Strategies

The story method (sometimes called the sentence mnemonic) is the most easily learned list-mnemonic strategy, although it is not as widely known as the other simple methods we’ve talked about so far.

As its name suggests, the story method involves linking words to be learned in a story. While this is most obviously useful for learning actual lists, it can also be used for remembering the main points of a passage. In such a case, you need to reduce each point to a single word, which hopefully has the power to recall the whole point.

Let’s look at an example. First, an easy one — a list:

Vegetable Instrument College Carrot Nail Fence Basin Merchant Scale Goat

This can be transformed into:

A VEGETABLE can be a useful INSTRUMENT for a COLLEGE student. A CARROT can be a NAIL for your FENCE or BASIN. But a MERCHANT would SCALE that fence and feed the carrot to a GOAT.

But let’s face it , this is not a very probable list of words for you to memorize. The example is taken (with some modification) from a laboratory experiment₁, and the few tests of the story mnemonic that there have been have tended to involve such lists of unrelated words. But learning lists of unrelated words is not something we need to do very often. And generally, if we do have lists of words to learn — say, the names of the elements in the periodic table — they’re going to be too technical to lend themselves readily to creating a story.

Even if the words themselves are not particularly technical, the nature of them is not likely to lend itself to a narrative. Let me show you what I mean. Consider the taxonomy of living things:

Kingdom

Phylum

Class

Order

Family

Genus

Species

Here’s an attempt at a story:

In the KINGDOM, PHYLUM is a matter of CLASS, but ORDER is a matter for FAMILY, and GENIUS lies in SPECIES.

The trouble with this is not the re-coding of genus to genius; the trouble is, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a sentence, but not a story — there’s no narrative. Humans think in stories. We find them easy to remember because they fit in with how we think. It follows then that the more effective story mnemonics will actually tell a story. To do that, we’re going to have to transform our technical words into more common words.

King Phillip went to the classroom to order the family genius to specifically name the individual who had stolen the taxi.

The last part of this is of course unnecessary — you could finish it after individual if you wished. But an important thing to remember is that it’s not about brevity. It’s about memorability. And memorability is not as much affected by amount to remember, as it is by the details of what is being remembered. So meaningfulness is really important. Adding that little detail about stealing the taxi adds meaningfulness (and also underlines what this mnemonic is about: taxonomy).

Here’s a longer example. Remember our hard-to-remember cranial nerves? This story was mentioned in a 1973 Psychology Today article by the eminent psychologist G.H. Bower₂:

At the oil factory the optician looked for the occupant of the truck. He was searching because three gems had been abducted by a man who was hiding his face and ears. A glossy photograph had been taken of him, but it was too vague to use. He appeared to be spineless and hypocritical.

Here it is again with the nerves shown for comparison:

At the oil factory (olfactory) the optician (optic) looked for the occupant (oculomotor) of the truck (trochlear). He was searching because three gems (trigeminal) had been abducted (abducens) by a man who was hiding his face (facial) and ears (auditory). A glossy photograph (glossopharyngeal) had been taken of him, but it was too vague (vagus) to use. He appeared to be spineless (spinal accessory) and hypocritical (hypoglossal).

Notice how, with these technical words, they have been transformed into more familiar words — this is what I meant by saying the keyword method is a vital part of all these list-mnemonics.

 

Excerpted from Mnemonics for Study

The two types of first-letter mnemonics

First-letter mnemonics are, as their name suggests, memory strategies that use the initial letters of words as aids to remembering. This can be an effective technique because initial letters are helpful retrieval cues, as anyone who has endeavored to remember something by mentally running through the letters of the alphabet can attest to.

There are two types of first-letter mnemonic:

• acronyms: initial letters form a meaningful word;
• acrostics: initial letters are used as the initial letters of other words to make a meaningful phrase

ROY G. BIV is an acronym (for the colors of the rainbow), and Richard Of York Gives Battle In Vain is an acrostic for the same information.

Similarly, the acronym FACE is used to remember the notes in the spaces of the treble staff, and the acrostic Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit for the notes on the lines of the treble staff.

Here’s some more well-known ones. Some acronyms first:

MRS GREN — the characteristics of living things: Movement, Respiration, Sensitivity, Growth, Reproduction, Excretion, Nutrition.

BEDMAS — the order of mathematical operations: Brackets, Exponent, Division, Multiplication, Addition, Subtraction.

HOMES — the Great Lakes in the U.S.A.: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior.

And some acrostics:

My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas — the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

Father Charles Goes Down And Ends Battle — the order of sharps in music

King Phillip Came Over From Great Spain — the order of categories in the taxonomy of living things: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

It’s likely that you’ll know very different acrostics for these same items. That’s one difference between acronyms and acrostics — the same acronyms are likely to be known to everyone, but acrostics are much more varied. The reason’s not hard to seek — clearly there are infinite possibilities for acrostics, but very very limited possibilities for acronyms.

This means, of course, that opportunities to use acronyms are also very limited. It is only rarely that the initial letters of a group of items you wish to learn will form a word or series of words or at least a pseudo-word (a series of letters that do not form a word but are pronounceable as one — like BEDMAS).

Nothing is going to make MVEMJSUNP (the order of planets) memorable in itself, even if you break it up into vaguely intelligible bits, like this: M.V. Em J. Sun P. (although that does help — say it and you’ll see why).

Acrostics, on the other hand, are easy to create, and any string of items can be expressed in that form. For example:

My Very Earnest Mother Jumped Seven Umbrellas Near Paris

Men View Enemies Mildly Juiced Since United Nations Party

Michael Voted Every May Judiciously Since Union Newsletters Plunged

Problems with first-letter mnemonics

Medical students are probably the group who use first-letter mnemonics most. Here’s a medical example that demonstrates a common problem with first-letter mnemonics:

On Old Olympia’s Towering Top A Finn And German Vault And Hop

This is a mnemonic for remembering the cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory, and hypoglossal. Of course, reiterating my earlier point, the mnemonic wouldn’t help most of us remember this information, because we don’t know these names. But there’s another problem with this acrostic: three Os, two Ts and three As. This is a particular problem when the purpose of the acrostic is to remind you of the precise order of items, for obvious reasons. In such a case, you need to use words that distinguish between similar items. Thus, a better acrostic for our medical students might be:

Oliver Operates Occasional Tropical Tricks Absurdly For Australian Gymnasts Vaulting Actual Helicopters

Except that the traditional acrostic does have two big advantages that make it a much more memorable sentence: rhythm and rhyme. Say them both aloud, and you’ll see what I mean.

Let’s try for an acrostic that contains the vital information and is memorable.

Oliver Opens Oceans; Tropical Trips Abet; Fabulous Authors Gushing; Violent Acts Hinted

Okay, this isn’t very good either, and it took a little while to come up with. I’ve tried to distinguish the same-initial terms by including the second letter. The problem is, this additional constraint makes a big difference in limiting the possibilities.

Also, of course, creating an acrostic with rhyme and rhythm requires a great deal more work than simply creating a meaningful sentence. Rhyme and rhythm do, however, render the acrostic considerably more memorable.

In fact, were I trying to memorize the 12 cranial nerves, I wouldn’t use a first-letter mnemonic. Let us consider what you need to learn:

• the names of each nerve
• the function of each nerve
• the order of each nerve

The cranial nerves are not simply in a particular order; they are numbered. This immediately suggests the appropriate mnemonic: the pegword mnemonic. And the need to remember some rather strange names, and associate this information with function, suggests another useful mnemonic: the keyword mnemonic.

 

Excerpted from Mnemonics for Study

Most people find numbers — phone numbers, personal identification numbers, dates, and so on — more difficult to remember than words. That is, of course, why businesses try to get phone numbers that correspond to some relevant word. The system whereby this is possible — the linking of certain letters to the different digits on a telephone calling pad —is a kind of coding mnemonic. Basically, coding mnemonics are systems that transform numbers into words.

Because words are much easier for most of us to remember, this is a good way to remember numbers, but it’s not the only one. If you have a facility for numbers, or an existing store of memorized numbers (dates, baseball scores, running times, whatever), you can use those memorized numbers or your understanding of mathematical patterns to remember new numbers. In one well-known experiment₁, for example, the subject was able (after 250 hours of practice!) to recall up to 82 digits after hearing them at the rate of one digit a second. This subject was a runner, and used his knowledge of record times to make the digit strings more memorable.

The difficulty with a coding system is that you can’t use it effectively until you have fluently memorized the codes, to the extent that the linked letter (if encoding) or digit (if decoding) comes automatically to mind. This requirement makes this sort of mnemonic the costliest of all the mnemonics — that is, it takes the most time and effort to master.

Here is the best-known digit-letter code — it’s important to note the system is based on sound rather than actual letters, so various similar sounding letters are regarded as equivalent:

---

0 = s, z, soft c (zero starts with a s sound)

1 = t, d, th (there’s 1 downstroke in t)

2 = n (2 downstrokes in n)

3 = m (3 downstrokes in m)

4 = r (r is the last letter of four)

5 = l (l is 50 in Roman numbers)

6 = sh, ch, j, soft g (six has a sort of sh sound)

7 = k, q, hard g, hard c (number 7 is embedded in k)

8 = f, v (both 8 and f have two loops)

9 = p, b (9 is p the wrong way round)

---

Practical uses for coding mnemonics

In the study situation, there is quite a lot of numerical information that you might need or be interested in learning. Historical dates; mathematical formulae; geographical facts. Let’s look at how we can combine three different mnemonics to remember the lengths of the ten longest rivers (in miles):

1. Nile (4140 miles)
2. Amazon (3990 miles)
3. Yangtse (3960 miles)
4. Yenisei-Angara (3445 miles)
5. Ob-Irtysh (3360 miles)
6. Hwang Ho (3005 miles)
7. Zaire/Congo (2900 miles)
8. Amur (2800 miles)
9. Mekong (2795 miles)
10. Lena (2730 miles)

First, let’s use the coding mnemonic to convert the lengths:

1. Nile 4140 = r-t-r-s = rotors, raiders, readers
2. Amazon 3990 = m-p-p-s = my pipes
3. Yangtse 3960 = m-p-sh-s = impish ass
4. Yenisei-Angara 3445 = m-r-r-f = more or few, more rev
5. Ob-Irtysh 3360 = m-m-sh-s = mommy shoes
6. Hwang Ho 3005 = m-s-s-f = mass shave, miss safe
7. Zaire/Congo 2900 = n-p-s-s = any passes
8. Amur 2800 = n-f-s-s = no fusses
9. Mekong 2795 = n-k-p-f = neck puff
10. Lena 2730 = n-k-m-s = hen games

They’re not brilliant, I know. Sometimes numbers will fall nicely into meaningful words, but more often than not they won’t. Still, you’ll be surprised how much these rather weird phrases help.

Now we need to use the keyword mnemonic to turn the names of the rivers into something concrete and familiar.

Nile — nail

Yangtse — ant sea (a sea of ants)

Yenisei-Angara — nice anchor (nice is not concrete, but you can attach it by always thinking nice anchor when visualizing it)

Ob-Irtysh — (observe the) yurt

Hwang Ho — hanging (image of a noose hanging from a gallows)

Zaire/Congo — stair (not using Congo because of its similarity to Mekong)

Amur — a mule

Mekong — King Kong

Lena — lion

You’ll notice I didn’t give a keyword for Amazon; I felt the female Amazon would provide an adequate image.

Now we can use the pegword mnemonic to provide our ordered list. So we tie our keywords to the pegwords to produce the following images:

1. a nail in a bun
2. an Amazon with one big shoe
3. a sea of ants around a tree
4. an anchored door
5. someone watching a yurt with a beehive hanging from its pole
6. an axe among sticks next to the gallows
7. stairway to heaven
8. a mule nudging a gate
9. King Kong drinking wine
10. a lion ripping apart a hen

Once you’ve worked on visualizing these images and got them well down, you can then connect the images to your sentences. Don’t worry if your images aren’t as clear as you think they should be; I rely equally on the words as much as the images — but it helps to visualize as much as you can while thinking on the words.

Now you’ve got these word-images (and it really does take very little practice), you can stick the coded phrases on.

1. a nail in a bun: rotors (helicopter blades) trying to lift the nailed bun
2. an Amazon with one big shoe: tripping over her big shoe, she drops her blowpipes: My pipes! she cries
3. a sea of ants around a tree: an impish ass (donkey) grins as he flicks ants at the tree
4. an anchored door: the door strains to move against its anchor; I shout: More rev!
5. someone watching a yurt with a beehive hanging from its pole: the observer is wearing mommy shoes
6. an axe among sticks next to the gallows: a mass of people lining up to be shaved by the axe (mass shave)
7. stairway to heaven: “any passes?” I ask anxiously
8. a mule nudging a gate: going through easily; “no fusses”
9. King Kong drinking wine: big neck puff around his neck
10. a lion ripping apart a hen: hen games!

It all sounds very strained and unnecessarily complicated if you simply read all this! You absolutely cannot appreciate this method until you try it. It really is much simpler than it appears (although still not a simple strategy). However, it is vital that you build up the strategy step by step. In this case, for example, you must be fully confident of the standard 1-10 pegwords (1 is a bun, etc) first; then you fix the rivers to the pegwords firmly; and finally you attach the coded phrases.

 

Excerpted from Mnemonics for Study

Forget the persistent myth that everything is remembered; that our brains are video cameras whirring away recording everything, and that such 'hidden' knowledge can be brought to light by a hypnotist or alien artefact. Such things are the stuff of fantasy. Of course, there is a nugget of truth there: we can, and do, remember things we've paid no conscious attention to. Sometimes the right question can elicit memories we didn't know we had, in more detail than we imagined we could have. But for the most part, what's not noticed is not remembered. Attention is crucial to memory.

In particular, attention is crucial to good encoding. That is, the construction of memories that will be easily accessed.

In study, of course, we become especially aware of the connection between attention and memory. That's because learning is all about the deliberate construction of accessible memories.

But attention is somewhat of a bugbear: we all recognize its importance, but improving it is no easy task. Nor does research have as much to offer as it might. There are no quick and easy 'fixes' to failing concentration, to the difficulties of focusing on your work when your mind is full of other things.

Here's the most important thing to know when it comes to understanding attention: Attention and working memory are inextricably entwined. Indeed, it's thought that your working memory capacity reflects the extent to which you can control your attention, particularly in situations where there is competing information or competing demands.

In other words, the undeniable differences between people’s working memory capacity are not so much because people differ in how much information they can keep active, but because they vary in their ability to control attention.

Controlling attention has two main aspects:

• your ability to focus on one thing
• your ability to ignore distracting and irrelevant information.

It now seems likely that an erosion in the ability to ignore distraction is the principal reason for the cognitive decline so often seen with age.

Your ability to ignore distraction is also challenged by other circumstances, such as stress and anxiety, sleep deprivation, busy environments.

Improving your attention, then, is a complex task, that should be approached from multiple directions:

• Quietening your mind (by reducing your stress and anxiety; by learning how to displace concerns from your working memory; by taking quiet moments; through meditation)
• Quietening your environment ('nature breaks' are also helpful)
• Understanding how working memory works
• Practicing to achieve flow.

K. Anders Ericsson, the guru of research into expertise, makes a very convincing case for the absolutely critical importance of what he terms “deliberate practice”, and the minimal role of what is commonly termed “talent”. I have written about this question of talent and also about the principles of expertise. Here I would like to talk briefly about Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice.

Most people, he suggests, spend very little (if any) time engaging in deliberate practice even in those areas in which they wish to achieve some level of expertise. Experts, on the other hand, only achieve their expertise after several years (at least ten, in general) of maintaining high levels of regular deliberate practice.

What distinguishes deliberate practice from less productive practice? Ericsson suggests several factors are of importance:

The acquisition of expert performance needs to be broken down into a sequence of attainable training tasks.

• Each of these tasks requires a well-defined goal.
• Feedback for each step must be provided.
• Repetition is needed — but that repetition is not simple; rather the student should be provided with opportunities that gradually refine his performance.
• Attention is absolutely necessary — it is not enough to simply mechanically “go through the motions”.
• The aspiring expert must constantly and attentively monitor her progress, adjusting and correcting her performance as required.

For these last two reasons, deliberate practice is limited in duration. Whatever the particular field of endeavor, there seems a remarkable consistency in the habits of elite performers that suggests 4 to 5 hours of deliberate practice per day is the maximum that can be maintained. This, of course, cannot all be done at one time without resting. When the concentration flags, it is time to rest — this most probably is after about an hour. But the student must train himself up to this level; the length of time he can concentrate will increase with practice.

Higher levels of concentration are often associated with longer sleeping, in particular in the form of day-time naps.

Not all practice is, or should be, deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is effortful and rarely enjoyable. Some practice is however, what Ericsson terms “playful interaction”, and presumably provides a motivational force — it should not be despised!

In general, experts reduce the amount of time they spend on deliberate practice as they age. It seems that, once a certain level of expertise has been achieved, it is not necessary to force yourself to continue the practice at the same level in order to maintain your skill. However, as long as you wish to improve, a high level of deliberate practice is required.

This article first appeared in the Memory Key Newsletter for November 2005

Subliminal learning achieved notoriety back in 1957, when James Vicary claimed moviegoers could be induced to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola through the use of messages that flashed on the screen too quickly to be seen. The claim was later shown to be false, but though the idea that people can be brainwashed by the use of such techniques has been disproven (there was quite a bit of hysteria about the notion at the time), that doesn’t mean the idea of subliminal learning is crazy.

Ten years ago, researchers demonstrated that subliminal messages do indeed affect human cognition — and showed the limits of that influence [1]. The study demonstrated that, to have an effect on a person’s decision, the subliminal message had to be received very very soon before that decision (a tenth of a second or less), and the person had to be forced to make the decision very quickly. Moreover, there was no memory trace detectable, indicating no permanent record was stored in memory.

But even such brief, low-level learning seems to require some level of attention. A study [2] found that subliminal learning doesn’t occur if the subliminal stimuli are presented during what has been termed an "attentional blink" You may recall when I’ve discussed multi-tasking, I’ve said that we can’t do two things at the same time — that tasks have to "queue" for attention. When a bottleneck occurs in the system, this attentional "blink" occurs.

But low-level sensory processing, which is an automatic process, isn’t affected by the attentional blink, so the finding that subliminal learning is affected by the blink indicates that subliminal stimuli require some high-level cognitive processing.

This finding has been confirmed by other studies. One such study [3] also has implications for reading. Participants in the study were shown either words or pronounceable nonwords and asked to perform either a lexical task (to identify whether the word they saw was a real word or a nonsense word) or a pronunciation task on the words. Unbeknownst to the participants however, they had been first presented with a subliminal word that either matched or didn't match the target word. People performed the tasks faster when the subliminal word was identical to the target word. However (and this is the interesting bit), the researchers then applied a magnetic pulse (transcranial magnetic stimulation) to the key brain regions of the brain before presenting the subliminal information. By applying TMS to one brain area or the other, they found they could selectively disrupt the subliminal effect for either the lexical or pronunciation task. In other words, it seems that, even when the stimulus is subliminal, the brain takes into account the conscious task instructions. Our expectations shape our processing of subliminal stimuli.

Another study [4] suggests that motivation is important, and also, perhaps, that some stimuli are more suitable than others. The study found that thirsty people could be encouraged to drink more, and also pay more for their drink, after being exposed to subliminal smiling faces. Subliminal frowning faces had the opposite effect. However, how much, and whether, the faces had an effect on drinking, depended on the person’s thirst. Those who weren’t thirsty weren’t affected at all. Smiles and frowns are of course stimuli to which we are very responsive.

So clearly, although it is possible to be unconsciously affected by stimuli that can’t be consciously detected, the effect is both small and fleeting. However, that doesn’t mean more long-term effects can’t be experienced as a result of information we’re not conscious of.

Psychologists make a distinction between explicit memory and implicit memory. Explicit memory is what you’re using when you remember or recognize something — it’s what we tend to think of as "memory". Implicit memory, on the other hand, is a concept that reflects the fact that sometimes people act in ways that are clearly affected by earlier experiences they have had, even though they are not consciously recalling such experiences.

Another study [5] that used erotic images (because, like smiling and frowning faces, these are particularly potent stimuli, making it easy to see a response) found that when your eyes are presented with erotic images in a way that keeps you from becoming aware of them, your brain can still detect them — evidenced by the way people respond to the images according to their gender and sexual orientation.

The study is more evidence that the brain processes more visual information than we are conscious of — which is an important part in the process of determining what we’ll pay attention to. But the researchers believe that the information is probably destroyed at an early stage of processing — in other words, as with subliminal stimuli, there is probably no permanent record of the experience.

Which leads me to sleep learning. This was a big idea when I was young, in the science fiction I read — the idea that you could easily master new languages by being instructed while you were asleep.

Well, the question of whether learning can take place during sleep (and I’m not talking about the consolidation of learning that’s occurred earlier) is one that has been looked at in animal studies. It has been shown that simple forms of learning are indeed possible during sleep. However, the way in which associations are formed is clearly altered even for simple learning, and complex forms of learning do not appear to be possible.[6]

As far as humans are concerned, the evidence is that any learning during sleep must occur during the lightest stage of sleep, when you still have some awareness of the world around you, and that what you are learning must be already familiar (presented previously while you were awake and paying attention) and not requiring any understanding.

All the evidence suggests that, although information can be processed without conscious awareness, there are severe limitations on that information. If you want to "know" something in the proper meaning of the word — be able to recall it, think about it — you need to actively engage with the information. No free lunches, I’m afraid!

But that doesn’t mean unconscious influences don’t have important implications for learning and memory. A paper provided online in the Scientific American Mind Matters blog describes how a single, 15-minute intervention erased almost half the racial achievement gap between African American and white students. And this is entirely consistent with a number of studies showing how our cognitive performance is affected by what we think of ourselves (which is affected by what others think of us).

This article first appeared in the Memory Key Newsletter for March 2007

We don’t deliberately practice our memories of events — not as a rule, anyway. But we don’t need to — because just living our life is sufficient to bring about the practice. We remember happy, or unpleasant, events to ourselves, and we recount our memories to other people. Some will become familiar stories that we re-tell again and again. But facts, the sort of information we learn in formal settings such as school and university, these are not something we tend to repeatedly recount to ourselves or others — not for pleasure anyway! (Unless you’re a teacher, and that’s part of the reason teaching is such a good way of learning!)

So, this is one of the big issues in learning: how to get the repetition we need to fix something in our brain. Simple repetition — the sort of drill we deplore in pre-modern schools — is not a great answer. Not simply because it’s boring, but because boring tasks are not particularly effective means of getting the brain to do things. Our brains respond much better to the surprising, the novel, the emotional, the interesting.

Teachers today are of course aware of this, and do try (or I hope they do!) to provide as much variety, and interest, as they can. But there is another aspect to repetition that is less widely understood, and that is the spacing between repetitions. Now the basic principle has been known for some time: spaced repetition is better than massed practice. But research has been somewhat lacking as to what constitutes the optimal spacing for learning. Studies have tended to use quite short intervals. But now a new study has finally given us something to work with.

For a start, the study was much bigger than the usual such study — over 1350 people took part — increasing the faith we can have in the findings. And, crucially, the interval between the initial learning session and the second review session ranged from several minutes to 3.5 months (specifically, 3 minutes; one day; 2 days; 4 days; 7 days; 11 days; 14 days; 21 days; 35 days; 70 days; 105 days). The time until test also covered more ground — up to nearly a year (more specifically: 7 days; 35 days; 70 days; 350 days). The initial learning session involved the participants learning 32 obscure facts to a criterion level of one perfect recall for each fact. The review session involved the participants being tested twice on each fact. They were then shown the correct answer. Testing included both a recall test and a recognition (multi-choice) test. The participants, by the way, ranged in age from 18 to 72 years, with an average of 34 (the study was done using the internet; so nice to get away from the usual undergraduate fodder).

So there we are, a very systematic study, made possible by having such a large pool of participants (the benefits of the internet!). What was found? Well, first of all, the benefits of spacing review were quite significant, much larger than had been seen in earlier research when shorter intervals had been used. Given a fixed amount of study time, the optimal gap, compared to no gap (i.e. 3 minutes), improved recall by 64% and recognition by 26%.

Secondly, at any given test delay, longer intervals between initial study session and review session first improved test performance, then gradually reduced it. In other words, there was an optimal interval between study and review. This optimal gap increased as test delay increased — that is, the longer you want to remember the information, the more you should spread the gap between study and review (this simplifies the situation of course — if you’re serious about study, you’re going to review it more than once!). So, for those remembering for a week, the optimal gap was one day; for remembering for a month, it was 11 days; for 2 months (70 days) it was 3 weeks, and similarly for remembering for a year. Extrapolating, it seems likely that if you’re wanting to remember information for several years, you should review it over several months.

Note that the general rule is absolute rather than relative: when measured as a proportion of test delay, the optimal gap declined from about 20 to 40% of a 1-week test delay to about 5 to 10% of a 1-year test delay. In other words, although the optimal gap between study and review increases as the length of time you want to remember for increases, the ratio of gap to that length of time will decrease. Which seems very commonsensical.

As the researchers point out (and as has been said before), “the interaction of gap and test delay implies that many educational practices are highly inefficient”, concentrating topics tightly into short periods of time. This practice is likely to give misleadingly high levels of immediate mastery (as shown in tests given at the end of this time) — performance which is unlikely to be sustained over longer periods of time.

It’s also worth noting that the costs of using a gap that is longer than the optimal gap are decidedly less than the costs of using a shorter gap — in other words, better to space your learning longer than too short.

This article first appeared in the Memory Key Newsletter for December 2008

Research has found that people are most likely to successfully apply appropriate learning and remembering strategies when they have also been taught general information about how the mind works.

The more you understand about how memory works, the more likely you are to benefit from instruction in particular memory skills.

When you have a good general understanding of how memory works, different learning strategies make much more sense. You will remember them more easily, because they are part of your general understanding. You will be able to adapt them to different situations, because you understand why they work and which aspects are important. You will be able to recognize which skills are useful in different situations. Not least important, because you understand why the strategies work, you will have much greater confidence in them.

[taken from The Memory Key]

Knowledge about memory is called "metamemory". There are four broad aspects of this kind of knowledge:

• Factual knowledge about memory tasks and processes (that is, knowledge about both how memory works and about strategic behaviors)
• Memory monitoring (that is, both awareness of how you typically use your memory as well as awareness of the current state of your memory)
• Memory self-efficacy (that is, your sense of how well you use memory in demanding situations)
• Memory-related affect (emotional states that may be related to or generated by memory demanding situations)

[taken from Hertzog, 1992]

Metamemory is assumed to play a significant role in the development of children's learning and memory performance. It's also — more surprisingly — now thought to play some part in the decline in cognitive performance with age.

Part of the reason for this is, of course, the widespread perception that memory does decline with age, and accordingly, when older adults experience memory failure, they are more inclined to simply attribute it to age, rather than attempt to improve their performance. Relatedly, older adults are less inclined to use new strategies, partly because they don't believe it makes a difference.

But, whatever your age, old or young, your memory can be improved by mastering and using effective strategies. The main obstacle, for both old and young, is in fact convincing them that it's not them, it's what they're doing. And they can learn to do things better.

There are two well-established strategies for remembering people’s names. The simplest basically involves paying attention. Most of the time our memory for someone’s name fails because we never created an effective memory code for it.

An easy strategy for improving your memory for names

We can dramatically improve our memory for names simply by:

• paying attention to the information
• elaborating the information (e.g., “Everett? Is that with two t’s?”; “Rankin? Any relation to the writer?”; “Nielson? What nationality is that?”)
• repeating the information at appropriate times.

The mnemonic strategy for remembering names and faces

The other method, of proven effectiveness but considerably more complicated, is a mnemonic strategy called the face-name association method.

You can find details of this strategy in most memory-improvement books, including my own. It is one of the most widely known and used mnemonic strategies, and it is undoubtedly effective when done properly. Like all mnemonic strategies however, it requires considerable effort to master. And as with most mnemonic strategies, imagery is the cornerstone. However, physical features are not necessarily the best means of categorizing a face.

What research tells us

Specific physical features (such as size of nose) are of less value in helping us remember a person than more global physical features (such as heaviness) or personality judgments (such as friendliness, confidence, intelligence). Rather than concentrating on specific features, we’d be better occupied in asking ourselves this sort of question: “Would I buy a used car from this person?”

However, searching for a distinctive feature (as opposed to answering a question about a specific feature, such as “does he have a big nose?”) is as effective as making a personality judgment. It seems clear that it is the thinking that is so important.

To remember better, think about what you want to remember.

Specifically, make a judgment (“she looks like a lawyer”), or a connection (“she’s got a nose like Barbara Streisand”). The connection can be a visual image, as in the face-name association strategy.

Song is a wonderful way to remember information, although some songs are better than others. Songs that help you remember need to have simple tunes, with a lot of repetition -- although a more complex tune can be used if it is very familiar. Most importantly, the words should be closely tied to the tune, so that it provides information about the text, such as line and syllable length. You can read more about this in my article on Music as a mnemonic aid, but here I simply want to mention a few specific songs designed for teaching facts.

I was always impressed by Flanders & Swann’s song describing the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, and Tom Lehrer’s song of the Periodic Table.

The Thermodynamics song, I think, is much easier to remember than the Periodic Table, but the latter is an interesting demonstration of how much you can improve memorability simply by setting the information to music.

You can find some more “science songs” at http://ww3.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/links.html (this is actually designed for instruction: you can hear some of the songs, there are associated lesson plans, etc).

Songs are in fact such a popular means of learning science facts that in the U.S. there is a Science Songwriters' Association!

Songs are also a great way to learn poems or prose texts. Many well-known texts have been put to music (for example, The Lied and Art Song Texts site has 87 listed for Shakespeare), or you can of course (bearing in mind the need to find a melody that "fits" the text) match texts to music yourself.

Part of this article originally appeared in the August 2004 newsletter.