The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

Product Information

The first strategy would be called ‘shallow’ processing because you would not be giving the information any additional meaning. You would be making only one connection between the cues (countries) and the target memories (cities). The second strategy would be called ‘deep’ processing as you would be drawing many connections – between the capital, the country, its people and its sights, and so on. This is a topic that has long fascinated me, and I’ve written a lot about memory previously on this blog. However, I wanted to create a guide that would combine and integrate everything we know scientifically about memory, and distill that knowledge into practical advice. Memory impacts every facet of our lives. The first step to remembering things better is to understand how your memory works. Try to see the items in your mind,” he said, and only consult the list at the end, if necessary. If you’re not going to the store, try memorizing a recipe. He added that frequent cooking is actually a great way to improve working memory. If you adopted the second strategy, you would be making use of the structure of your memory. Memory is believed to operate on the principle of spreading activation. [ 32] If you encounter one concept (a country), the neural pathways representing this concept are activated in your brain. As a consequence, nearby neural pathways encoding closely related concepts are also activated. Images and ideas come to your mind. For instance, when someone says France, you may visualize the French flag, the Eiffel tower, French wine, cheese, etc. This process continues to further and further concepts until you start thinking about something else.

One way to divide up retrospective memory is in the kinds of things it stores. A big difference here is between implicit and declarative memory. As we age, our memory declines. This is an ingrained assumption for many of us; however, according to neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak, a neurologist and clinical professor at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health, decline is not inevitable. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58. Think hard about how you will be tested on the information you need to remember. Will it be multiple choice tests? Essay questions? Applied in real life problems? Then make your practice match the situation where you use it. Mismatched practice is a major cause of poor memories–they simply aren’t encoded in a way that is useful. At my request, you recovered a memory for something that you probably would have not thought about, if I hadn’t prompted you to recall it, and you hadn’t made the effort to retrieve it.There's also discussions around how memory can change and be changed. This leads to a fascinating section on collective memory, false information and technology. It strays into Orwell's Ministry of Truth from 1984! From ancient philosophers to Freud, 'The Complete Guide to Memory' breaks down nuggets of theoretical and scientific study into bite-sized synopses with real-life examples for application. In doing so, Richard Restak is not telling the reader which philosophies are inherently correct or incorrect. Instead, he is highlighting the benefits of multiple approaches to the study of memory so that you can decide what may or may not work best for you. Throughout his career, Dr. Restak has been asked by dozens of patients how they can improve their memory. But not all memory lapses are problematic. For instance, not remembering where you parked your car in a crowded lot is pretty normal. Forgetting how you arrivedat the parking lot in the first place, however, indicates potential memory issues. The main implication of this study is that structured information is much easier to encode to memory than disorganized information. [ 3] Scientists have discovered that memories are heavily context-dependent. Context is essentially anything that is present during encoding (for instance the environment we are in). Our brains seem to encode the context as a part of the memory trace as if taking a snapshot of everything that is around us at the moment of creating the memory.

How can I remember such an inconsequential and innocuous experience when over four decades later, often I can’t remember what I had for dinner the previous evening? Now I know thanks to this book!

Select a format:

Space out your practice. Done properly, you can get the same memory strength with 20-30% less time by spacing properly.