The most recent Science News features a fascinating article titled Brain training turns recall rookies into memory masters. With the subtitle: “Just six weeks of training can turn average people into memory masters.”But in 5 minutes you will know and be able to apply the basics of this strategy today! In the article they report on a study conducted by Craig Stark, Ph.D, a neuroscientist at the U of California Irvine.
In this study a group of 17 memory experts far outperformed a group of people with average memories. Twenty minutes after seeing a list of 72 words, the experts remembered an average of 70.8 words; the non-experts caught, on average, only 39.9 words.
Subsequently 51 novices were split into three groups. A third of these people spent six weeks learning the method of “loci,” a memorization strategy used by ancient Greek and Roman orators.
Other participants spent six weeks training to improve short-term memory, performing a task that required people to simultaneously keep track of a series of locations they see and numbers they hear. The rest of the participants had no training at all.
After the training, the people who learned the loci method performed nearly as well as the memory experts. But the rest didn’t show such improvement. Study coauthor Martin Dresler, a neuroscientist from a University Medical Center in the Netherlands, notes that he knew the method of loci works quite well; but he was more interested in the changes that took place in the trained people’s brains.
Before and after training, non-experts underwent scans that pinpointed brain areas that were active at the same time, an indication that these brain areas work together closely. Dresler and colleagues looked at 2,485 connections important for memory visual and spatial thinking. Training in the method of loci seemed to reconfigure many of those connections, making some of the connections stronger and others weaker. The overall effect of training was to make brains “look like those of the world’s best memorizers,” Dresler says. The results suggest that large-scale changes across the brain, as opposed to changes in individual areas, drive the increased memory capacity.
These new memory skills were still obvious four months after training ended, particularly for the people whose brain behavior became more similar to that of the memory experts. The article goes on to note: Memorization techniques have been criticized as interesting tricks that have little use in real life. But “that’s not the case,” Dresler says. In fact, one of our trainers on the American Brain Council advisory board, Dr. Michael Cox, told me he used this system extensively to ace his way through college and a post grad doctorate program to become an audiologist. I too used this to make it through grad school, as objective tests showed my innate memory wasn’t the greatest, but with these and other mnemonic (pronounced neumonic) strategies I did OK.
So how does the loci technique work? Simply imagine a mental scene you are very familiar with such as your home, a familiar walking path, or your neighborhood. New information, people or key symbols can then be mentally posted and visualized in this familiar setting, offering a simple way to quickly “see” and recall the new info in order. If you can vividly imagine the new items in your old familiar settings, then simply recalling these settings should evoke a recollection of the new posted info as well. There are lots of variations of this strategy and endless possibilities, but with a little imagination and practice this can become a very helpful tool for improving information recall, and perhaps brain function in general.
In chapter 9 of our book How to Maintain A Healthy Brain, we share the basics of Mnemonics, and for anyone who would like to purchase a copy (it’s only $10 for a pdf copy) I will send you a copy of How to Remember Names With Mnemonics. If you already have a copy of this book or one of my other books let me know and I will send this article to you free of charge. For a copy of the book, article or both simply email me at David@ABCbrain.org .
Encouraged by this new study we also adding a new Lesson to our continuing education and Certification courses in Memory Strategies, as the research definitely showed this not only improves memory in the short term, but may have a profound positive effect on improving brain health and function long term. Certainly something worth learning and experimenting with.
References
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brain-training-turns-recall-rookies-memory-masters
Dresler et al.Mnemonic training reshapes brain networks to support superior memory.Neuron. Vol. 93, March 8, 2017. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2017.02.003.
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