26.3 Improving Memory

• Rehearse repeatedly. To master material, use distributed (spaced) practice. To learn a concept, give yourself many separate study sessions. Take advantage of life’s little intervals—riding a bus, walking across campus, waiting for class to start. New memories are weak; exercise them and they will strengthen. To memorize specific facts or figures, Thomas Landauer (2001) has advised, “rehearse the name or number you are trying to memorize, wait a few seconds, rehearse again, wait a little longer, rehearse again, then wait longer still and rehearse yet again. The waits should be as long as possible without losing the information.” Reading complex material with minimal rehearsal yields little retention. Rehearsal and critical reflection help more. As the testing effect has shown, it pays to study actively. Taking lecture notes in longhand, which requires summarizing material in your own words, leads to better retention than does verbatim laptop note taking. “The pen is mightier than the keyboard,” note researchers Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer (2014).
• Make the material meaningful. You can build a network of retrieval cues by taking text and class notes in your own words. Apply the concepts to your own life. Form images. Understand and organize information. Relate the material to what you already know or have experienced. As William James (1890) suggested, “Knit each new thing on to some acquisition already there.” Restate concepts in your own words. Mindlessly repeating someone else’s words won’t supply many retrieval cues. On an exam, you may find yourself stuck when a question uses phrasing different from the words you memorized.
  

  Thinking and memory Actively thinking as we read, by rehearsing and relating ideas, and by making the material personally meaningful, yields the best retention.
• Activate retrieval cues. Mentally re-create the situation and the mood in which your original learning occurred. Jog your memory by allowing one thought to cue the next.
• Use mnemonic devices. Associate items with peg words to harness visual imagery skills to illustrate in your mind’s eye what is to be remembered (“one is a bun, two is a shoe”). Make up a story that incorporates vivid images of the items. Chunk information into acronyms. Create rhythmic rhymes (“i before e, except after c”).
• Minimize interference. Study before sleep. Do not schedule back-to-back study times for topics that are likely to interfere with each other, such as Spanish and French.
• Sleep more. During sleep, the brain reorganizes and consolidates information for long-term memory. Sleep deprivation disrupts this process. Even 10 minutes of waking rest enhances memory of what we have read (Dewar et al., 2012). So, after a period of hard study, perhaps just sit or lie down for a few minutes before tackling the next subject.
• Test your own knowledge, both to rehearse it and to find out what you don’t yet know. Don’t be lulled into overconfidence by your ability to recognize information. Test your recall using the periodic Retrieval Practice items, the numbered Learning Objective questions in the Review sections, and the self-test questions at the end of each set of modules. Outline sections using a blank page. Define the terms and concepts listed at each module’s end before turning back to their definitions. Take practice tests; the websites and study guides that accompany many texts, including this one, are a good source for such tests.