Good memory is an undeniable advantage for students and a skill that will undoubtedly be useful in life, regardless of your academic disciplines.
Today we decided to start a series of materials on how to enhance memory — let's begin with a brief overview: the types of memory and effective memorization methods.
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Memory 101: from a fraction of a second to infinity
The simplest way to describe memory is as the ability to accumulate, preserve, and reproduce knowledge and skills for some time. "Some time" can last from seconds to a lifetime. Based on this (and also on which parts of the brain are active at any given moment), memory is typically divided into sensory, short-term, and long-term.
Sensory — is the type of memory that activates in just a fraction of a second; it lies beyond our conscious control and is essentially an automatic response to changes in the environment: we see/hear/feel an object, recognize it, and 'complete' the surrounding context with the new information. Essentially, it is a system that allows us to register the picture perceived by our senses. However, it lasts only for a very short time — information in sensory memory is stored for literally half a second or less.
Short-term memory "works" within a time frame of several dozen seconds (20-40 seconds). We can reproduce information obtained during this time without needing to refer back to the original source. However, not all information: the amount of information that short-term memory can hold is limited — it was long assumed that it can contain "seven plus or minus two items."
This assumption stemmed from an article by Harvard cognitive psychologist George Armitage Miller titled "The Magical Number 7±2," published in the Psychological Review in 1956. He described the results of experiments conducted during his time at Bell Laboratories: according to his observations, an individual could store between five and nine items in short-term memory, whether they were sequences of letters, numbers, words, or images.
Subjects remembered more complex sequences by grouping elements so that the number of groups also fell within the range of 5 to 9. However, modern studies provide more modest results, with the "magical number" being considered 4±1. Such estimates , in particular, professor of psychology Nelson Cowan in his 2001 article.
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Long-term memory is structured differently—the duration of information storage in it can be unlimited, and its capacity far exceeds that of short-term memory. While temporary neural connections in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain are involved in short-term memory, long-term memory relies on stable neural connections distributed throughout all areas of the brain.
All these types of memory do not exist separately from one another—one of the most well-known models of their interrelationship was proposed by psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968. According to their assumption, information is first processed by sensory memory. The "buffers" of sensory memory provide information to short-term memory. Then, if the information is repeatedly rehearsed, it transitions from short-term memory to "long-term storage."
Recall (whether intentional or spontaneous) in this model is the reverse transition of information from long-term to short-term memory.
Another model was proposed by cognitive psychologists Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart four years later. It is based on the idea that the duration of information storage and whether it remains only in sensory memory or transitions to long-term memory depends on the "depth" of processing. The more complex the processing method and the more time spent on it, the greater the likelihood that the information will be remembered for a long time.
Explicit, implicit, working—all of this is also about memory.
Research into the relationships between types of memory has led to the emergence of more complex classifications and models. For instance, long-term memory has been subdivided into explicit (also known as conscious) and implicit (unconscious or hidden) memory.
Explicit memory — what we usually mean when we talk about memory. It is further divided into episodic memory (memories of a person's life) and semantic memory (memory of facts, concepts, and phenomena) — this division was first proposed in 1972 by the Canadian psychologist of Estonian descent, Endel Tulving.
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Implicit memory is usually into priming and procedural memory. Priming or setting an attitude occurs when a certain stimulus influences how we perceive a subsequent stimulus. For example, the phenomenon of misheard lyrics (when in songs ) — upon learning a new, version of a song lyric, we also start to hear it that way. Conversely, an earlier unintelligible recording becomes clear if we see a transcription of the text.
As for procedural memory, a vivid example is motor memory. Your body 'knows' how to ride a bike, drive a car, or play tennis just as a musician plays a familiar piece without looking at the sheet music or thinking about what the next beat should be. This is far from the only model of memory.
Original versions were proposed by contemporaries of Miller, Atkinson, and Shiffrin, as well as subsequent generations of researchers. There are also many more classifications of types of memory: for example, autobiographical memory is considered a separate class (something between episodic and semantic), and besides short-term memory, sometimes working memory is mentioned (although some scientists, like Cowan, , suggest that working memory is rather a small section of long-term memory that a person operates with in the moment).
Trivial yet reliable: basic techniques for memory training
The benefits of good memory are, of course, evident. Not just for students before exams — according to a recent Chinese study, memory training, besides its main task, also regulates emotions. For better retention of items in short-term memory, the chunking method is most often used. (chunking) is when objects in a certain sequence are grouped by meaning. This is the very method that underlies 'magical numbers' (considering modern experiments, it is preferable that the number of final objects does not exceed 4-5). For example, the phone number 9899802801 is much easier to remember if broken down into blocks 98-99-802-801.
On the other hand, short-term memory should not be extremely sharp, literally sending all received information 'to archive.' These memories are short-lived precisely because most of the phenomena around us carry nothing fundamentally important: the restaurant menu, the shopping list, and what you wore today are clearly not the types of data that are important to retain in memory for years.
As for long-term memory, the basic principles and methods of training it are both the most difficult and labor-intensive—and quite obvious.
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Repeated recall. This is a cliché advice, yet reliable: it is precisely the repeated attempts to remember something that allow for a high likelihood of 'placing' the object into long-term storage. There are a couple of nuances. First, it is important to choose the right time interval after which you will try to recall the information (not too long, not too short—it depends on how well-developed your memory is).
Suppose you have analyzed the exam ticket and tried to memorize it. Try to recall the ticket after a few minutes, after half an hour, after an hour, and then two hours, the next day. This will take more time for one ticket, but relatively frequent repetition after not too long intervals will help solidify the material better.
Second, it is important to try to remember the material in its entirety, without looking at the answers at the first sign of difficulty—even if you feel like you don't remember anything at all. The more you manage to 'fish out' from your memory on the first attempt, the better the next recall will work.
Simulation in conditions close to realityAt first glance, this only seems to help manage potential stress (during an exam or at the moment when your knowledge is supposed to come in handy). However, this approach allows not just to cope with nerves but also to better remember something — this applies not only to semantic memory, but also to motor memory.
For example, according to , the skill of hitting balls turned out to be better developed in those baseball players who had to face various pitches in an unpredictable order (like in a real game), compared to those who consistently trained to work with a specific type of pitch.
Restating/writing in your own words. This approach provides greater depth of information processing (if we refer to the Craik and Lockhart model). Essentially, it forces you to process information not only semantically (evaluating dependencies between phenomena and their interrelations), but also 'in relation to yourself' (how would you name this phenomenon? How could you explain it yourself — without retelling word-for-word the content of the article or lecture?). Both of these approaches, according to this hypothesis, represent levels of deep information processing that provide more effective recall.
All of this involves quite labor-intensive techniques, although they are effective. In the next material from the series, we will look at what other approaches work for memory improvement, and whether there are any life hacks among them that can help save time and expend less effort on memorization.
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