There are four Rs in memory – Registration (taking the information in), Retention (hanging onto it), Recall (brining it back when we need it) and also an extra one Review (one way to take memory from short term to long term)
We have pretty good retention (not perfect sometimes but good enough for now). We have pretty bad recall. But the better the Registration the better the Recall. Taking time to get the information in in a memory-friendly way will improve our ability to get the information back out as and when we need it.
So many memory registration strategies are all versions of the same simple ideas that go back the ancient Greeks if not before. Making abstract ideas into concrete visual linked images, often stories, that include movement, as many senses as possible, include you personally, are funny, yucky, bizarre or sexy (or all of them at once).
For example, to help my son with his GCSE English I got him to identify nine aspects (remember, if you number stuff off it makes it easier to remember) that he had to remember to consider when he was analyzing a piece of writing in an exam. They were:
1) Irony, 2) metaphors, 3) oxymorons, 4) alliteration, 5) onomatopoeia, 6) repetition,7) syllables, 8) imagery and 9) themes.
As a student he knows what to look for under each of these headings, it’s a question of remembering to cover them all. So, to memorise them all gives him a better chance of getting the grade he’s capable of. To do this we just created a stupid story:
I was ironing (1) a horse (2) when a stupid person came in with an ox (3) dragging an alligator (4) so I hit it over the head with an encyclopaedia (5) again and again (6) and put the dead alligator on a slab (7) and took a photo (8) of it and the moral of the story is (9) don’t iron horses.
Stupid story but it took us less than a minute to come up with and I’m remembering it now weeks later. (His results come out next month so we’ll see how well he used it – he certainly remembered it for his exam though.)
Other variations are the memory palace idea where you put the things you want to remember in various rooms throughout your house and then, for recall, just walk around your house in your mind’s eye and pick them all up again. You can do a version of the same thing with a familiar journey or even putting things to remember on various parts of your body.
There are also things like Peg Word systems – 1= bun; 2- shoe; 3= tree etc.. And you take what you want to remember and create a suitable memorable link between the first thing on your list and a bun, the second thing and a shoe...
Another variation is where 1=rocket; 2=swan, 3= bra... And you do the same thing, visual links.
There’s even a language learning version called the Linkword system that I used with my bottom set students teaching French.
The Review cycle is based on what is called the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting – that on a graph, our memory tails away by around 80% within 24 hours of learning something unless we review. If we revisit what we’ve learned at the end of the session (even ten minutes after it to tap into what is called the Reminiscence Effect), after 24 hours, after a week, after a month and then after 6 months, this process can improve our memory by 400%
Many of the variations of Tony Buzan’s Mindmapping books have information about memory as do the Accelerated Learning books of Colin Rose. There are also tapes by a chap called Trudeau which I have been told are good.
Is this enough to be going along with for now?
Hope that helps – let me know how you get on (if you remember).
Best wishes