you’re learning is one example of active internal emotional significance. That is, you purposely see the information as significant. To do this, you take an interest in what you’re learning. You look for ways the information could be interesting or important or cause some other reaction in you, whether through the information’s features or connections, even though those ways aren’t obvious to you at first.

External emotional significance

I define external emotional significance as significance that the learner imposes on the information, whether actively or passively, because of the way the learner is feeling apart from the information itself. I haven’t explored this topic very far, and the books I’ve read don’t really cover it, so I’ll just mention it briefly.

On the passive side, strong emotions, such as during a traumatic experience, can cement even random facts into your mind. In addition, events that happen directly in relation to the material you’re learning will often lend them significance. For example, the embarrassment of getting an answer wrong in front of other people makes the right information feel very important, and afterward it tends to stick in the mind!

Similarly, the shift from confusion to understanding can give an item significance. Once an incomprehensible item makes sense, the feelings of relief and inspiration you get from finally understanding it can make it more significant.

Necessity is another factor that can catch your attention. If the information is simple enough, knowing you need to know it can make it more memorable. Unless the necessity comes with a lot of stress, that is. Stress works against memory, which I discuss below.

On the active side, you may be able to set an emotional tone for your study time via music, narrative, or some other form of art, and as you interpret the information by that mood, you may see new properties of it pop out as significant.

But emotion also can hinder learning. In particular, stress works against both memorizing and recalling things {64-66}. I believe this is partly because stress and other strong emotions draw your attention away from what you’re learning and recalling, but I suspect there are other processes at work as well. My experience is that the mind can lock up under stress {Gladwell}.

Expression

The mind has several ways of taking in and processing information: visual, verbal, musical, narrative, kinesthetic. I’ll call them modes of expression. Some of these types of information are more memorable than others. It differs from person to person, but there are some trends. Visual information, for example, especially spatial, tends to be very easy for most people to remember {Higbee 37-39}.

Timing

I’ve encountered a few observations related to the timing of memory storage and retrieval relative to other things. I’ll probably try to generalize these later.

You remember items in a list more or less easily depending on their position in the list {53}.

You remember better things you learn just before sleeping and less well things you learn right after sleeping {44}.

Most forgetting happens soon after learning. The rate slows down and levels off after that {35}.

Interaction

Your interaction with the material over time, even without any notable emotion, can lend the material significance.

Attention

Paying attention to the material you’re learning is one of the most basic and important ways of creating significance for it. Of course, you have to pay attention in order to notice things about the information and build up its properties in your mind {59}, but attention also clues your mind in that the information is important. This goes for any active part of memorization.

Repetition

I define repetition as repeated storage of an item in memory. Memory researchers know that spaced repetition is a key factor of learning {78-80}. I don’t know how it works out neurologically, but my interpretation is that being exposed to the same information repeatedly over a long period of time clues the mind in that it’s important.

Many people think this type of repetition is what memorizing is. Reading over the information a few times is their only technique. But by itself, it’s really a very flimsy one, and we have many more resources at our disposal for planting information firmly in our minds {62}, which of course are the subject of this project.

Recitation

I define recitation as repeated retrieval of an item from memory. It seems to me that forcing yourself to recall information using spaced repetition is even more effective than simply exposing yourself to the information {83}. This is why flashcards are an effective study tool.

Continued in part 2.

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