A good memory is an undeniable advantage for students and a skill that will definitely come in handy in life - no matter what your academic disciplines were.
Today we decided to open a series of materials on how to upgrade memory - let's start with a short educational program: what kind of memory is and what memorization methods work for sure.
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Memory 101: fraction of a second to infinity
The easiest way to describe memory is the ability to accumulate, store, reproduce knowledge and skills for some time. "Some time" can take seconds, or it can last a lifetime. Depending on this (as well as on which parts of the brain are active at one time or another), memory is usually divided into sensory, short-term and long-term.
touch is a memory that is activated in just a fraction of a second, it is beyond our conscious control and, in fact, is an automatic response to changes in the environment: we see/hear/feel an object, recognize it and “finish” the environment around us, taking into account new information. In essence, this is a system that allows us to register the picture that our senses perceive. True, for a very short time - information in sensory memory is stored for literally half a second or less.
short-term memory "works" within up to several tens of seconds (20-40 seconds). We are able to reproduce the information received in this time period without having to consult the original source. True, not all: the amount of information that short-term memory can hold is limited - for a long time it was believed that it contained "seven plus or minus two objects."
The reason for this was the article by the Harvard cognitive psychologist George Miller (George Armitage Miller) "The magic number 7 ± 2", which was published in the journal Psychological Review back in 1956. In it, he described the results of experiments during his work at Bell Laboratories: according to his observations, a person could store from five to nine objects in short-term memory - be it a sequence of letters, numbers, words or images.
The subjects memorized more complex sequences by grouping the elements so that the number of groups was also in the range from 5 to 9. True, modern studies give more modest results - 4 ± 1 is considered the “magic number”. Such assessments , in particular, psychology professor Nelson Cowan in his 2001 article.
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Long term memory is arranged differently - the duration of information storage in it can be unlimited, the volume far exceeds short-term memory. At the same time, if temporary neural connections in the frontal and parietal cortex are involved in the work of short-term memory, then long-term memory exists due to stable neural connections distributed over all parts of the brain.
All these types of memory do not exist separately from each other - one of the most famous models of the relationship between them was proposed by psychologists Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (Richard Atkinson, Richard Shiffrin) in 1968. According to them, information is first processed by sensory memory. Sensory memory "buffers" provide short-term memory information. Further, if the information is repeatedly repeated, then from short-term memory it goes “to long-term storage”.
Recall (purposeful or spontaneous) in such a model is the reverse transition of information from long-term to short-term memory.
Another model after 4 years was proposed by cognitive psychologists Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart (Fergus IM Craik, Robert S. Lockhart). It is based on the idea that the duration of information storage and whether it remains only in sensory memory or goes into long-term memory depends on the "depth" of processing. The more complex the processing method and the more time spent on it, the higher the likelihood that the information will be remembered for a long time.
Explicit, implicit, working - all this is also about memory
Research into the relationship between types of memory has led to more complex classifications and models. So, for example, long-term memory began to be divided into explicit (it is also called conscious) and implicit (unconscious or hidden).
Explicit memory is what we usually mean when we talk about memorization. It, in turn, is divided into episodic (memories of the life of the person himself) and semantic (memory of facts, concepts and phenomena) - such a division was first proposed in 1972 by the Canadian psychologist of Estonian origin Endel Tulving.
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implicit memory is usually for priming and procedural memory. Priming or setting fixation occurs when a particular stimulus affects how we perceive the stimulus that follows it. For example the phenomenon of misheard lyrics may seem especially funny (when songs ) - having learned a new one, version of the line from the song, we also begin to hear it. And vice versa - a previously illegible record becomes clear if you see the transcript of the text.
As for procedural memory, a vivid example of it 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 notes and without thinking about what the next bar should be. These are far from the only memory models.
The original versions were offered both by the contemporaries of Miller, Atkinson and Shiffrin, as well as by the next generations of researchers. There are also many more classifications of types of memory: for example, autobiographical memory (something in between episodic and semantic) is singled out as a separate class, and in addition to short-term memory, they sometimes talk about working memory (although some scientists, such as Cowan, that working memory is rather a small section of long-term memory that a person operates in the moment).
Trite, but reliable: basic memory training techniques
The benefits of a good memory are, of course, obvious. Not only for students on the eve of the exam - according to a recent Chinese study, memory training, in addition to its main task, also regulate emotions. To better retain objects in short-term memory, the most commonly used grouping method (English chunking) - when objects in a certain sequence are grouped according to meaning. This is the same method that underlies the "magic numbers" (given modern experiments, it is desirable that the number of final objects does not exceed 4-5). So, for example, the phone number 9899802801 is much easier to remember if you break it into blocks 98-99-802-801.
On the other hand, short-term memory should not be extremely sharp, sending literally all the information received “to the archive”. These memories are short-lived precisely because most of the phenomena around us do not carry anything fundamentally important: the restaurant menu, the shopping list and what you were wearing today are clearly not the data that is really important to keep in memory for years.
As for long-term memory, the basic principles and methods of its training are at the same time the most complex and time-consuming. And pretty obvious.
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Repeated Remembrance. The advice is banal, however, reliable: it is repeated attempts to remember something that make it possible to “place” an object in long-term storage with a high probability. There are a couple of nuances here. First, it is important to choose the right time period after which you will try to remember the information (not too long, not too short - depends on how well your memory is already developed).
Suppose you took apart the ticket for the exam and tried to memorize it. Try to repeat the ticket in a few minutes, in half an hour, in an hour, two, the next day. This will take more time per ticket, but relatively frequent repetition at not too long intervals will help to consolidate the material better.
Secondly, it is important to try to remember the whole material without looking at the answers at the first difficulty - even if it seems to you that you do not remember anything at all. The more you can get out of your memory on the first try, the better the next one will work.
Simulation in conditions close to real. At first glance, this only helps to cope with possible stress (on an exam or at a time when knowledge should come in handy in theory). However, this approach allows not only to cope with the nerves, but also to remember something better - this, by the way, applies not only to semantic memory, but also to motor memory.
For example, according to , the ability to hit the ball was better developed in those baseball players who had to take different pitches in an unpredictable order (as in a real game), as opposed to those who consistently trained to work with a specific type of pitch.
Retelling / writing in your own words. This approach provides a greater depth of information processing (if we focus on the Craik and Lockhart model). In essence, it forces you to process information not only semantically (you evaluate the dependencies between phenomena and their interconnections), but also “with reference to yourself” (how would you call this phenomenon? How can you explain it yourself - without retelling word for word the content article or ticket?). Both, from the standpoint of this hypothesis, are levels of deep processing of information that provide more effective recall.
All this is a rather laborious technique, albeit effective. In the next article in the series, we'll see what other approaches work to improve memory, and whether there are life hacks among them that help save time and spend a little less effort on memorization.
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Source: habr.com