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T h e M e m o r y K e y

<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

November 2007

<http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_111.htm>

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

TALKING ABOUT BOOKS YOU'VE READ

THE IRRATIONALITY OF THE BRAIN

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NEW: The original Memory Key is now available as an e-book!

Check it out at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/memkey_ebook.htm

Note that you can now use your credit cards on Paypal.

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Check out the e-book on "Effective notetaking" at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/notetaking_workbook.htm

and the e-book on "Remembering intentions" at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/intention_ebook.htm

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Find out about my YA novel at:
http://www.fmmcpherson.com/

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TALKING ABOUT BOOKS YOU'VE READ

I recently read an entertaining op-ed article in Inside Higher Education (http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/07/mclemee ) that raised a very interesting point. The writer (Scott McLemee) was suggesting that rather than advice telling us how to talk about a book without reading it (as given in Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read), what would be more useful to him is advice on how to talk about books you have read.

It’s a good point. We have all, surely, been in the position he describes, of being unable to remember anything about a book we’ve read — may even have spent considerable time and reflection on — when asked about it in conversation.

McLemee suggests that the problem arises because there are different parts of the self involved in reading: the part that reads; the part that files away the “take away message”; the part that integrates the new material with other stuff you have filed away; and finally, the part that deals with communication.

It’s good to separate these different tasks and note that different parts of the brain deal with them, but the problem is essentially simple: it’s to do with the match between encoding and retrieving.

I’ve spoken about this before (at length in The Memory Key! and much more briefly in last November’s newsletter http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_93.htm#RETRIEVAL ). For those who haven’t read my book, or picked up the basics from my various reports and articles over the years, encoding is what we do when we put information (a blanket word for anything being experienced) into our memory, and retrieving refers to the process of getting it out. The closer the fit between the encoding and retrieving contexts, the more likely we are to be able to retrieve the information.

In the situation McLemee talks about, we have information that has been encoded for the purpose of written critical review, now being subject to retrieval in an informal, social, oral context. The problem may be exacerbated by there being too much information encoded, perhaps too well integrated with other material (a peculiar notion, that being well integrated might be a bad thing!).

But the retrieval context — social conversation — demands a response that is fast and relatively superficial. If you don’t have any relevant sound bites prepared, you may well be at a loss.

This brings up another important point. When we retrieve information, it’s not like replaying a video. In fact, what we are doing is reconstructing that information — making, in effect, new information. The newer it is — the more different from codes already stored in your memory — the harder it’s going to be to construct. So if you have a whole lot of relevant information filed away, but what you need is only a few bits that may be scattered through the mass of data, and perhaps even from other stuff that isn’t part of that mass at all, then you’ve got quite a task ahead of you. A task that’s hard to do on the fly.

A similar thing can occur in an exam situation, and it’s why it’s so important if you’re preparing for an exam, to not simply review the material, but practice producing answers. Doing so creates new codes, codes in a form that will be more easily accessed in response to related questions.

Textbooks, of course, commonly are organized in such a way as to make this easy — with summaries, advance organizers, headings — all examples of concise, coherent, tightly integrated codes. But the trick is to have such codes available in response to the questions you are faced with. That’s why you want lots of strong access points, and these are achieved by accessing the material through many different parts of the code — which is why testing yourself is so important.

Something different is usually going on in the case when you are asked about a book you have a more casual acquaintance with. The most likely problem here is that you are unable to retrieve information about the book because you can’t quickly distinguish it from similar books. This is particularly the case with those of us who read lots of books! And particularly if they have a similar theme (for example, I read a lot of mysteries).

The remedy here, when you care (and I’m certainly not recommending you bother all the time), is to try and select something distinguishable and memorable to hook to that title — but not something that isn’t going to trigger your recollection of the story as a whole; an isolated image that has nothing much to do with anything, however memorable in itself, is probably not going to be of much use.

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THE IRRATIONALITY OF THE BRAIN

I was recently reminded that marketers, like economists, have only just begun to move away from the belief that people (a) make rational decisions, and (b) know why they do what they do. I must admit I find it amazing that these beliefs existed, and for so long, but there it is. But I guess, apart from psychologists, these beliefs are prevalent — evident by the fact that so often people are contemptuous about the irrationality of (other!) people.

We are all irrational, and that is not a dirty word. I love logic, and the cool analytical beauty of a pure reasoning process, but it is important to note that these are tools. They are not how the brain thinks. The human mind is based on other principles, the most important of which is association. If you want to understand your own, and others’, learning, remembering, and thinking processes, you need to take that to heart.

An important component of association is emotion. Here's a quote that says it all: "It is only because our emotional brains work so well that our reasoning can work at all." (Jonathan Haidt). The Boston Globe had a very nice article on this a few months ago, which you can read at: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/04/29/hearts__minds/

I’ve also put a video of a talk from the eminent neurologist V.S. Ramachandran on my blog ( http://www.memory-key.com/blog_archive/2007_11_11_archive.html ). In it he discusses three fascinating disorders, which memorably exemplify this principle that our cognitive processes all involve complex interactions of different component processes.

And if you haven’t read it, you might like to read my article on emotion and memory, that I wrote a few years ago: http://www.memory-key.com/NatureofMemory/emotion.htm . You can also find everything I’ve written about emotion indexed at: http://www.memory-key.com/MemWorks/personality.htm 

The bottom line is that emotion is part of all your cognitive processes, and if you deny it, all you do is allow it to rule you. If you learn how it works, you are in a better position to use it to help you remember and think.

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If you have missed any issue of the newsletter (those people who use hotmail
in particular sometimes have their mail bounced back "overquota"), you can
read back issues at: http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/newsletters.htm

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The Memory Key website is named after my book "The Memory Key", a
practical user-friendly handbook designed to help people achieve
genuine, long-lasting memory improvement.

http://www.memory-key.com/AboutTheSite/about_book.htm

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1564144704/thememorykey-20

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