6 How Do I Remember?
Will had only one challenge in school: memorizing. Generally, Will loved the routine, relationships, and activities of school. Except when it came to memorizing things. Everywhere Will turned, the school expected him to remember things. Will had to memorize his locker combination and class schedule. He had to remember all the different things to bring to school, the different books and things to bring back home, and the assignments he was to complete each night. But the hardest part was remembering what he was learning. One minute, Will knew what he needed to know, but the next minute, it was gone. And to make it all the more frustrating, no one else seemed to have the same problem.
Memory
Learning requires remembering things. If, as prior chapters confirmed, learning involves a persistent change in behavior, then the learner must be able to recall what the learner has learned. As the above story just illustrated, forgetting something as quickly as one grasps it can frustrate and discourage learning. All that attention, concentration, and effort goes for naught if you don’t remember what you read, heard, or did. If any skill or capacity distinguishes learners more, memory may be that thing. Students will indeed speak of having good or bad memory skills. A struggling learner will often express frustration at not being able to remember. If that’s you, first assess your basic health. Adequate and regular sleep can be critical for memory. Memories somehow consolidate with sleep. Good nutrition and exercise also help. Remembering involves physiological processes. Keep your physiology fit, and you’ll aid your memory. But then, adopt the following practices, and your memory will likely improve, perhaps vastly. You may forget that memory was once a problem.
Understanding
Memory begins with getting an accurate grasp on things. Your attention, concentration, and effort to recognize and comprehend are absolutely key. You cannot remember what you don’t initially understand. If you struggle with memorizing, first confirm that you are initially understanding what you are trying to remember. Practice getting a clear picture in mind of what it is that you want to remember later. An example is remembering someone’s name after an introduction. Too often, you don’t quite hear the name or don’t hear it right. That bit of uncertainty promptly evaporates the memory. You then stand no chance of recalling even just five minutes later what you didn’t quite grasp initially. Instead, make a practice of repeating the name to the person just introduced, inviting the person’s quick confirmation that you correctly pronounced the name. Even better, confirm that you can spell the name correctly. You’ve now solved your comprehension problem and will much more likely remember the name. Do the same with your studies, repeating and confirming the information, aloud or silently as the circumstances permit. Confirm comprehension.
Rehearsal
The next step in remembering involves rehearsal. The practice just suggested above of repeating a person’s name after an introduction is an example of rehearsal. Only seconds may have passed, but by repeating the name, you have already rehearsed it once. Rehearsal, one way or another, is the key to memory. Rehearsal often involves silent repetition of the thing you’re trying to remember, just going over it again in your mind. Subvocalization, whispering the memory item to yourself, is a common form of rehearsal and reinforcement. Audible vocalization, whether talking to yourself or, better yet, speaking to another, further rehearses and reinforces the memory. Writing the memory down is yet another form of rehearsal, adding tactile sensation to the memory. If the memory bears use, such as working it into an account or solution, or even enactment, such as moving around or manipulating objects, all the better. You’ve now added kinesthetic sensation to the memory. The more frequent your rehearsal, and the greater the variety of mental, auditory, vocalized, tactile, and enacted rehearsals of the memory, the more likely you are to remember.
Spacing
The next key to remembering, after comprehension and repetition or rehearsal, is spacing the repetition. If you have any one overarching technique on which to rely for sound memory, spaced repetition is that technique. Rehearsing the memory repeatedly is all good, but spacing the repetition out over time is critical. If all your rehearsal is in the first five minutes after you grasped the concept that you are trying to remember, then you’re not spacing the repetition, and you won’t significantly aid your memory. The spacing should be progressive, initially at shorter intervals and later at longer intervals. Rehearse the memory in five minutes, then an hour, then four hours, then twenty-four hours. Then rehearse the memory in four days, two weeks, six weeks, and twelve weeks. Then rehearse the memory in six months, one year, and five years, and you’ll likely remember it for a lifetime.
Transfer
Beware the subtle effect of environmental support of memory. When we comprehend something in one physical setting, say for instance a classroom, that setting’s sound, light, surfaces, and visual images become a part of the memory. When you move to another setting, say for instance an exam room, recalling the memory becomes more difficult without the environmental support. To remove the environmental support from a memory and make the memory transferable to other settings, rehearse the memory in different settings. Don’t, in other words, study in just one location. Move your studies from the home to the library to the coffee shop. Studying in the location in which you will have to recall and use the knowledge that you are trying to remember, such as the exam room, might be best but isn’t always possible. And when learning, you generally want to be able to use the knowledge indiscriminately, in different environments.
Forgetting
Forgetting is a significant aspect of remembering. We may forget simply because we did not at first clearly comprehend the knowledge or because we did not rehearse it sufficiently, progressively spaced out over time. But we may also forget the knowledge because other encounters interfere with the memory. Taking in large quantities of new information may, for instance, interfere with storing and recalling what you recently learned. Thus, if you’re studying, don’t overload your mind and memory with other new information, if you can avoid it. You may find it nearly impossible, for instance, to study while traveling to a location you’ve never been before. The sensual onslaught of new sights, sounds, tastes, and surfaces may overwhelm your mind. Traumatic events, like news of a friend’s serious injury, or other briefly overwhelming events, like attending a rock concert, can likewise degrade memory. Expect to have to rehearse, refresh, and restore memory after any such event.
Refreshing
The practice of rehearsing memories often requires refreshing them. We may not be sure we’ve got the memory just right, and so we glance at an outline, reading, note card, slide show, or other memory aid and resource. Refreshing is necessary and appropriate to ensure the memory’s integrity. But refreshing has important techniques, tricks, and tips, too. One is that you must withdraw the prompt. You do yourself little good simply staring endlessly at your outline. You must instead remove the outline or cover it over, to try again to recall the memory without the outline’s prompt. Use prompts as aids, not crutches. If you can’t remember without the prompt, you are not remembering but instead just rereading the prompt. Practice removing prompts until you can reproduce the prompt from memory. Then, you’ll have confirmed your memory without the aid of the prompt.
Outlines
Outlines are common and useful tools for refreshing memory. An outline attempts to summarize a unit or course in reasonably concise form, for a student to review for a final exam. In some programs, students make a ritual of preparing, borrowing, buying, trading, and improving outlines. Preparing an outline can be a useful way of ensuring that you have identified and organized the priority information. For a three-credit course, an outline of around ten single-spaced, typewritten pages can make a useful aid for memorizing and refreshing memories. Anything longer may be too long to effectively review and memorize. Yet memorizing outlines is no substitute for deeper engagement with the studies, such as answering questions, solving problems, analyzing scenarios, and evaluating outcomes. Even as a memory aid, an outline presents the hazard of supporting context. The outline’s concepts just before and just after the information you are trying to memorize can become a part of your recall. Pulling discrete bits of information quickly and accurately out of your memory may be difficult, when you’ll instead remember whole chunks of the outline. Consider the following remedy.
Fluency
The above paragraphs describe some basic requirements of remembering, along with some techniques of memorizing. Consider for a moment, though, what we are trying to achieve when memorizing and remembering. No one wants to struggle to recall. Struggling to remember in any setting, whether an exam room, workplace, or social setting, pretty much defeats the purpose of knowing. We generally need instead a sort of fluency or automaticity to memory, so that we can do other necessary things using the information that we promptly and without the burden of thought recall. In many settings, we need to remember without thinking about it, instead recalling instantly and easily. What you need for fluent recall is a tool or aid that builds and strengthens memory without introducing the prompt and support problems described above.
Aids
If your memory is insufficiently automatic or fluid on a subject important to you, such as for a test, exam, or presentation, and you want to improve your memory to the point of automaticity, you can use memory aids to help you. You’ve just seen that a key to memory is gradually withdrawing prompts until your memory can stand alone. Ideally, you would want a concise prompt followed by an opportunity to recall, and then a quick refresh if unable to recall, with the refresh just as quickly withdrawn for another attempt at recall. Repeating that process while gradually removing mastered prompts and introducing new prompts to master would quickly build instant, accurate, and thus fluent recall.
Flashcards
Flashcards, whether physical or digital, can be a useful memory solution. Students can memorize, for fluent recall, vast quantities of information when properly using well-designed flashcards. One side of the card should have a brief prompt. The other side of the card should have a somewhat longer but not overly long refresher of the information to recall, perhaps a dozen words or less. Make a deck of cards sufficient to address the priority topics you need to memorize. Then, pull three to five cards randomly from the deck. Display the top card’s prompt while trying to say aloud the memory refresher on the card’s hidden back. If you cannot instantly recall the memory, flip the card over briefly to display the refresher, reading the refresher aloud before hiding the refresher again while displaying the prompt and repeating the correct memory. Move on to the next card of the three to five cards in your mini deck. Go through those three to five cards until you master them with instant and accurate recall. As you master a card, return it to the bottom of the whole deck of cards, replacing it with a fresh card from the top of the whole deck. Keep working through your mini deck until you have mastered the whole deck. Repeat at spaced intervals, and you’ll memorize like you’ve never memorized before.
Mastery
Flashcards may seem to you like an unnecessarily artificial tool and their use like an awkward and annoyingly abstract activity. But flashcards highlight a fascinating aspect of learning having to do with its rates. We tend to think of learning as involving plodding consistently along at a linear rate, making regular small gains. But learning instead tends to have highly variable rates. Indeed, learning gains are not generally arithmetic, like walking forward an even step at a time. Learning gains may instead be logarithmic, jumping ahead tenfold at stages. Children learn vocabulary in that fashion, very slowly at first, much more quickly soon after, and then at a head-spinning speed. And so, turning your struggling memory into fluent memory with a little concentrated effort such as flashcard work doesn’t just give you another incremental learning gain. It may instead catapult you to the next level. In whatever your learning goal is, find the surest way to mastery, whether flashcards or other practice, and you’ll likely gain by leaps and bounds, not just incrementally.
Mystery
Memory is thus mysterious but not entirely a mystery. By all means, treat memory delicately. For you to memorize, your brain must gradually grow innumerable tree-like dendrites across its vast neural network, while organizing electrical charges and chemical exchanges into the patterns that somehow store and replicate memories. Your natural frustration with effortful memorizing is simply an expression of that phantom physiological process, one of the great mysteries of life. Memorizing may not feel so good to you because of the way that it challenges your brain to grow and adapt. But just as learning gains are logarithmic rather than arithmetic, so are learning losses. With memory as with other organic functions, the rule is use it or lose it. You are far better off consistently striving to comprehend, remember, and recall, and making learning leaps and bounds as a consequence, than to vegetate in catastrophic learning loss. The day may come when you have no choice but to relinquish the reins of learning. But until then, race on toward the mountaintop.
Reflection
On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your skill at memorizing and remembering? What is your bigger impediment to remembering, properly encoding new information at the outset, retaining it across time, or retrieving it on demand? Recall an example of new information that you routinely and properly rehearse to assuredly remember, whether a new telephone number of a family member or friend, a new device’s password, or the names of new neighbors. In those instances, what is your rehearsal practice or pattern that works? Can you think of an example when you have effectively spaced your rehearsal in order to remember something important over a long period of time, like thinking every few weeks about your parents’ upcoming special anniversary or a friend’s scheduled surgery? Have you experienced the transfer effect where you met someone in one setting but failed to recognize them in a new setting? What have been your go-to memory techniques for an instructional program? Did this chapter suggest to you any refinements of those techniques or any new techniques? Can you recall an instance when you gained fluency in a subject through special effort? If so, how far did your fluency advance your learning beyond what you expected?
Key Points
Memorizing, remembering, and recalling are crucial to learning.
To remember, one must first comprehend firmly and accurately.
Remembering then requires rehearsing the new knowledge.
Spacing out rehearsal across progressively greater periods helps.
Rehearsing in different settings helps fix memory outside of stimuli.
Overloads of new information and traumatic events degrade memory.
Refreshing memory is necessary, but withdraw prompts for effect.
Outlines can be both useful and problematic memory aids.
Train memory for fluent recall, not simply for struggling recall.
Well-designed and implemented aids can improve memory.
Flashcards, properly designed and used, can be effective memory aids.
Mastery of memory can advance learning by leaps and bounds.
The physiologic mystery of memory requires effortful striving.