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How Memory Works by Association
Kevin Jay North
How does our memory work?
We remember things by association. Every piece of information in
our memory is connected to other pieces in some way or another.
For example, if you are given the word "apple", what do you think
of? Perhaps something like this:
APPLE: red, round, sweet, teacher, tree, fruit
But it's unlikely that we might see "apple" and think of "dog"
(unless you remember some funny incident in which your dog
investigated an apple). And what if you were asked what the 7th
letter of the alphabet was? Chances are, you wouldn't know that
"G = 7," but you could easily think to yourself, "A B C D E F G,"
and then say "G". You used association to get to the letter G,
because you knew A was the first letter, then you kept choosing
the next letter in the sequence until you got to the right one.
Why do most of us have a bad memory?
Most of us don't. Most of us have a really good memory, but we
just don't have practice in using it efficiently.
If the above is true, then why is it so hard for me to remember
things?
As stated before, our memory works by association. If there is no
obvious association between things, it's very difficult to
remember them. For example, suppose you needed to remember that
your plane takes off at 2 P.M. There is nothing about the plane
that would suggest the number 2 more than it would any other
number (at least at first glance). Therefore, 2 is easily
forgotten. Likewise, how does your best friend relate to his
phone number, an arbitrary string of digits? Or how does a new
word, like "hypothalamus," relate to what it represents?
How can we learn to remember things better?
Simple. If memory works by association, we actively work to
create an association between two bits of information. For
example, for the plane that we need to catch at 2 P.M., we can
imagine the plane in our mind, and notice that it has 2 wings.
Two wings, 2 P.M. There's an association. We are now ten times
more likely to remember the take-off time long after it has faded
from our short-term memory.
Sometimes an association comes very easily. For example, suppose
you are introduced to a Mr. Hill who lives on a hill at the end
of town. Mr. Hill on a hill. Pretty easy, huh? Or what if you're
trying to remember the classroom number for a Chemistry class,
and it just so turns out that it's the same as your dorm room
number. Another natural association! Do you think you'll have a
problem remembering it?
When pieces of information are not obviously related in any way,
however, we have to be a bit more creative in linking things
together. But it isn't as hard as it seems. Most of us learned
rhymes and acronyms in school that helped us remember things. Do
any of the following look familiar to you?
i before e except after c, or when sounded like a as in neighbor
and weigh (rule for remembering ei or ie)
ROY G. BIV (colors of the rainbow)
All cows eat grass; Every good boy does fine (notes of musical
scale) Never eat sour watermelons (directions on a compass) Why
do they work? Because they form an easy-to-remember and clever
association between themselves and the information that is to be
remembered.
The idea is to be creative and clever. You don't have to invent
a rhyme or a poem every time you want to remember something,
though -- just think of a picture in your mind that links pieces
of information together, preferably something unusual or silly so
it is more memorable. For example, suppose you want to remember
that the football field is on Maple Street. You might imagine in
your mind a burly football player eating a football for breakfast
... he pours some maple syrup on the football, cuts off a chunk
and eats it!
To demonstrate how effectively this works, look at the following
list of words, and try to come up with an association between
the left word and the right word of each row. Some will be easy;
others may be harder. As an example, for the first pair, you
might want to imagine a mouse that has a long, wavy tail that is
in the shape of the letter S.
mouse S
fur R
train bridge
moat boat
popcorn chair
elephant pancake
toothbrush canal
umbrella triangle
After you have formed the associations (if you had trouble on one
or two of them, that's okay; just skip them for now), cover up
the right side of the list and then try to name the word
associated with each word on the left. If you formed vivid, clear
associations, you may be surprised at how quickly and easily you
were able to remember everything!
Pacing
by Peter Shepherd
Pacing is an unconventional way of reading a page, which can
reduce the amount of work by more than half without significantly
reducing the comprehension.
A plastic ruler or strip of transparent plastic 5 cm wide, is
placed vertically down the page to delineate the section of the page
where your Pacing Technique will be used.
By fixating only the words in the pacing zone, you reduce your
reading time by about one half. But you don't reduce your
comprehension by one half because you are forced to think beyond
the words your eyes are seeing. When your thoughts are on the
same subject as the material you are reading, the addition of
your personal experience to the reading increases your
understanding and memory.
If you read within the pacing zone by sliding back and forth in a
Z or S-type pattern to the bottom of the page, you will find that
you have read about 200 words with no more than 50 or 60
fixations.
All the time you are reading in this way, your eyes are seeing
and picking-up the odd word from peripheral vision and you are
thinking all the time and putting together ideas, because the
mind abhors a vacuum.
The first 10-15 times you use this technique, expect to be
frustrated. At first you may remember only 3 or 4 words from each
reading, but your objective is to go past the literal act of
remembering isolated words, to collecting and relating ideas.
This takes a lot of practice, so don't give up! Once you have
become used to this manner of reading, you can develop the use of
the technique further by letting your eyes stray beyond the
boundaries of the ruler, selecting from the page the words that
are most informative.
As you practise in this way, try to fixate on parts of speech,
i.e. nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. You will find that you start
to see more and more through peripheral vision, and as a result
you will find that you are concentrating more and speeding-up
your thinking.
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