James
D. Weinland’s How to Improve Your
Memory is, in my mind, primarily a book on study
skills.
Weinland’s interest is learning,
and memory is
an important part of that.
As I read the book, it seemed to me that learning successfully is built
on four areas: intention,
attention, repetition
and organization.
Weinland has tips related to all of these.
Intention to learn is easy to come by when you have an interest in a
subject. If you’re not interested, you’ll need to find some other motivation.
Think about why you’re studying a subject and the benefits you hope to achieve.
Even if you’re a student and you “have to” take a class, think of the
opportunities that might open up to you if you get a good grade.
Attention is very important to memory and learning. If you forget
something, it is very likely you weren’t paying attention to begin with. Remove
distractions from your environment and mind (this wasn’t an issue when this
book was published in 1957,
but put away your cell phone and put it out of your mind). Engage as many
senses as you can.
Remember that attention isn’t an infinitely available commodity. Get
the rest you need. Don’t burn yourself out by focusing too long on one subject
or closely related subjects. Give your mind, especially the executive functions
a break, by alternating unrelated subjects, switching back and forth from
mental to physical activities and making a little time for rest and recreation.
Repetition is important to memory, but it doesn’t need to be boring.
Allowing time between practice sessions can actually improve performance.
Organization can go a long way to making learning easier. Some of the
most successful mnemonic
techniques involve arranging and associating things we want to remember with
things we already remember well, especially locations. For instance,
pigeonholing involves creating a spacial arrangement, such as a grid, with
things to be remembered in each space. Mind maps do something similar with a
more free-form arrangement that also takes advantage of our ability to remember
images and colors. Memory castles are sophisticated applications of this
strategy. Understanding how things are divided into wholes and parts or groups
can help you break down subjects into smaller, easier to remember, parts that
are connected so that remembering on item helps you remember the others.
I tend to connect the use of meaningful association to the idea of
organization. Meaningful association builds on what you already know. This
could be building on or filling in your background on a subject, finding
analogies to familiar or using acronyms and rhymes. A related practice is it to
come up with an outrageous image that represents what you want to remember. We
find it easy to remember images—the more unusual the image the easier it is to
recall—so we can take advantage of that by associating what we want remember
with a crazy image that reminds of it.
The book is dated, but I think the advice is applicable even if the science
of memory has advance. In addition, the book has the advantage of being short.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
No comments:
Post a Comment