Memory Key Newsletter

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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 2006

http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_93.htm

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:
RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES

NEXT MONTH

BLOG

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The e-book on "Remembering intentions" is now $9.95!

Check it out 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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RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES

I want to talk this month about retrieval strategies and encoding strategies.

In my books and articles, I talk a lot about encoding strategies (how you put information into your memory) and very little about retrieval strategies (how you find it again). The reason is very simple: if you haven’t encoded something properly, the best will in the world won’t help you retrieve it; if you have encoded it well, retrieval will largely take care of itself. Also, there aren’t many retrieval strategies to talk about!

I’m simplifying here. But the essential point is clear: encoding is more important. Being able to remember easily is all about putting in the attention and effort when encoding.

However, as I say, I devote a lot of time to encoding. It’s time I talked more about the connection between encoding and retrieving. For it’s not all about encoding.

Let’s think about retrieval. First of all, there’s the fundamental distinction between recognition and recall.

We all know that recognition is much easier than recall — recognizing someone is much easier than trying to call them to mind; a multi-choice question is much easier than writing a short answer. In the same way, cued recall is much easier than free recall — it’s easier to answer specific questions about something than to be asked to tell everything you know about a subject. And, of course, the more detail the question supplies, the easier.

It’s all about retrieval cues. Retrieval cues are the things that trigger our remembering, and they can be huge cues (The name of the person credited with composing the Iliad is the same name as the lead character in the Simpsons, and very similar to another word for house) or quite obscure (seeing the word Lammas just now, I misread it as llamas, which triggered the image of David Carradine, an actor I saw on TV two nights ago, playing the part of a Buddhist monk in a high Tibetan monastery — or lamasery, as we identified it at the time, leading my thoughts inevitably to llamas).

The point is, the greater the retrieval cue — the more information it provides; the more closely it matches the information you have in store — the easier it is to remember.

Which leads us to the connection between encoding and retrieving. If it’s all about fit between the information you have available at retrieval and the information you originally encoded, then clearly, the more you have thought about retrieval when encoding, the more likely you are to have a good fit.

You’re probably going to say: That’s impossible! How should I know what retrieval cues I’ll have?
It’s not as hard as you think.

Students, of course, do it all the time, at least at a basic level. If they know they’re going to be given a multi-choice test, they know they only need to recognize the right answer, and adjust their study effort accordingly. Similarly, they’ll put greater effort into free recall situations such as essay questions, than cued recall situations such as short answer questions.

We can go a lot deeper than that though.

In my forthcoming book on note-taking, I devote a chapter to headings, and one of the things I say (which, indeed, triggered this article) is that research suggests that, although headings are often useful, it may be that they are only useful if you not only use them in your encoding, but also in your retrieval strategy. That is, it’s not enough to encode your information cleverly, you also have to make sure you use the same approach at retrieval.

In practice, that means the format, the structure, of your encoded information, has to be very obvious, or stronger than the encoded information itself. Let me give you an example.

Say you’re learning about brain cells. You might devise a hierarchical outline, such as this:

brain cell:

neurons
glia.

parts of neurons:

cell body / soma:

nucleus,
rough endoplasmic reticulum
smooth endoplasmic reticulum
Golgi apparatus
mitochondria.

neurites:

axons
dendrites.

etc

When you want to remember the information, you will remember more if you follow this structure, as opposed to, say, trying an alphabet approach (to take an extreme example!) — ‘What starts with A?’ — or the common but not very helpful, ‘What do I know about brain cells?’ (i.e., waiting for the first thought then following the associations).

As I discuss in the book, there are many ways of arranging information. If you are going to maximize the benefit of effective note-taking formats, however, it seems you need to know how you arranged it when you’re retrieving the material. That doesn’t mean invariably using the same format, because there is no one way that most effectively represents all types of information. But it does suggest you want to develop a certain habitual consistency in your approach to information you want to remember, so that you have a good idea how you would have arranged it.

Moreover, it seems that if you deliberately use some structuring strategy in encoding and retrieving, you’ll be less affected by general memory factors such as:
· serial position (items mentioned first or last are remembered better than items in the middle), and
· familiarity (items you are already familiar with will of course be recalled more easily).

Okay, studying, being a fairly formal information-processing situation, is an obvious example of the principle I’m talking about. But how does the principle apply to everyday situations?

First of all, let’s remind ourselves of memory principle #1: You can’t remember everything, and in fact it’s not desirable.

So improving your memory is about improving your memory for the things you want, or need, to remember.

Let’s think about remembering people. We’ve got a great memory for people (though it might not seem so when you’re focused on the failures!), but we come into contact with lots and lots of people. Callous as it might seem, we have to prioritize — some people just aren’t ‘worth’ remembering (to you) — by and large, these are people you don’t expect to meet again.

Now, we don’t tend to try and remember people in any kind of formal way, as we do when studying, but if we consciously organized them, we would find it easier to remember them, especially when meeting many people in a short space of time.

People can be organized in a number of different ways: by name, by place, by occupation, by time (e.g., people you knew in childhood), by relationship… If you do expect you’ll meet a person again, you should ask yourself, will it be in this same situation, or am I likely to meet them in different places and contexts? If they’re part of a group of people, you’ll probably want to encode them as part of that group. But you may not feel the need to remember their name (at least not immediately); it may be enough for you for now to simply be able to recognize them as belonging to a particular group, so that if you meet them in a different context, you can recognize them as a group member and make an appropriate comment.

This is easier if you have some sort of organizational structure in place. If you mentally file people according to a personal category system, you can then use that system to find the file. Such a system could be along the lines of:
Family
Friends
Friends of friends
Interests
Music
Archery
Chess
Work
Own workplace
Associates
Clients/Customers
Services
Health
Trades
Retail
And so on.

This may all seem needlessly complicated, but it isn’t really. Our brains naturally think in terms of hierarchical categories. To some extent such an arrangement will already exist in your database. But if you encode people in this way consciously, and then use that structure to guide your retrieval, remembering will be easier and faster.

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NEXT MONTH

There won’t be a newsletter next month, but I do hope some time during the month I will be able to notify you that the long-promised ebook on note-taking is available. I do fulsomely apologize for the length of time it has taken, and once it is out of the way, I feel sure the other promised books will be much much swifter! I stalled on the study skills book, and only realized a few months ago (and that progressively) that my problems stemmed from trying to cover too much, from too many angles (student, teacher, writer). It’s a prime example of the importance of clearly specifying your goal. However, I am now closing in on the end, and it should be available early in the new year. (Finishing this book, and the print version of Remembering intentions, is also the reason I haven’t been keeping up my blog very well, and have temporarily given up on podcasts).

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