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Memory facilitation vs memory improvement

What generally happens as a result of participating in a memory-improvement course is temporary memory improvement, known as facilitation of memory performance. Sometimes this is all that is desired. For example, a teacher or supervisor often tries to create conditions whereby the student’s or employee’s memory in the learning situation is facilitated, rather than trying to permanently improve their memory.

When a teacher or parent teaches a child the rhyme “Thirty days hath September, April, June and November…”, the aim is to help the child remember a specific set of facts — the number of days in each month. This is facilitation of memory performance. If instead, the instructor had explained mnemonic strategies — what they are, how they can be used, when they are appropriate, how you can create them, etc — and then gave as an example “Thirty days …”, that would be an attempt to permanently improve memory.

The difference between memory facilitation and genuine, permanent, memory improvement, lies in the extent to which facilitation strategies are used. In most cases, such strategies are adopted for a particular occasion only.

For example, someone might tell you their phone number — 560-1984 — and suggest that it is easy to remember because you were born in 1956 (in 1956 you were 0) and 1984 is of course the name of George Orwell’s famous book. If you generalized that strategy and began to remember all new phone numbers by transforming them into meaningful chunks, that would be memory improvement, but if, as is much more likely, you simply followed the recommendation for remembering that particular number, that would be memory facilitation.

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