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Your Memory and Your Brain: 5 Key Principles By Dave Ellis (1) Following are five key things to remember about how you remember and learn. They will introduce you to ideas and suggestions that you will find useful to include in your study process. Principle 1: see memory as something you do—not something you have. (2) Once upon a time, people talked about human memory as if it were a closet. You stored individual memories there as you would old shirts and stray socks. Remembering something was a matter of rummaging through all that stuff. If you were lucky, you found what you wanted. This view of memory creates some problems. For one thing, closets can get crowded. Things too easily disappear. Even with the biggest closet, you eventually run out of space. If you want to pack some new memories in there—well, too bad. There’s no room. (3) Brain researchers shattered this image to bits. Memory is not a closet. It’s not a place or a thing. Instead, memory is a process that is based in the brain. On a conscious level, memories appear as distinct and unconnected mental events: words, sensations, images. They can include details from the distant past—the smell of cookies baking in your grandmother’s kitchen, or the feel of sunlight warming your face through the window of your first-grade classroom. On a biological level, each of those memories involves millions of brain cells, or neurons, firing chemical messages to one another. If you could observe these exchanges in real time, you’d see regions of cells all over the brain glowing with electrical charges at speeds that would put a computer to shame. (4) When a series of brain cells connects several times in a similar pattern, the result is a memory. Psychologist Donald Hebb explains it this way: “Neurons which fire together, wire together.” It means that memories are not really stored. Instead, remembering is a process in which you encode information as links between active neurons that fire together. You also decode, or reactivate, neurons that wired together in the past which allows you to retrieve information, i.e., “remember.” Memory is the probability that certain patterns of brain activity will occur again in the future. In effect, you recreate a memory each time you recall it. (5) Scientists tell us that the human brain is “plastic.” Whenever you efficiently encode and decode, your brain changes physically. You grow more connections between neurons. The more you learn, the greater the number of connections. For all practical purposes, there’s no limit to how many memories your brain can process. Knowing this allows you to step out of your crowded mental closet into a world of infinite possibilities. Principle 2: Remember that the memory process works in stages. (6) The memory process consists of a series of events. To make the most of your memory, apply an appropriate memory strategy when one of these events take place: • Pay attention to sense experiences. Memories start as events that we see, hear, feel, touch, or taste. Memory strategies at this stage are about choosing where to focus your attention. • “Move” sense experiences to short-term memory. Sensory memories last for only a few seconds. If you don’t want them to disappear, then immediately apply a strategy for moving them into short-term memory, such as reciting the information to yourself several times. Short-term memory is a place where you can “hold” those fleeting sensory memories for up to several minutes. • Encode for long-term memory. If you want to recall information for more than a few minutes, then wire the new neural connections in a more stable way. This calls for a more sophisticated memory strategy—one that allows you to refire the connections for days, weeks, months, or even years into the future. • Decode important information on a regular basis. The more often you recall information, the more stable the memory becomes. To remember it, retrieve it. Principle 3: Sink deeply into sense experience. (7) Your brain’s contact with the world comes through your five senses, so anchor your learning in as many senses as possible. For example: • Create images. Draw mind map summaries of your readings and lecture notes. Include visual images. Put main ideas in larger letters and brighter colors. • Immerse yourself in concrete experiences. Say that you’re in a music appreciation class and learning about jazz. Go to a local jazz club or concert to see and hear a live performance. Principle 4: Choose strategies for encoding. (8) Signs of encoding mastery are making choices about what to remember and how to remember it. This in turn makes it easier for you to decode, or recall, the material at a crucial point in the future—such as during a test. (9) Say that you’re enjoying a lecture in introduction to psychology. It really makes sense. In fact, it’s so interesting that you choose to just sit and listen—without taking notes. Two days later, you’re studying for a test and wish you’d made a different choice. You remember that the lecture was interesting, but you don’t recall much else. In technical terms, your decision to skip note taking was an encoding error. (10) So you decide to change your behavior and take extensive notes during the next psychology lecture. Your goal is to capture everything the instructor says. This too has mixed results—a case of writer’s cramp and 10 pages of dense, confusing scribbles. Oops!—another encoding error. (11) Effective encoding is finding a middle ground between these two extremes. Make moment-to-moment choices about what you want to remember. As you read or listen to a lecture, distinguish between key points, transitions, and minor details. Predict what material is likely to appear on a test. You also should stay alert for ideas you can actively apply. These are things you capture in your notes. Another strategy for effective encoding is to find and create patterns. Your brain is a pattern-making machine. It excels at taking random bits of information and translating them into meaningful wholes. (12) You’ve probably experienced the “tip of your tongue” phenomenon. You know that the fact or idea that you want to remember is just within reach—so close that you can almost feel it. Even so, the neural connections stop just short of total recall. This is an example of a decoding glitch. No need to panic. You have many options at this point. These are known as decoding strategies. For example: • Relax. Your mood affects your memory. The information that you want to recall is less likely to appear if you’re feeling overly stressed. Taking a long, deep breath and relaxing muscles can work wonders for your body and your brain. • Let it go for the moment. When information is at the tip of your tongue, one natural response is to try hard to remember it. However, this can just create more stress that in turn interferes with decoding. Another option is to stop trying to decode and to do something else for the moment. Don’t be surprised if the memory you were seeking suddenly pops into your awareness while you’re in the midst of an unrelated activity. • Recall something else. Many encoding strategies are based on association—finding relationships between something you already know and something new that you want to remember. This means that you can often recall information by taking advantage of those associations. Say that you’re taking a multiple-choice test and can’t remember the answer to a question. Instead of worrying about this, just move on. You might come across a later question on the same topic that triggers the answer to the earlier question. This happens when a key association is activated. • Recreate the original context. Encoding occurs at specific times and places. If a fact or idea eludes you at the moment, then see whether you can recall where you were when you first learned it. Think about what time of day that learning took place and what kind of mood you were in. Sometimes you can decode the information merely by remembering where you wrote the information in your class notes or where on the page you saw it in a