In a previous post, I suggested a memory exercise based on mentally constructing a two-act play and summarizing the things you want to remember.
Some students objected to the additional requirement of not only memorizing things, but also adding them to the game, a separate cognitive effort that not everyone is comfortable with. So here’s an equally effective alternative method that eliminates the need to mentally create a new play each time you want to memorize a list of items.
Assessment of the upper limit of human short-term memory
But before we discuss this method, what would be your estimate of the upper bound on the number of things that can be remembered in a randomly selected group of people?
A psychologist in the 1940s George Miller German radio found a limit in the design of a jamming signal capable of disrupting communications. While working on this important war mission, Miller measured how people rated the strength of various stimuli. how tall How bright? How long did it last? The responses to all these different warnings turned out to be 7 well-known cases. When he tried his subject short term memory for numbers it also turned out to be 7. Of course, some people did slightly worse (remembering no more than 5 digits), while others could report 9 digits, with the rare exception of successfully repeating 10 digits.
Later, while researching the subject of memory, Miller discovered that nineteenth-century philosopher Sir William Hamilton had come to the same conclusion through a simpler experiment. “If you drop a handful of marbles on the floor, it will be difficult to see more than 6 or 7 at once without confusion,” wrote Hamilton.
Study the following series of numbers and see how many you can repeat reading aloud or silently after 1 minute: 3,8,2,1,6,0,6,5,4,8,4,9,3,7,4,8,5,0,5,8. If you remember 10 numbers, count yourself among the rare exceptions Miller says.
The take home from Hamilton and Miller’s research? As Miller points out, the “magic number 7” applies to numbers, words, pictures, and even complex ideas. In other words, the brain operates within certain constraints, and these constraints cover a wide range of human experience.
Back to the number line, here’s a way to learn 10 numbers on the first try.
Think of a sequence of numbers for phone numbers:
382-160-6548
493-748-5058
By setting the frame (phone numbers), you can go beyond Miller’s “rare exceptions”.
How the method of loci improves memory
For students who are not interested in combining memory with mental dramatization, here is an equally effective method, especially for things that require special effort to dramatize, such as a grocery list. Choose ten objects or places that you frequently encounter every day, inside or outside your home or apartment. The main requirement is this familiarity. For this method to work, you need to visit these places regularly.
The first step in this memory method is to generate a clear mental picture each of these 10 places (called loci since the description of Simonides in 556 BC), so you can take an imaginary walk or drive that includes them all. It is important that you visualize these places vividly. To do this, it helps to take a picture of each of them so that you can refresh your internal mental images at any time for details if they seem to be fading.
My mind walk or drive starts at my house and goes to a nearby library, a local coffee shop, a local liquor store, Georgetown Medical School (which I attended), Georgetown University, Cafe Milano – a popular restaurant in Georgetown, the Key Bridge (which connects Georgetown to Rosslyn, Virginia), Iwo Jima International Airport, and finally Reagan. I zoomed in on the internal images I have for best results imaginationmade them as clear as possible, showing them in color rather than black and white. Every once in a while, I’ll look at each site from my house to the end at Reagan Airport, and then mentally return home.
Once you’ve done this, each of the sites will act as place settings for things you want to remember. Take this sample grocery list: bread, milk, eggs, coffee, olive oil, sugar, tea, cinnamon, cookies, and apple pie. At this point, I can only think of dramatic, weird, or just exaggerated ways to post everything on 1 out of 10 sites. For example, I think of milk coming out of the chimney of my house. The library shelves are filled with bread instead of books. There are small tables in front of the coffee shop where they serve, of course, large cups of coffee. The liquor store does not stock alcohol, but many, many cartons of eggs. When I go to Georgetown Medical School, I can’t walk up the stairs because there’s olive oil running down the stairs onto the pavement. When I arrived at Georgetown University, the entrance was blocked by mountains of sugar that made it look like it was covered in snow. Outside Cafe Milan, everyone sits down and eats a 6-inch-tall apple pie. When I reach Key Bridge, the road is sprinkled with cinnamon. Soldiers carrying a flag at the Iwo Jima memorial pack waist-high tea bags. Finally, at Reagan National Airport, a statue of Reagan hands out a plate of cookies to passersby.
Once you’ve committed these images to memory, you don’t need to remember the food items by name: see them arranged within ten images.
If you’re thinking that the first list will interfere with the next list, it won’t. First described by the Soviet psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik in the 1920s, due to a peculiarity of the human brain, it disappears from active memory when a task is completed. But if the task is not completed, it creates cognitive tension that prevents further memory formation. Lesson? Always finish your list.
Richard M. Restak, MD
