Pictures have many advantages.

They allow us to share our most precious (or emba

rrassing) memories with others, like the time you tried to cut your own hair They
allow us to convey a thousand words without slaving over a computer and most imp
ortantly, they allow us to rely on the camera s memory rather than on our own. We
can review our photos after an event and reminisce, reminding us of good times a
nd can then save our memory for important things like remembering all of the lyr
ics to Bohemian Rhapsody.
Although pictures can help us remember times from our past, the act of taking ph
otos, on the other hand, might actually impair our memory according to a new stu
dy by Linda A. Henkel published in Psychological Science.
In Henkel s study (Experiment 2), 46 undergraduate students were led on museum tou
rs in which they were each told to view 27 museum objects. These objects include
d a variety of things one would encounter at a museum: paintings, sculptures, je
welry, a penny-smashing-machine, etc. (okay not the penny-smashing machine, althou
gh no good museum would neglect having one). The participants were told to view
objects in three different ways (each person viewed 9 objects in each of 3 viewi
ng conditions):
view the object for 25 seconds (the looked at only condition)
view the object for 25 seconds, then take photograph of entire object (the p
hotographed-whole condition)
view the object for 25 seconds, then take photograph of specific part of obj
ect (i.e., a zoomed in view of one aspect of the object) (the photographed-detai
l condition)
Each participant visited the same 27 objects, but had differing instructions so
that each object was viewed and/or photographed in different conditions for diff
erent people. This was done in case any particular object was simply more memora
ble than others were (we wouldn t want there to be an advantage to one condition j
ust because it had a memorable three-headed monkey robot in its group!). Of addi
tional importance, the tour was organized in such a way, that participants did n
ot pass by the same objects more than once, as this would affect participants abi
lity to remember items. Lastly, note that regardless of whether participants too
k a picture of an object or not, they still had 25 uninterrupted seconds to view
the item.
The day after the tour, participants were tested on their ability to recognize t
he items and details about the items from the tour. First, they were given a lis
t of names of the museum objects. The list contained names of objects that were
and were not included in the tour. In this simple recognition task, people had t
o say whether the item was seen in the tour or whether it was a new item.
People were less able to remember the items that they took whole pictures of and
were more able to remember items they took detailed pictures of and items that
they only looked at. Similarly, when asked specific questions about the details
of the objects (e.g., What was this statue holding?), people were better able to
remember details about the objects that they took detailed pictures of (even whe
n the details they took pictures of were not the ones they were asked about) and
were better able to remember details about objects they only viewed. They were
less able to remember details about the items they took whole pictures of.
So, to recap, when given names of the items:
memory of seeing objects
photographed-whole < photographed-detail AND/OR looked at only
memory of object details
photographed-whole < photographed-detail AND/OR looked at only

After those memory tests, participants were tested again, but this time the part
icipants were presented with pictures of the objects instead of the objects names
. Again, people were better at remembering that they had seen the objects that t
hey took detailed pictures of and objects they simply viewed and were worse at r
emembering seeing objects they took whole pictures of. Lastly, while viewing pic
tures of the objects, participants had to identify where in the museum they had
seen objects by picking one of four rooms from a map. When participants did this
, they were worst at correctly identifying the source of the objects photographe
d in detail and best at identifying the location of objects they only viewed.
So, to recap the second part, when given pictures of the items:
memory of seeing objects
photographed-whole < photographed-detail AND/OR looked at only
memory of object locations
photographed-detail < photographed-whole < looked at only
Okay, okay. What does this all mean? Well, for starters, each object was viewed
initially for 25 seconds. Then, the ones that were photographed were theoretical
ly looked at longer (while people were taking the pictures). As such, one might
assume that people would remember those better (since they were looked at longer
overall). As we see here, however, they were actually remembered less (at least
the items where people photographed them in entirety). Why is this?
To answer this, the author pointed out another memory phenomenon that might expl
ain it. In studies of directed forgetting , people are told to forget some items an
d to remember others and find that people s memory follows these directions (i.e.,
they actually remember more of the things they were told to remember and rememb
er fewer of the things they were told to forget when subsequently asked to remem
ber everything). How does this relate? Well, the author reasons that taking a pi
cture of something might serve as a cue that we need not bother remembering some
thing, or a direction to forget . After all, we can always look at the pictures lat
er. So, instead of storing these things in our memory, we can save that space fo
r important things, like Tuesday s prime-time television lineup. This only seemed
to occur for the objects photographed in their entirety.
On the other hand, Henkel found that the objects that were photographed in detai
l were remembered just as well as the ones that were merely looked at. It is a l
ittle harder to explain this finding. The author says that this may be due to th
e extra cognition and focused activity that has to occur to zoom in on objects fe
atures while photographing them. Perhaps. I suppose this is an empirical questio
n that future researchers could look at. Does it take more attention and cogniti
on to take photos of parts of objects than it does to take pictures of whole obj
ects? Possibly, especially if people are more experienced at taking holistic pho
tos. If so, perhaps this counteracts or impedes directed forgetting.
One could also reason that people remembered objects photographed in detail as w
ell as objects merely looked at, due to the fact that when focusing on a part of
an object, we must focus on what the object is. For example, if we are told to
take a picture of a warrior statue s hand, we might still be focusing on the fact
that this is a warrior we are looking at. Here is his arm, okay, now there is hi
s hand, which happens to be holding an axe. Focus, snap! If we are trying to get
the entire warrior into the picture, on the other hand, all we have to do is lo
ok for edges. Do we have a whole object in the camera? Yes? Cool. Does it matter
what it was? No. Okay. Focus, snap! We re done. This, of course, is merely my int
erpretation and is itself an empirical question someone could go research.
Another interesting thing Henkel found was that people s memory for the location o
f the objects was affected by what condition it was viewed in. Notably, people l
east remembered the locations of the objects that were photographed in detail. T

his might be because the participants focus was smaller than the whole object and
smaller, certainly, than the room. When photographing the whole object, however
, it is easier to see how one s attention might be tuned to the separation between
the object and the space around it. Who knows- perhaps each of the four rooms w
as a different color? Taking a holistic picture might help one remember what sep
arates the object from the background (say, the blue wall), whereas taking a zoo
med in picture of a hand might not allow us to notice the place the object is in
.
Either way, it is clear that taking photos of objects can adversely affect our m
emory for them. This could be especially annoying if one were to lose one s camera
or memory card before one was able to view the pictures! In the long run, howev
er, taking a photo is probably more beneficial than not taking a picture and hop
ing to remember an event or scene, since we can view photos dozens of years late
r (assuming we can locate it), but a memory would fade with time, even if we wer
e successful at remembering it the day after. So, advice if you re going to take pic
tures of the things you want to remember, don t lose your camera :o)
+
}
Let me tell you something utterly amazing about your brain. Better yet, let me s
how you something you can do to increase your brain s ability to memorize informat
ion easily and for the long-term. In short, take a moment with me here and I ll demo
nstrate a way you can consciously use your own brain s hardware to make you feel and
seem to others truly gifted.
First, consider this challenge. Pretend that I were to ask you to go to the groc
ery store for me to buy a particular list of ten items. Furthermore, suppose tha
t I was going to dictate these items to you and that I would not let you write t
hem down yup, that s right. All you can do is listen to me and do your best to memor
ize them. After that, you d get in the car, drive to the store, and start shopping
based on your memory of what I d said.
How would you go about doing this? Would you make a mental acronym of the items?
(POM, for example, might help you recall that you ll need to get pizza, oranges,
and mustard.) Would you make up a song about the items? Maybe you d try to make a
mental map of the store and walk through it to get the items. All of these are c
lever approaches, to be sure. And yet none of those are the approach most people
would take which is to merely repeat the items over and over and over again, on
e continuous loop of pizza, oranges, mustard pizza, oranges, mustard .
Regardless of the technique used above, the average person people can successful
ly recall seven or eight of ten items posed in such a fashion and he can only do s
o in a scattershot fashion. He might recall that mustard was somewhere on the list
, but he may not recall that it was the third item he was told to buy. The reaso
n for this hit-or-miss memory is that, in most of the examples above, a relative
ly miniscule portion of the brain is being used to retain the information the hipp
ocampus. This portion of the brain is not really adapted to storing information
in a sequential or long-term way. So imagine the power and efficiency of your br
ain s ability to retain information if you could use a whole lobe of it, say 20 pe
rcent of your brain s matter, to help you out instead of something about the size of
a lima bean. You can.
I ve written before about the visual portion of the brain. We ll put it to the test
today. Let s tap into the occipital lobe and, by doing a simple experiment, see if
you re not able to dramatically increase your own memory. We ll use that simple lis
t of 10 random grocery items to judge its effectiveness. As silly as what I am a
bout to ask you to do may seem, I promise you this: if you really try it, if you
really suspend disbelief, and if you really follow my directions, you will be a
ble to recall that list of 10 items perfectly. I don t mean that you ll be able to e

ventually remember all the items; I mean you will have immediate recall of each
item, in the order they were given, the very instant you want them, even if I we
re to ask you to list them for me out of order. (For example: "Tell me what the
seventh item was, followed by the third and then the tenth. )
It starts with this odd list at left. Keep it handy. We re going to use it a lot
initially. You ll recognize it as the words from an old nursery rhyme ( One two, buc
kle my shoe. Three four, shut the door. etc.). Here s what I d like you to do with th
is list.
As I rattle off the 10 items (provided on the link you ll find below), you are goi
ng to consult that nursery rhyme list and use it to create a picture in your min
d. You ll do this by associating the item I ask you to get with one of the items g
iven in that list. For example, if the FIRST item I ask you to recall is a bag o
f oranges, then you ll make a mental picture of oranges somehow associated with a bun
. You might imagine a bunch of oranges nestled in a hot dog bun. Or maybe you ll pi
cture a sliced orange sitting in between the top and bottom of a hamburger bun.
It s entirely up to you, but I can tell you this: the odder the picture, the more
details you create, the stronger that memory will be.
When I ask you to recall the SECOND item say, a gallon of milk you should make a men
tal picture that places milk and a shoe together. You re drinking milk from the shoe,
perhaps; or maybe you re kicking that gallon of milk down the hallway with your hi
gh-heeled shoe. It s up to you.
We ll continue in like fashion. I'll give the items in sequential order, you make
the mental pictures. Initially, consult that nursery rhyme list it s fine! We are us
ing that list as a matrix to help you organize the data I m about to give you (the
grocery list). Just DO NOT write down the list of items I ask you to buy that d be
cheating. Go slowly so that you have enough time to really create each image. If
I go too fast, just hit pause on the two-minute video you're about to watch. Wh
en we are done, I ll ask you to answer the questions in the paragraph below. Again
, trust me on this: if you really try it, crazy as it seems, it will work. Ready
? If so, then click this link (link is external) and get ready to hear the 10 it
ems I want you to purchase. Go!
You re back! Great.
Now, breathe deep, relax and answer these questions. Again, you may consult that
memory matrix as you complete this questionnaire. (The answers are at the end o
f this article.)
What was the third item I asked you to buy, the one you associated with the

ree
What was the eighth?
In this order, what was item number 9, then 1, then 6?
Which numbered item was the hamburger meat ?
So, are you amazed? You needn t be. You were successful because you actively sough
t to use a large portion of your brain to do something that it naturally wants t
o do all of the time. Think about it: do you recall a time when you studied for
a test and recalled that the answer to the test question lay in your notebook it w
as on the right-hand page in the upper right corner . Or do you recall precisely whe
re you were when you heard of the attacks on 9/11? Of all the ways your brain tr
ies to help you recall information, for most of us, it does so in a visual forma
t. By virtue of the experiment above, you ve just proven that harnessing that powe
r of the brain can dramatically improve your own abilities.

Now, it s up to you to put that newfound talent and knowledge to everyday use.
Answers (in order): oranges, chocolate syrup, 50 lbs. of dog food, broccoli, air
freshener, ice cream, 1 lb. hamburger meat, loaf of bread, blank data CDs, and
heavy whipping cream
|
WARNING UPFRONT:If you have not read my last article of this series, you'll like
ly be confused (and maybe even downright skeptical) as this particular article t
icks along. I previsously wrote about the power of using the occipital lobe to a
id memory. This lobe, located in the back of your head, is protected by your sku
ll quite nicely. Reach around right now and locate it by feeling for a knot or a
bump in the cranium several inches above your neck. (Ladies, sorry, yours will
not be as pronounced as the men reading this. That s one of those anatomical gende
r differences.) Just above that bump yep, right there is your occipital lobe.
The occipital lobe is what gives us the power to visualize images in our minds.
Yes, it is also the place where, for all intents and purposes, vision itself is
processed once data comes streaming in from the optic nerve. But never mind the
latter, it s the power of visualization we will use again today to help harness ou
r brain s greater potential for recall of information.
Many pointed out in the comments of the other article that the structure I demon
strated was called a peg system. Indeed, that is correct and that system is many m
any decades old. In that demonstration, we used a number-rhyming organization lo
osely based on a nursery rhyme to connect data (e.g. grocery list items) to a li
st of numbers, one through ten. The advantage of the peg system, as many of you
confirmed for me, is that it allows for a direct and immediate recall of the rel
ationship between the data and the number. Thus, you were able to note that #3 w
as dog food or, equally easily, that dog food was the third item on the list.
Today s technique is a tad different in that it makes no use of these mnemonic pegs
. The system we ll explore today is one that I learned many years ago as journeying a
lthough, again, others have noted that this is merely a form of a broader techni
que called the loci method. As that name implies, the loci technique seeks to make
use of places or localities familiar to you already as a means of pinning infor
mation to memory. Before we get started on the explanation, I should note for yo
u a few things.
This technique is extremely powerful in that it potentially allows a larger
amount of information to be coded without the use of those number-rhyme type pegs .
Still
In my own experience, it also takes a bit more practice to harness. (This sh
ould not be a deal-breaker but be aware that if you are comparing it to the peg
system of the previous article, it will not be as immediately user-friendly for at l
east some of you, perhaps.)
Unlike the previous number-rhyme peg system, this technique doesn t allow for
that immediate recall of, say, number six on a list. Journeying requires you to
trace the steps from one to five in order to name item number six. (Again to me,
depending on what you are trying to recall, that should not be a deal breaker e
ither.)
Journeying, indeed the loci-method in general, is powerful because we are st
ill utilizing and accessing massive amounts of our brain s hardware that occipital l
obe to create memorable images.
Let s start by getting the data we ll seek to memorize. At the end of this article i
s a list of 25 items. In keeping with the theme of last article, I ve opted to mak
e many of them grocery store items. You ll also note, however, that I ve added some
typical errands that a person might have to do in the course of a day. If you ar
e able to, you might wish to copy and paste that list into a document for consid
eration later on or, if not, you may simply scroll up and down to compare my descr

iption of the technique to this list I ve created.

Now completely leaving aside that list (just for the moment), I want you to thin
k of some sort of trip or traveling routine you perform every day of your life. Ev
ery morning, for example, I wake up, leave my bedroom, and hit the bathroom for
a shower and a shave. Finished and dressed, I pass by my son s room and a guest be
droom as I head downstairs to the kitchen where I make coffee. I sit down in the
dining room at my computer and chug the caffeine while I review my day s plans. A
nd then I go to the living room where I feed the cat. Finally, I head out the do
or for school, leaving by way of the side door that opens onto a screened porch
where we have some wicker furniture and our mailbox hangs on the brick wall.
You, dear reader, need not think of your own home. Perhaps the daily trip you th
ought of was your daily work commute leaving your house, driving past the neighbor
s homes, that Starbucks one one corner (McDonalds on the other!), arriving at the
train depot. Maybe, like me, you re a runner and you can quite easily picture all
the twists and turns and landmarks of your daily four-mile route. Perhaps you d
rive a bus and that s the route in your life you know like the back of your hand.
It doesn t matter.
What does matter to make the journeying memory technique really work are those detai
ls you ll recall. You know that neighbor s funky house, that Starbucks on the corner
that used to be an old bank, the paisley shower curtain, that coffee maker on the
counter right next to the sink, the cat bowl next to the couch. In my experienc
e, you ll want at least 10 to 12 such distinct landmarks, and here s why: those deta
ils will effectively become the mnemonic pegs that link to your data. How, you a
sk?
Crazy as this seems, what you ll do is create detailed and exciting, bizarre, humo
rous, scary, titillating, you-name-it visual images that pair the data you want
to recall with each of the landmarks on your journey. Then you ll mentally trace thi
s journey later on when you want to recall that data.
Thus, if I were considering only the first ten or so items on the list I ve create
d for you, I would associate the first (plastic cups) with my morning shower (th
e first of my landmarks). I imagine innocently pulling the shower curtain aside
to turn on the faucet and being utterly shocked awake that a plastic cup is bathin
g in the tub. He s right there! I d imagine his thin arms holding my loofah (grr!),
vigorously rubbing away at some lipstick left on his rim. He would even be compl
aining about it and yelling at me for some d@mn (link sends e-mail) privacy! Remem
ber, the brain likes novelty, not ordinary. The crazier and more detailed that i
mage is, the better.
I d slam the curtain shut or maybe I d fill him with cold water from the tap just to g
et even and then I d move on with my journey to the second item in the list and its
associated landmark. I d note that, as I pass my son s room, there on his door where
the usual Knock, please sign hangs is a pizza?! And it s huge. The grease is drippin
g down the door and the pepperoni is on the floor. What a mess. It ll take forever
to clean that up. (Maybe I ll make my son do it, heh heh.)
I d continue in like fashion until all ten(ish) items were securely cemented via t
hat visualization. WhenI I'm srure they're there, it's time fot
And yet many of you have noted that there are 25 items on the list below and I sai
d you only need about a dozen landmarks. So what then? It s an easy fix: For lists
that are longer, all you need do is combine your images in pairs.
So, starting again, I d pull aside that shower curtain and there, revealed in all
their glory, would be a pizza and plastic cup caught in the middle of a, uh, roman
tic interlude. (Whaaaa?!) The pizza is wrapping the cup in a full embrace I can ha

rdly see the cup at all for cryin out loud! This time it s the pizza that yells at
me for privacy or maybe she doesn t (oooh).
Again it's the mental investmetn that makes it count, pairing the items with my
landmarks (Hey, why are the detergent box and Super Glue fighting over who gets
to eat cat food first? There s plenty to go around, guys!) until I arrive at the l
ist of errands.
When you get there, don t let the verbs bother you just picture a noun that goes wit
h each. For get birthday present I might picture the actual gift itself, sure. Or
maybe I ll imagine the the wrapped box, bow and all (Wait, isn t it a tad large? It
takes up the entire porch!). When I go to put the Netflix DVD in the mail yep, you
guessed it it cries and begs me not to send it away ( I ll never see you again, will
I? ). Sigh. It s hard, yes, but in you go as I head out the door.
The wonderful and powerful thing about using the journeying technique is that yo
u likely have many different routes or trips you can take. I have one that documents
my morning routine. But I also have: that favorite four-mile running loop I enj
oy so much; the route my family walks when we go to our favorite restaurant a mi
le away; and my own morning commute to work. Each journey and its associated landm
arks can become a mnemonic device for you, each assigned to a different list of
data.
Ladies and gents, the key to this particular mnemonic device is practice. Try th
ese journeys at night as you lay in bed before sleeping. Trace them with as much
detail as you can. Cement those details in your mind. In this case, practice ma
kes perfect.
Next time, we ll consider ways to deal with more nonrepresentational concepts, suc
h as the meanings of foreign words or abstract nouns. Stay tuned!
Want more? Follow me on Twitter (link is external)for the latest!
YOUR (DATA) LIST:
-

plastic cups
frozen pizza
grapes
deli meat (turkey)
shampoo
dog biscuits
detergent
nail polish
ice
garlic
cans of soup
celery
Super Glue
light bulbs
Hershey s bars
pepper
floor wax
batteries
gift card
eggs

deposit checks
get car inspected
do laundry
get present for friend s birthday

- put Netflix DVD in the mai

}
In the last couple of columns I have been explaining how stereotyping affects pe
rformance. For example if seniors buy into the stereotype that they are supposed
to have failing memories they are more likely to have failing memories. How you
identify yourself (young, old, male, female, and so on) is a key factor in how
you will respond to advertising. Indeed, self-identity creates all kinds of bias
, from the sports team you root for to the candidate you want to become Presiden
t.
Marketing research has established that most consumer decisions are memory based
. You buy something because you remember a persuasive ad for it. Thus, advertise
rs seek to find ways to get consumers to remember their products and services. O
ne obvious way is to repeat the ad over and over. But that costs a lot of money.
One advertising strategy is to target consumers with promotions that capitalize
on social identity. The idea is that you will prefer a product that is pitched t
o your identity. No doubt you have seen the TV ads on reverse mortgages, where a
clearly older celebrity makes the pitch. You are supposed to be persuaded by th
e ad because you can identify with such a person. He s a senior, you re a senior. He s
a star, and you can imagine how great it might feel if you were one. In other w
ords, your personal identity is wrapped up in how responsive you are to a given
ad. This same principle is at work in ads that use beautiful models to sell clot
hes and star athletes to sell athletic gear.
Social identity can be threatened when the ad presents events, information, or c
hoices in a way that is inconsistent or negative. A senior, for example, would n
ot be persuaded to consider reverse mortgages if the salesman was a young and go
rgeous female model. Recent studies show that these kinds of cognitive disconnec
t interfere with how consumers encode and remember advertising messages. Adverti
sers certainly don t want to create identity-threat ads because consumers will be
automatically motivated to forget the ads.
The process of motivated forgetting is being explored by Hong Kong University ma
rketing professor, Amy Dalton and her colleague, Li Huang. When people see or he
ar an ad that presents identity threat, they are automatically motivated to forg
et it. It s a defense mechanism. Naturally, the effect is greatest in people who h
ave the strongest in-group identities. That s why advertisers have to be really ca
reful in ads that involve such emotionally charges matters as gender, race, reli
gion, or political belief.
In their studies, they use identity linked promotions, such as Ladies get one dri
nk free, or 10 percent discount for seniors, and the like. To enhance attention and
encoding, they prime the experimental audience ahead of time to reinforce the i
ntended identity. In one experiment, they primed a social identity, produced ide
ntity-linked promotions, introduced social identity-threat, and then tested for
memory of the promotions.
For example, experimental subjects were students. Students were primed about the
ir student identity by telling them that the experiment was being performed also
with students at other universities. Students then watched 20 print ads for thr
ee seconds each and told they would be quizzed on how much they remember of the
ads. Identity-linked promotions were created for eight of the ads by stating tha
t Additional 10 percent discount for Hong Kong University students. Then students
read news reports about their university, either neutral reports or negative one
s (in the identity-threat group).
What they found was that identity strength enhanced memory for identity-linked p
romotions if the identity had been primed. When the primed identity was threaten
ed, ad memory was impaired, reflecting the motivated forgetting effect.

A related experiment tested the role of the news source for neutral and negative
-identity conditions. Identity strength increased the resistance to read news fr
om a source that presented an identity threat but not in control conditions. Thi
s may explain why some people steadfastly get their news from a single distinct
identity source, such as NBC (more liberal viewers) or Fox News (more conservati
ve viewers). Such loyalties minimize identity threat and make the news and opini
on better remembered. Obviously, such loyalties contribute to political polariza
tion. In U.S. politics, voters are not identified as people. They are identified
as voting blocs (Blacks, Hispanics, seniors, females, millennials, poor, rich,
and so on). Often these groups are pitted against each other (as in the rich expl
oit the poor, blacks are victims of white racism, and so on). What politicians ex
ploit is social identity.
While identity politics is old hat, consumer identity research is in early stage
s. But you can bet there will be more such research, as advertisers have their o
wn motivations: spend less money through fewer ads, make their ads more memorabl
e, and get you to spend more money.
}
Whoever said "what you don't know can't hurt you" needs to rethink the position.
Knowing what you don't know keeps you from learning what you need to know or wo
uld benefit from if you did know it. Likewise, there is the foolish notion, "Ign
orance is bliss." We teach these mindless ideas to our children and then wonder
why so many don't like school.
Anyway, what I really want to explore here is the notion of thinking about think
ing. Scholars call this metacognition. But, it really is a simple idea that we a
ll experience every day to various degrees. Suppose you look up a phone number i
n the phone book. You have to quiz yourself to see if you remember it well enoug
h to dial it. That is, you have to think about what you know and if you know eno
ugh to complete the task.
These things are often done consciously, and your conscious mind has to allocate
enough effort and thinking resources to perform the task. In this particular ca
se, we are talking about working memory. You test yourself to see if you still h
old all the phone number digits in working memory long enough to dial them witho
ut error.
The principle applies more generally to other and more complex tasks. Basically,
humans use memory awareness to determine if they have enough relevant knowledge
before they act. Obviously, such awareness improves the appropriateness and qua
lity of the act. This reminds me to tell you about my new book coming out on Apr
il 8, Mental Biology,[1] (link is external) in which I explore how the brain cre
ates awareness and what consciousness is and what it does. In my view, conscious
ness does many things, but this ability to realize what you know and don't know
provides the enormous advantage of helping you know if you know enough and decid
e what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Notably, there are many scientist
s now arguing that consciousness does not do anything. Everything we do, they cl
aim, is driven by genes and unconscious programming. To them, consciousness is j
ust the brain's TV screen to show you some of what it is doing. These people wil
l hate my book.
Metacognition even occurs in some higher animals, and there are some interesting
animal experiments on metacognition. For example, one study[2] (link is externa
l) showed that monkeys can track what they are holding in working memory. In the
test, food was hidden in one of four opaque tubes. On half the trials monkeys w
atched the experimenter bait the tube, so that they had to know if they remember
ed which tube had the food. On the other half of trials, monkeys did not get to
see where food was placed. After a short delay, the monkeys were given a chance
to pick a tube to get a food reward, and on uninformed trials the monkeys peeked

into the end of each tube to see which one had the food. That is, they knew the
y didn't know which tube was baited, so instead of guessing they looked into eac
h tube before acting. When monkeys saw the baiting, they immediately went to the
right tube without peeking. That is they knew where the food was and they knew
that they knew.
The food was a reward, and as we all know positive reinforcement typically motiv
ates us and drives behavior. We do things if there is some benefit to doing it.
This leads me to consider another study[3] (link is external) that explored the
role of human consciousness in evaluating rewards and their degree of attainabil
ity. It is no surprise that high value rewards improve mental performance, and t
his works whether you assess the value consciously or unconsciously (as in condi
tioned reflexes, for example). How motivating high rewards are depends on what w
e know about their attainability. If we know we don't know enough to earn the re
ward, we may not make the effort needed. If we think the reward is unattainable,
we won't even try.
The study asked the question of whether this principle applies to unconscious pr
ocessing. In other words, can unconscious mind integrate reward contingencies wi
th attainability estimates? In the experiment, each trial included showing volun
teers a picture of either a penny or a 50 cent coin which would serve as a rewar
d if they performed a subsequent working memory task correctly. But sometimes su
bjects were informed before a trial that the reward would not be obtainable on t
hat trial, even if they performed the memory recall correctly. In each trial the
coin was shown either for 17 msecs, in which case its value could not be percei
ved consciously, or for 300 msecs, which was long enough to register consciously
. So, across trials, the subjects had to integrate reward value with attainabili
ty and do so either under conscious or unconscious conditions.
Results showed that efficient memory recall resulted when the trial showed the r
eward long enough for conscious registration and when the high reward was attain
able. And of course, performance was better for the 50 cent piece. Amazingly, ev
en in the unconscious condition, high rewards improved performance even when the
y were designated in advance as unattainable. In other words, unconscious mind c
ould not integrate reward value and attainability. Thus, it seems that conscious
ness uniquely controls the allocation of neural resources needed to integrate th
ese two kinds of information. Oh, and by the way, don't experiments like this es
tablish that consciousness really does something, that it is more than the mind'
s TV screen?
A third line of research has to do with psychotherapy. Here, the whole idea is t
o think about what you are thinking and feeling and substituting that with more
mentally healthy thought. Being aware of memories is crucial to this process. Re
calling bad memories causes a disturbing experience to fester, but also makes th
em accessible to revision. I have discussed in earlier columns some new approach
es to treatment of PTSD based on the reconsolidation of memories that occurs whe
n you recall a memory. The whole business about consolidation is explained in my
recent book, Memory Power 101[4] (link is external).
Here, I want to explore the value of being aware of the associations that are he
lpful and those that are not in terms of dealing such things as addictions, phob
ias, and even PTSD. For example, anybody in the throes of withdrawal from cigare
tte smoking knows how disturbing it can be to see or think about ashtrays or oth
er reminders. A typical response is to try and inhibit the reminders of the form
er pleasure. But avoiding such reminders is often impractical.
In my book, Blame Game, I explore the importance of being more aware of what you
are thinking and doing so that when change is needed you can reprogram your bra
in effectively. It is difficult to change bad habits or behavior because they de
rive from well-entrenched memory. The remedy is to replace this memory with a be

tter new habit or behavior. And the way to do that is to make the substitute mem
ory much stronger than one you want to replace. You can make such new memories s
tronger, the way you would any memory.[5] (link is external) This is basically t
he idea of substituting a bad memory with a good one, wherein the good one has b
een made especially robust. My memory book shows multiple ways to strengthen any
memory, and this approach can be especially helpful to make a good substitute m
emory that will substitute and displace a bad memory. In general, the approach i
s to:
1. Think often about the substitute memory and use traditional memory enhancemen
t techniques to strengthen it.
2. Rehearse the substitute memory in different situations and places.
3. Space rehearsal of the substitute memory out over time, both within a therapy
session or new learning situation and self-test for recall of the substitute me
mory several separated times.
So, hopefully the general point is made. Knowing what you know and don't know is
really important. Such self-knowledge is necessary to make you more competent eve
n to make yourself a better person. And remember, self-knowledge resides in memo
ry. As with all memory, it can be strong or weak, true or false, recalled or for
gotten, useful or harmful. You decide.
}|
Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students int
o the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their study observation f
orms, the observers watched intently as the students in middle school, high school,
and college, 263 in all opened their books and turned on their computers.
For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psych
ology professor at California State University Dominguez Hills, marked down once a
minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form in
cluded: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer and also using em
ail, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the
phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtr
usively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows ope
n on the students screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds.
Although the students had been told at the outset that they should study somethin
g important, including homework, an upcoming examination or project, or reading
a book for a course, it wasn t long before their attention drifted: Students
on-task
behavior started declining around the two-minute mark as they began responding to
arriving texts or checking their Facebook feeds. By the time the 15 minutes wer
e up, they had spent only about 65 percent of the observation period actually do
ing their schoolwork.
We were amazed at how frequently they multitasked, even though they knew someone
was watching, Rosen says. It really seems that they could not go for 15 minutes wi
thout engaging their devices, adding, It was kind of scary, actually.
Concern about young people s use of technology is nothing new, of course. But Rose
n s study, published in the May issue of Computers in Human Behavior, is part of a
growing body of research focused on a very particular use of technology: media
multitasking while learning. Attending to multiple streams of information and en
tertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become
common behavior among young people so common that many of them rarely write a pape
r or complete a problem set any other way.

But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that
when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier a
nd shallower than if the work had their full attention. They understand and reme
mber less, and they have greater difficulty transferring their learning to new c
ontexts. So detrimental is this practice that some researchers are proposing tha
t a new prerequisite for academic and even professional success the new marshmallo
w test of self-discipline is the ability to resist a blinking inbox or a buzzing p
hone.
The media multitasking habit starts early. In Generation M2: Media in the Lives o
f 8- to 18-Year-Olds, a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and publ
ished in 2010, almost a third of those surveyed said that when they were doing h
omework, most of the time they were also watching TV, texting, listening to music,
or using some other medium. The lead author of the study was Victoria Rideout,
then a vice president at Kaiser and now an independent research and policy consu
ltant. Although the study looked at all aspects of kids media use, Rideout told m
e she was particularly troubled by its findings regarding media multitasking whi
le doing schoolwork.
This is a concern we should have distinct from worrying about how much kids are o
nline or how much kids are media multitasking overall. It s multitasking while lea
rning that has the biggest potential downside, she says. I don t care if a kid wants
to tweet while she s watching American Idol, or have music on while he plays a vi
deo game. But when students are doing serious work with their minds, they have t
o have focus.
For older students, the media multitasking habit extends into the classroom. Whi
le most middle and high school students don t have the opportunity to text, email,
and surf the Internet during class, studies show the practice is nearly univers
al among students in college and professional school. One large survey found tha
t 80 percent of college students admit to texting during class; 15 percent say t
hey send 11 or more texts in a single class period.
During the first meeting of his courses, Rosen makes a practice of calling on a
student who is busy with his phone. I ask him, What was on the slide I just showed
to the class? The student always pulls a blank, Rosen reports. Young people have a
wildly inflated idea of how many things they can attend to at once, and this de
monstration helps drive the point home: If you re paying attention to your phone,
you re not paying attention to what s going on in class. Other professors have taken
a more surreptitious approach, installing electronic spyware or planting human o
bservers to record whether students are taking notes on their laptops or using t
hem for other, unauthorized purposes.
Such steps may seem excessive, even paranoid: After all, isn t technology increasi
ngly becoming an intentional part of classroom activities and homework assignmen
ts? Educators are using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as well as
social sites created just for schools, such as Edmodo, to communicate with stude
nts, take class polls, assign homework, and have students collaborate on project
s. But researchers are concerned about the use of laptops, tablets, cellphones,
and other technology for purposes quite apart from schoolwork. Now that these de
vices have been admitted into classrooms and study spaces, it has proven difficu
lt to police the line between their approved and illicit uses by students.
In the study involving spyware, for example, two professors of business administ
ration at the University of Vermont found that students engage in substantial mul
titasking behavior with their laptops and have non-course-related software appli
cations open and active about 42 percent of the time. The professors, James Kraus
haar and David Novak, obtained students permission before installing the monitori
ng software on their computers so, as in Rosen s study, the students were engaging i
n flagrant multitasking even though they knew their actions were being recorded.

Another study, carried out at St. John s University in New York, used human observ
ers stationed at the back of the classroom to record the technological activitie
s of law students. The spies reported that 58 percent of second- and third-year
law students who had laptops in class were using them for non-class purposes more
than half the time. (First-year students were far more likely to use their compu
ters for taking notes, although an observer did note one first-year student text
ing just 17 minutes into her very first class the beginning of her law school care
er.)
Texting, emailing, and posting on Facebook and other social media sites are by f
ar the most common digital activities students undertake while learning, accordi
ng to Rosen. That s a problem, because these operations are actually quite mentall
y complex, and they draw on the same mental resources using language, parsing mean
ing demanded by schoolwork.
David Meyer, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan who s studied th
e effects of divided attention on learning, takes a firm line on the brain s abili
ty to multitask: Under most conditions, the brain simply cannot do two complex ta
sks at the same time. It can happen only when the two tasks are both very simple
and when they don t compete with each other for the same mental resources. An exa
mple would be folding laundry and listening to the weather report on the radio.
That s fine. But listening to a lecture while texting, or doing homework and being
on Facebook each of these tasks is very demanding, and each of them uses the same
area of the brain, the prefrontal cortex.
Young people think they can perform two challenging tasks at once, Meyer acknowl
edges, but they are deluded, he declares. It s difficult for anyone to properly eval
uate how well his or her own mental processes are operating, he points out, beca
use most of these processes are unconscious. And, Meyer adds, there s nothing magic
al about the brains of so-called digital natives that keeps them from suffering th
e inefficiencies of multitasking. They may like to do it, they may even be addic
ted to it, but there s no getting around the fact that it s far better to focus on o
ne task from start to finish.
Researchers have documented a cascade of negative outcomes that occurs when stud
ents multitask while doing schoolwork. First, the assignment takes longer to com
plete, because of the time spent on distracting activities and because, upon ret
urning to the assignment, the student has to refamiliarize himself with the mate
rial.
Second, the mental fatigue caused by repeatedly dropping and picking up a mental
thread leads to more mistakes. The cognitive cost of such task-switching is esp
ecially high when students alternate between tasks that call for different sets
of expressive rules the formal, precise language required for an English essay, for
example, and the casual, friendly tone of an email to a friend.
Third, students subsequent memory of what they re working on will be impaired if th
eir attention is divided. Although we often assume that our memories fail at the
moment we can t recall a fact or concept, the failure may actually have occurred
earlier, at the time we originally saved, or encoded, the memory. The moment of
encoding is what matters most for retention, and dozens of laboratory studies ha
ve demonstrated that when our attention is divided during encoding, we remember
that piece of information less well or not at all. As the unlucky student spotligh
ted by Rosen can attest, we can t remember something that never really entered our
consciousness in the first place. And a study last month showed that students w
ho multitask on laptops in class distract not just themselves but also their pee
rs who see what they re doing.
Fourth, some research has suggested that when we re distracted, our brains actuall

y process and store information in different, less useful ways. In a 2006 study
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Russell Poldrack of the
University of Texas Austin and two colleagues asked participants to engage in a le
arning activity on a computer while also carrying out a second task, counting mu
sical tones that sounded while they worked. Study subjects who did both tasks at
once appeared to learn just as well as subjects who did the first task by itsel
f. But upon further probing, the former group proved much less adept at extendin
g and extrapolating their new knowledge to novel contexts a key capacity that psyc
hologists call transfer.
Brain scans taken during Poldrack s experiment revealed that different regions of
the brain were active under the two conditions, indicating that the brain engage
s in a different form of memory when forced to pay attention to two streams of i
nformation at once. The results suggest, the scientists wrote, that even if distr
action does not decrease the overall level of learning, it can result in the acq
uisition of knowledge that can be applied less flexibly in new situations.
Finally, researchers are beginning to demonstrate that media multitasking while
learning is negatively associated with students grades. In Rosen s study, students
who used Facebook during the 15-minute observation period had lower grade-point
averages than those who didn t go on the site. And two recent studies by Reynol Ju
nco, a faculty associate at Harvard s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, found
that texting and using Facebook in class and while doing homework were negatively c
orrelated with college students GPAs. Engaging in Facebook use or texting while tr
ying to complete schoolwork may tax students capacity for cognitive processing an
d preclude deeper learning, write Junco and a co-author. (Of course, it s also plau
sible that the texting and Facebooking students are those with less willpower or
motivation, and thus likely to have lower GPAs even aside from their use of tec
hnology.)
Meyer, of the University of Michigan, worries that the problem goes beyond poor
grades. There s a definite possibility that we are raising a generation that is lea
rning more shallowly than young people in the past, he says. The depth of their pr
ocessing of information is considerably less, because of all the distractions av
ailable to them as they learn.
Given that these distractions aren t going away, academic and even professional ac
hievement may depend on the ability to ignore digital temptations while learning a
feat akin to the famous marshmallow test. In a series of experiments conducted
more than 40 years ago, psychologist Walter Mischel tempted young children with
a marshmallow, telling them they could have two of the treats if they put off ea
ting one right away. Follow-up studies performed years later found that the kids
who were better able to delay gratification not only achieved higher grades and
test scores but were also more likely to succeed in school and their careers.
Two years ago, Rosen and his colleagues conducted an information-age version of
the marshmallow test. College students who participated in the study were asked
to watch a 30-minute videotaped lecture, during which some were sent eight text
messages while others were sent four or zero text messages. Those who were inter
rupted more often scored worse on a test of the lecture s content; more interestin
gly, those who responded to the experimenters texts right away scored significant
ly worse than those participants who waited to reply until the lecture was over.
This ability to resist the lure of technology can be consciously cultivated, Ros
en maintains. He advises students to take tech breaks to satisfy their cravings fo
r electronic communication: After they ve labored on their schoolwork uninterrupte
d for 15 minutes, they can allow themselves two minutes to text, check websites,
and post to their hearts content. Then the devices get turned off for another 15
minutes of academics.

Over time, Rosen says, students are able extend their working time to 20, 30, ev
en 45 minutes, as long as they know that an opportunity to get online awaits. You
ng people s technology use is really about quelling anxiety, he contends. They don t w
ant to miss out. They don t want to be the last person to hear some news, or the n
inth person to like someone s post. Device-checking is a compulsive behavior that mus
t be managed, he says, if young people are to learn and perform at their besOn a
post-holiday visit to New York, I was walking in the winter darkness with a fri
end in search of a restaurant when I realized with some surprise that we had wan
dered into a neighborhood where I had lived years before. With each passing step
, more memories materialized in the cold air, until it seemed as if nearly every
streetlight illuminated another version of the young woman I had been all those
years ago.
Here was the intersection where, as I was crossing the street one Saturday morni
ng, a tall, well-dressed man loomed up between the white lines of the crosswalk
and commanded me in a hostile voice: Smile!
There, behind a banner of holiday lights, was the neighborhood tavern where I ag
reed to meet a former boyfriend in the middle of a weekday afternoon. We were si
tting at the bar catching up when an oddly familiar tune wafted out of the speak
ers overhead, and I felt compelled to share my knowledge. That s the theme song of
the June Taylor Dancers on the Jackie Gleason Show, I informed my startled compan
ion. He was a bit of a highbrow; if he had set up our meeting with the intention
of resurrecting our romance, this piece of trivia perhaps caused him to reconsi
der his plan.
I lived in that neighborhood during the 1980 transit strike; while gamely trudgi
ng to work one morning, I saw in the window of a kitchen supply store a graceful
ceramic bowl the precise color of the cloudless blue sky in summer. Heedless of
the transportation challenges, I walked in and bought it, and I lugged my treas
ure all the way to work and back home again that night. It has been with me ever
since, through countless moves, and when I see it on my shelf I am briefly prop
elled back to the happy morning I found it.
In the midst of my pleasant reminiscing with my friend, however, I remembered to
o a sharp sorrow from those years. Ten blocks north of my old neighborhood was t
he street corner where, on a cool evening in early spring, I stepped off a bus a
fter work to find a man who had broken my heart and disappeared without explanat
ion standing on the sidewalk looking straight at me, as if he, finally, had some
thing he wanted to say to me.
Inexplicably, instead of walking the few steps north to meet him, I stared, pani
cked, turned in the opposite direction and crossed the street, heading south. If
this had been a movie, he would have followed me. But alas, it was callous real
ity. When I came to my senses and turned around seconds later, I saw him walking
quickly north, already too far away for me to catch up to him. As the wrenching
magnitude of my error overwhelmed me, I set off in a different direction: I wen
t straight to a liquor store, bought a bottle of whiskey, took it home to my apa
rtment and had an anesthetizing glass or two over ice with my extremely sympathe
tic roommate.
I moved to New York all those years ago because I wanted to be a writer; I thoug
ht the intoxicating magic of the city and its presence in the personal histories o
f so many other writers would help my craft. I lived there only three years, in th
ree very different neighborhoods, but much of what I experienced then seems pres
erved in my memory with crystal clarity. All I need is a faint suggestion a visit
to an old haunt, a bowl found on a shelf, the name of a friend from that time and
the scenes begin to flash by one after the other, as if I am watching in my mind
reel after reel of the uncut footage of my youth.

Memories of other eras in my life are strong, too; my family and friends are oft
en surprised by what I remember of events in the past details such as where someon
e was sitting at a party or what someone else once said to me. But the memories
from my New York years stand out in especially sharp focus. Did the city itself
imprint those years so decisively on my mind? Or was it simply that I was in my
20s when I lived there, dreamy-eyed about writing and about life, and nearly eve
ry encounter seemed weighted with significance, half real and half the stuff of
fiction?
My mother lived in New York in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a time I consider
one of the city s golden eras. She was young then, too, but she never loved it; s
he saved her urban ardor for San Francisco, a city that she also inhabited as a
young woman and that she adored forever after. When I announced my intention of
moving to New York, my mother s comment after she tried to talk me out of it was a ter
se, New York is a tough town.
Still, she played an unwitting part in my desire to live there. The few family v
isits we made to New York when I was a child exposed me to a destination that wa
s intense, lively and so different in every way from our quiet suburban neighbor
hood that I was enthralled. On one enchanting family trip to Chinatown when I wa
s small, my father, mother, brother and I strolled the crowded sidewalks at nigh
t, ducking in and out of small shops, caught up in the festive throng. On anothe
r family trip some years later, we had lunch at a midtown restaurant so sophisti
cated (to my pre-teen eyes, at least) that the entrance was three or four steps
down from the sidewalk.
Perhaps it was on this trip that my father negotiated the fierce Manhattan traff
ic to drive by a tall, imposing apartment complex near the United Nations so my
mother could point through the car window and say to her two children, This is wh
ere your mother used to live. I wonder now if she also saw through the car window
a younger version of herself slim and beautiful, unmarried and childless hurrying d
own the sidewalk in her stylish 1940s dress, hat, pumps and gloves, with her who
le life ahead of her.
After my evening in my old neighborhood, I said goodbye to my friend at Grand Ce
ntral Terminal, traversed the two blocks west to Fifth Avenue among the genial F
riday night crowds and then proceeded down Fifth Avenue to my hotel. There was a
fine, cool mist in the air, and fog was swirling over the roofs of the elegant
buildings across the street from Bryant Park and painting blurred halos around t
he streetlights.
As I passed the New York Public Library, I realized with some relief that I had
no youthful memories of this part of town. This left me free to stop and gaze at
the misty towers of the buildings in wonder, imagining foggy nights like this i
n the 1920s, 30s and 40s, and half-expecting a young man in a fedora and an overco
at and a young woman in a stylish 1940s coat, hat, pumps and gloves to pass by m
e, arm in arm and deep in conversation.
The dreams I had when I moved to New York as a young woman did not all come true
. But I kept faith with the little girl who had been entranced by a night in Chi
natown and the pre-teen who discovered that not all restaurant entrances are fou
nd at street level. I lived in New York for a time in my youth, and because of t
hat my memories of the city will always swirl and mix with those of all of its o
ther inhabitants, past and present, real and fictional. At peace now under the s
oft veil of the evening fog, I continued down the deserted city sidewalk and tur
ned in at the door to my hotel.t.
}
People want to know how they can improve their memory. Computer-based

brain-train

ing? Doing crossword puzzles? Eating blueberries? The one method that has strong
evidence-based support is simple: walking. Really, the answer is cardiovascular
exercise, and walking fits the bill. So, if you are thinking of a New Year s resol
ution, just lace up your walking shoes!
When people hear walking can improve memory, and leads to volumetric changes in
the brain, they are often surprised. If the brain is like a muscle, then should
n t brain exercises help? How can walking lead to changes in the brain? The simpl
e answer is blood flow. Cardiovascular exercise leads to greater blood flow to t
he brain, bringing oxygen and nutrients. A recent study (link is external) show
ed that older people who walked 40 minutes a day, 3 times a week, showed a 2% IN
CREASE in the volume of the hippocampus, one of the main brain structure involve
d in memory one year later. Typically, the hippocampus volume DECLINES by about 1
% every year after the age of 50. So, an increase of 2% is a big deal, as it mig
ht suggest walking can reverse the typical age-related decline in brain volume.
For most people, walking is easy to do, and you don t need to be an athlete. That
is also one reason is attracts research interest you can randomly assign people to
a walking group (or a stretching group, which does not lead to the same benefit
s as walking), but perhaps not to an extreme biking, or marathon running, regime
nt! So, walking helps, as does any other cardiovascular form of exercise.
Also, walking can have a social component, if you walk with a partner or group,
or even a pet. Having someone to walk with can lead to greater motivation to wa
lk, and talking while walking can lead to enhanced mental health, social support
and friendship.
There has been a lot of recent attention about how getting 10,000 steps (link is
external) a day can have wonderful benefits, but you don t need to start with thi
s large number of steps (which is about 5 miles). Barring any disability, there
are relatively few barriers to walking, even bad weather. In fact, mall-walking
is a popular early morning activity for many people who live in cold weather cl
imates.
There are lots of ways to get in a few more steps each day, and having a pet to
walk might motivate you. Buy a pedometer, and measure and monitoring how many st
eps you take a day. Then, walk to work. Or walk at work, with help of the laste
st in multi-tasking technology: a treadmill desk.
Walking has many benefits beside brain function, as recent research (link is ext
ernal) suggests just 2000 steps a day can ward off diabetes, and breast cancer i
n women. Even people who are at risk for diabetes can cut their risk for heart-r
elated events like a heart attack (link is external) or stroke.
So, how can you train your brain? Computer-based brain training can have some be
nefits, but leads to more screen time, and perhaps a more sedentary life. While
there can be benefits to playing these brain games, it is often difficult to fin
d that these benefits transfer, or improve, other functions, such as being able
to remember where you put your keys, or the name of the doctor you just met. Jus
t the opposite of computer-based brain training, walking gets you away from your
computer (but perhaps not your smart phone!).
The bottom line is that walking, one of the most primitive forms of movement and
exercise, can improve your body and your mind, and may help you remember where
you put your keys. So, the best way to find the fountain of youth may be walking
there (take those 10,000 simple steps!), and that will help you stay both physi
cally fit and mentally sharp.
]
Many people love to solve puzzles, and often feel this can also lead to benefits

in brain function. Many of us are familiar with the idea of training the brain
to improve memory, attention, or problem solving abilities. Packaged as enterta
inment that is also good for you, brain training lures many of us with the promi
se of revamping mental function in a way that just feels like games. Whether to pr
eserve the mental prowess of youth, treat chronic conditions without the risks o
f medication, or simply gain a competitive edge in school or at work, the allure
of voluntarily improving brain function has driven a billion dollar industry th
at shows no sign of abating.
Ultimately, we want to know if these products are worthy of our time and money.
The nuanced answer, however, is less than satisfying: the evidence is conflictin
g (link is external), and the data are not strong enough yet. Recently, a large
group of eminent scientists wrote and signed a letter (link is external) outlini
ng what brain training has yet to deliver and were met with a counter-statement
signed by a second group of scientists attempting to set the record straight (li
nk is external). Regardless of this contentious debate, many of us particularly
baby boomers, but also younger adults beginning to appreciate the fickle nature
of cognitive health
feel comforted, even inspired, when viewing ads for the late
st brain training app or reading a new piece on the brain s ability to change itse
lf. But do these attitudes change based on critiques that dismiss brain training
as bunk? (link is external)
As it turns out, most of us are optimistic about the promise of brain training.
A recent study (link is external) found that even the highly educated and critic
ally minded people have relatively high expectations about the potential of brai
n exercises to improve cognitive functions such as memory, concentration, and pe
rformance in everyday activities. What s more, these expectations do not necessari
ly decrease based on critical reports. Older adults may be especially prone to t
his, and report that their own intuitions are the primary factor driving their b
eliefs and attitudes towards brain training.
What might be driving these expectations? Optimism surrounding brain training so
ftware may also stem from the technology effect, where people generally expect tec
hnology to generate success. A recent study (link is external) showed that peopl
e are more likely to invest in technology industries and implicitly associate te
chnology particularly new technologies
with success. The brain training industry
fits well with this concept, drawing on the relative novelty of neuroscience an
d the idea that the brain s structure and activity can change in response to lifes
tyle activities. These findings birthed the term neuroplasticity
a favorite catchp
hrase of brain training companies
and encouraged the development of intervention
s that showed initial success in certain populations (e.g., children and adults
with ADHD, healthy seniors). Mostly, we may believe in the promise of brain trai
ning because we want to: Our study also suggested that people who were more fami
liar with the concept of brain training and who spent more time playing computer
games (cognitive or otherwise) were more likely to have high expectations.
The overwhelming enthusiasm for brain training may represent a victory of market
ing campaigns, but should give us pause. Our minds, once made up, can prove diff
icult to change, even with strong evidence to the contrary. In brain training, t
he potential for misuse and creation of unjustified expectations is significant.
On the one hand, maintaining a positive outlook can be beneficial in many circu
mstances, and may even boost the effects of therapy (link is external). Expectat
ions motivate us, and may account for at least some of the benefits reported in
the scientific literature not to mention the success of the commercial market. H
owever, the extent and significance of such influences are ambiguous. Unrealisti
c expectations of success may drive people to buy into programs without consider
ing other, potentially less costly and more appropriate, alternatives. If brain
training cannot yield robust, tangible results, patients may lose faith in thems
elves or in their capacity to improve; the industry may be fated to the same dis
illusionment that has spawned mistrust in Big Pharma.

The appeal of brain training programs is strong; the evidence for their effectiv
eness less so. Research must now determine how our expectations interact with a
program s intended outcomes, and establish whether they are helping or hurting us.
Meanwhile, the consumer s job is to keep expectations consistent with what scienc
e has shown, rather than what the industry claims. Brain training may promote co
gnitive health or represent a drug-free alternative to medication. Optimism may
turn out to be a powerful driver of positive brain training effects which clinic
ians can harness for the benefit of their patients. But we should not allow our
hopes and expectations to color our ability to question claims. More screen time
might have its own costs (perhaps especially for school age children (link is e
xternal)), while something as simple as walking (sometimes away from a computer)
has known benefits for memory and overall health, esecially in older age. Befor
e buying into computer-based brain training, we should be mindful of what we are
actually gaining or losing.
]
We are very good at remembering the things that we see. We can recognize familia
r faces, we can talk about the things we have seen, we return to places we liked
, and we avoid places we did not. If you see something many times, over and over
again, you should stand a pretty good chance of remembering it, right?
Perhaps not.
Consider an object that many people handle on a daily basis, the U.S. penny[1].
Though it is a common object, most people find it hard to explicitly describe al
l of its features or to pick out the correct representation of it among cleverly
drawn alternatives with the features changed or moved (try it out with this dem
o (link is external)).
Perhaps we forget the features of pennies because they are so small. Would our m
emory improve with highly visible objects? A recent study at UCLA tested people s
memory for the location of fire extinguishers.[2] Fire extinguishers are bright
red and placed in highly visible locations, yet people in the study were not ver
y good at remembering where the nearest one was, even though they often remember
ed the fact that they had seen it (often many times, and for some people, for mo
re than 25 years). The researchers determined that seeing is not always the same
as noticing.
Would we remember an object better if we physically interacted with it daily?
Not necessarily. Even interacting with objects does not ensure noticing and reme
mbering them. For instance, without looking can you describe the features and sp
atial layout of the keys that surround the T key on your computer keyboard? Many p
eople have trouble doing this very well. According to researchers at Vanderbilt
and Kobe universities, even skilled typists had trouble giving explicit descript
ions of the QWERTY keyboard.[3]
What might cause this poor memory of things that are highly available, very noti
ceable, or with which we frequently interact? Before going any further, try this
short, fun demonstration (link is external) don t worry, it will take less than a m
inute, and you can test yourself.
If you went to the site, you might have found yourself struggling to pick out th
e correct version of an incredibly common design the Apple logo. Logos are specifi
cally designed to be memorable and to convey certain qualities and values about
a company. The Apple logo is among the most recognizable in the world. It has a
simple set of features, following a minimalist design that evokes a stylish sens
e of ease. Though it is very simple and highly available, a very recent study at
UCLA (link is external)shows that people are not very good at elaborating and r
ecalling the specific features of the logo (by drawing it).[4] And people had tr

ouble identifying the correct logo from a set of alternatives.

We see the Apple logo all the time, but do we notice it? When we see things very
often, we may reach what can be called attentional saturation. Through constant
ly seeing and attending to the same thing over and over again, our brains may le
arn that it is unimportant to remember specific details. This same principle can
be applied to pennies, fire extinguishers, and keyboards. When we first encount
er one of these things, we might have a very distinct representation of it in ou
r memories. But with continued use, that distinct memory may blend with other ex
periences with the object to the point that we start to only really pay attentio
n to the important characteristics: It helps me pay with exact change, my finger
s need to do this to make this word, I need it to put out a fire, or it represen
ts a popular brand (and not a counterfeit).
Strangely, we are largely unaware of this everyday phenomenon. In the study invo
lving the Apple logo, participants were asked prior to drawing the logo how well
they would be able to draw it. There was a striking discrepancy between partici
pants confidence prior to drawing the logo and how well they performed on the tas
k. After the drawing task, there was a large drop in confidence, suggesting that
the act of trying to retrieve the logo from memory was a good method of updating
ideas of how available that memory was. This type of retrospective judgment of m
emory is widely-known in the literature to be superior to prospective judgments,
and it applies to other types of memory as well.
If you want to really know how well you know something, the best thing you can d
o is to actually try to use that information in a meaningful way it will probably
be a telling experience.
_
When you remember first meeting the love of your life, do you also have a strong
memory of where you both were and also where you were in relation to objects in
the scene? When I first met my wife, Doris, it was at a party and she was at a
piano surround by bird dog males, who I saw from an adjacent room. In my mind s eye,
I still see both rooms and where everybody was.
Do you remember where you were on 9/11? I was in the waiting room of a hospital,
looking over a series of lounge chairs at a large-screen TV program that was re
porting the news.
It seems that many people remember not only events but where they were at the ti
me of the event. In the buccolic scene, for example, if you were there, you prob
ably remember what was happening.
But how does this happen? We do know that a new experience may be consolidated int
o a lasting memory, especially if it stirs emotion and you replay it in your min
d. That is certainly the case when you meet the love of your life or see a terri
ble event.
Back in the 1970s I was studying the part of the brain known as the hippocampus,
and it was known at the time that this structure is crucial for consolidating m
emories. I and others were focused on an EEG rhythm (theta rhythm of 4-7 waves p
er second) that was especially prominent when an animal moves around in an enclo
sure EEG signals are summed over dozens of neurons, and therefore to get more pr
ecise data some investigators put microelectrodes into the hippocampus so they c
ould monitor the nerve impulse activity of single neurons as the animal moved ar
ound.
It was quickly discovered that some hippocampal neurons fired impulses selective
ly when an animal was in a special location within the enclosure. Collectively,
these place neurons were actually mapping the enclosure space and tracking the ani
mal s position as it moved around in this space.

New insight on an additional role for place neurons has come from a new research
report on human epileptics with electrodes implanted in their hippocampus to lo
cate the diseased tissue. These patients played a virtual-reality game in which
their avatar drove through a virtual town and delivered items to stores. Their t
ask was to memorize the layout and what was delivered at each store. Meanwhile,
place cells in the hippocampus were monitored and their place coding was noted.
Then when participants were asked to recall the memory of what went where, the p
lace-responsive activity was reinstated even though the subjects were not actual
ly playing the game but recalling it from memory. And the activity of place cell
s was similar to that during the learning stage.
In other words, neural representations of the content of the experience had beco
me linked with the spatial and temporal context. Such evidence provides strong e
vidence for the theory that memory formation and recall involve association of e
vent with context, especially spatial and temporal context. This linkage creates
a mutually reinforcing interaction of event and location. We tend to remember b
oth or neither.
Can we apply these findings to improving everyday learning and memory situations
? Of course, we can. The key elements for making it easier to learn something ne
w are to:
Identify a context that stirs emotions, preferably positive emotions like me
eting someone you are attracted to.
Be especially aware of where you are at the time and where you are in relati
on to the location of various objects.
The hippocampus uses these emotional and spatial cues to facilitate the consolid
ation of memory. We know that memory is promoted by making associations. Emotion
s and spatial cues are probably the most effective kinds of cues.
Sources: Miller, J. F. et al. (2013) Neural activity in human hippocampal format
ion reveals the spatial context of retrieved memories. Science. 342, 1111-1114
+
The good news is you re not losing your mind, you re just adapting to the Internet a
ge. A study, called Google Effects on Memory, published last week in the journal S
cience proves what we ve suspected for a long time: We don t remember as much as we
should, but we sure remember how to Google for the answer. In the experiment, co
llege students remembered less information when they knew they would have access
to it later. Instead, they remember the pathway to find it again, like the comp
uter folder in which it was saved.
It s like when your boss asks you for a client s phone number and you say, I don t know
it, but I have it in my e-mail.
It s just one more example of how the Internet is
changing our brains to be more reliant on our external hard drives
the Web.
The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where i
nformation is stored collectively outside ourselves, the study s authors write.
To some education theorists, this might read as a positive development. After al
l, if everything we know is stored online, and we all carry around smart phones
to instantly aid with factual queries, and our brains are actually adjusting to
these changes, then it appears that technology and biology have at last converge
d into one seamless, packet-fueled stream.
In fact, it would seem as though there s no need to memorize a single byte of info
rmation ever again. Soon your ATM code could be the only morsel of data that eve
r need burden your 21st-century brain. However, that may not be such a good thin
g.

Author Don Tapscott advocated the no-memorization agenda back in 2008, saying th
at rote learning should be phased out of schools because, teachers are no longer
the fountains of knowledge; the Internet is. Instead, he and others argue that ch
ildren should be taught to better parse the constant feed of information they re b
ombarded with. (He s somewhat late to the game, however, since the popularity of m
emorization has been declining in schools since the early 1980s
nearly a decade
before most kids would be getting on the Internet at home.)
Scores of education theorists have also argued that high schools and colleges sh
ould focus more in outcome-based learning than the internalizing of mere facts.
Of course, for every education reformer there is an equal and opposite education
reformer. Recently, there have been some fairly convincing arguments coming fro
m the other side that kids need more memorization training so that society can b
ecome more innately knowledgeable, not less.
William Klemm, a neuroscience professor at Texas A&M University, has written sev
eral screeds decrying teaching methods that leave out a critical component of in
telligence: memory.
Creativity comes from a mind that knows, and remembers, a lot, he says, arguing th
at memorization both improves thinking and arms us with the facts to defend our
arguments.
Granted, Klemm s rants seem slightly tinged with technophobia (he criticizes paren
ts for raving about how smart kids are to multi-task with all their electronic gi
zmos. ) But his overall argument has roots even at the highest echelons of the tec
h world.
In a Wall Street Journal excerpt this week, Google s first brand manager Douglas Edw
ards recounted his job interview, in which Google head Sergey Brin asked Edwards
to provide a detailed explanation of a topic
from memory. (This from the guy w
ho s supposedly responsible for our collective forgetfulness.)
Countless academic studies have also reinforced the idea that a good memory impr
oves academic performance. For me, the real kicker came with Joshua Foer s recent
book Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything.
In it, Foer says that people squander forty days annually compensating for things
they ve forgotten and embarks on a mission to become a national memory champion
He also offers the best-yet argument as to why good memory shouldn t go the way of
good handwriting and other relics of the pre-digital age, writing:
To the extent that experience is the sum of our memories and wisdom the sum of ex
perience, having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the worl
d, but also more about myself.
Of course, you can also fake knowing about the world by digging through Wikipedi
a. But who will be there to edit it if nobody actually knows anything anymore? R
eciting pi to 100 digits is more of a party trick than a marker of genius, but p
erhaps just Googling it isn t truly a replacement for just remembering.
|
When I was in veterinary medical school, I could often be found lounging in the
fraternity living room listening to jazz records. My classmates were stunned tha
t I was wasting so much time, when most of them had to study while I seemingly h
ad nothing to do. O.K., so maybe I graduated fifth in my class rather than first
, but I was not nearly as stressed as my classmates.
My reason for sacrificing study time was that it bolstered my spirits. Veterinar
y medicine is a lot harder than most people think. Veterinarians learn the same

anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, microbiology, and so on as physicians do. In

some schools, human and veterinary medical students take many of the same basic
science classes. Moreover, veterinary students have to learn about multiple spec
ies, learn more public health, and take a year s worth of surgery.
But back to the music issue: some people, especially students, think that listen
ing to music helps the memory. Historically, supporters of this practice have re
ferred to this as the Mozart effect. Most students, of course, listen to pop music
rather than Mozart. Students are notorious for listening to music while studyin
g. Why isn t music a distraction? I have written before about how extraneous stimu
li can prevent memory consolidation, which in the case of studying, consumes cog
nitive resources and prevents the formation of memory that lasts long enough for
the next examination.
Because so many students listen to music while studying, formal experiments were
recently
reported on whether or not that is a good thing. These experiments, conducted in
Finland, had a scientific rationale. Prior research had shown that listening to
music that people considered pleasurable increased the release of dopamine in t
he brain, and dopamine is well known as a feel good neurotransmitter. Other resear
ch had also shown that dopamine promotes learning to approach rewards, while a d
eficiency of dopamine promotes learning of punishments.
Seventy three subjects, mean age of 27.1 years, listened to a battery of 14 song
s and identified
three that they really liked and three that were emotionally neutral. One of eac
h was selected for use in the study, in which subjects were grouped in four diff
erent listening patterns involving a positive (P) or neutral (N) song during stu
dy and the opposite kind of song during testing. Thus, there were four groups, N
N, NP, PP, PN. Each group was formed to have an approximately equal number of mu
sicians and non-musicians.
The learning involved memorizing 54 pairs of Japanese characters, in which one c
haracter was arbitrarily given a high reward value (a simple smiley face feedbac
k display during training) and the other character a low reward value (frowning
face feedback). In the test phase, pairs were shuffled and thus served as a meas
ure of how well the original learning was generalized.
Results indicated that people with more musical experience learned better with n
eutral music but tested better with pleasurable music. The opposite was true for
people without music training. My explanation is that pleasurable music is a di
straction for a musically trained person who could be expected to pay more atten
tion and devote more cognitive resources to pleasurable music s inherent structure
in the process of analyzing and realizing its pleasing quality. Neutral music i
s more easily ignored. A central tenet of learning is that any kind of distracti
on impairs formation of memory. The musically untrained people learned better wi
th positive music, presumably because of the positive emotions it generated with
out the complication of analyzing it and thus interfering with memory formation.
Clearly, the role of music listening in learning differs among individuals.
I looked at their song list and found no jazz all of it was either concert-type mu
sic or pop songs. That is a serious oversight, in my view. What the researchers
may have missed is the possible positive effect of the unique rhythms and synco
pation of jazz. I am reminded of a study I reported in my book, Memory Power 101
, showing that chewing gum helps learning.
I am musically untrained, and maybe my listening to jazz improved my learning in
vet school by creating positive emotions. A great deal of research has shown th
at positive emotions have an indirect enhancing effect on forming memories. Nega

tive emotions impair memory. No solid neuroscience explanation exists, but it is

no doubt highly relevant that the same brain structure, the hippocampus, mediat
es both emotions and memory formation.
+
n 1913, Ebbinghaus demonstrated that spacing learning out over time creates much
more efficient learning than cramming a learning task into a single intense ses
sion. Now, a new discovery has been made for a specific spaced-learning strategy
that so far is the best of all. In reviewing this new design, Kelley and Whatso
n (2013) point out experiments showing that this kind of spaced learning is opti
mal for information encoding and for activation of the genes needed to form long
-term memory.
And what is the design? The idea begins with the established notion that a given
learning task should be chunked so that it can be studied in a short time, on the
order say of 20 minutes. What is novel about the new design is that a given chu
nk is studied three times in a single session, with two intervening rest periods o
f 10 minutes in which there is little mental activity. During the rest periods,
physical activity, like shooting hoops or cycling, seem to be ideal. The reason
for these intervening rest periods is that thinking about new information or per
forming mental tasks creates interference with the memory-forming processes alre
ady under way.
Of course, like most learning tasks, a single session, even with three repetitio
ns within it, is not likely to be sufficient unless you are really adept at mnem
onic techniques (Klemm, 2012). After a day or so, this strategy needs to be repe
ated one or more times.
This is so simple to do and, if replicated in more studies, should become standa
rd practice in schools. However, very few teachers know about this technique and
school curricula are not designed to be taught this way. Changing the education
al establishment is probably too much to hope for. But this strategy can be used
by all students in homework study. Home schoolers and students taking Internet
courses can easily use the technique on their own.
If you try this approach, please add comments to this post to let us know how it
works for you.
+
Forgetting important dates, names, facts, or things you need to do can be frustr
ating and potentially disastrous, depending on the seriousness of the situation.
For example, it s annoying to forget to bring your lunch to work, but it can be d
angerous to forget to turn off the stove before leaving the house.
Following are our top 5 memory mistakes and strategies you can use to overcome the
m. It may take a little effort, but the results can have an immediate payoff by
improving your mental efficiency and preventing disaster for yourself and others
.
1. Committing unconscious transference.
No, we're not talking about psychoanalysis now. The term unconscious transferenc
e pops up in research on false memory (link is external) effect. Unconscious tra
nsference in memory occurs when an eyewitness transfers to person Y and the action
s carried out in Y s vicinity by person X. Imagine that you saw two people standin
g on a street corner. One takes out a can of spray paint and proceeds to deface
the side of a building. If someone later asks you to identify the person respons
ible for the graffiti, the chances are good that you ll lay the blame on person Y.
Florida Atlantic University psychologist Alan Kersten and his research team, in
a 2013 publication, recently demonstrated this effect by having participants sta
te whether or not a second person committed the actions carried out by a first p

erson. The unconscious transference effect showed up loud and clear, but was par
ticularly pronounced in older adults. The familiarity of seeing the second perso
n present at the event seems to be enough to bias our recollection of their resp
ective roles, a tendency that may be greater in people who also show other memor
y errors.
How does unconscious transference apply to you? Most likely, you won t witness man
y criminal activities in your life, or at least let s hope you don t. Instead, the c
ommon tendency to transfer recognition from one person to another is more likely
to affect your emotional reactions to people as they perform everyday activitie
s in ordinary situations (which was the premise of the Kersten et al. study). Kn
owing that you might mentally blame an innocent person for something he or she d
idn t do should make you better able to nip unconscious transference in the bud. B
efore you criticize a perfectly reasonable, friendly, and well-meaning person by
your faulty associations of that person with actions that you find annoying or
problematic, ask yourself whether you re allowing recall of the other people in th
e situation to taint your judgment.
2. Falling prey to commission errors (thinking you've done something you didn't)
.
Admit it: You meant to pay a bill that arrived in your email, thought you did, a
nd then were stunned when you got an overdue notice. Sure, you opened the email;
sure, you clicked on the link; and sure, you checked over the amount to make su
re it was correct. Then something went awry. You got a text from a friend who ne
eded an immediate answer to a question, or you took a bathroom break, or you got
another email to answer that looked more interesting than paying your bill. And
you never did pay that bill. This is an example of a commission error, meaning
that you remembered you needed to do something, started doing it, and then didn t
complete it. Prospective memory refers to your remembering to do something in th
e future, either at a specific date and time (remembering a dentist appointment)
or in conjunction with another event (buying toothpaste). An omission error in
prospective memory means you forget the action entirely. A commission error mean
s you remembered that the action needed to be done, initiated it, and just faile
d to bring it to completion.
Julie Bugg of Washington University in St. Louis and her team (2013) investigate
d Implementation Intention (II) encoding on commission errors in prospective mem
ory, comparing older and younger adults. II encoding involves telling yourself,
and possibly visualizing, a task you need to do. For example, if your garbage ge
ts picked up on Thursday, you need to remember to take the cans outside on Wedne
sday night. It s helpful to provide these mental reminders, but the risk is that y
ou think about getting it done but then never actually do. Bugg and her coauthor
s found that both younger and older adults had poorer performance when they were
told to imagine what they would do in a prospective memory task than when not t
old to imagine.
It s good to use imagery and other active encoding methods when you re trying to str
engthen your memory. However, in the case of prospective memory, you need to do
so with a built-in warning that imagining something doesn t mean you actually perf
ormed the action. This is where Post-it notes and checklists can be most helpful
, but you can also work to build in a good mental reminder that will make sure y
ou finish what start without getting lost along the way.
3. Negative prospective memory (forgetting to not do something).
We ve just looked at forgetting to do something that you need to do, but what abou
t the opposite case when you are continue to do something you re supposed to stop?
You ve been going out of your way every day to pick up a friend on the way to the
gym or to drop your child off at preschool. Now the friend has an injury and ca

n t work out, or your child is no long in preschool. However, you still end up goi
ng out of your way out of habit. This is a case, then, of negative prospective m
emory.
michaeljung/Shutterstock
You might think it s easier to remind yourself not to do something that requires e
xtra effort on your part. However, inertia sets in even under those conditions.
A habitual behavior becomes well-established and it s surprisingly hard to turn it
off. University of Virginia psychologists Jeffrey Pink and Chad Dodson found th
at once participants were lulled into making a lab task routine, they were more
vulnerable to forgetting not to do it when their attention was experimentally di
vided. In the divided attention task, participants had to complete a decision-m
aking task in which they indicated whether words were real words or not; at the
same time, they had to shout out Now when three consecutive odd digits were played
to them at the rate of one every two seconds. If this sounds to you like distra
cted driving, then you ve correctly imagined the experimental situation.
Forgetting to forget requires that you have enough attention to spare so that yo
u can literally kick the habit. It s probably adaptive that we so easily form new
habits. However, when situations make those habits either irrelevant or potenti
ally damaging, we need to have enough mental energy left to remember to interrup
t the habit chain.
4. Not making mistakes.
You read this memory error correctly as well. Although we tend to try for comple
tely error-free learning, especially the over-achievers in the crowd, it turns o
ut that building a mistake into learning what you re trying to remember can be ben
eficial. Canadian psychologists Andre-Ann Cyr and Nicole Anderson studied the eff
ect of trial-and-error learning on how well older and younger adults remembered
lists of words. In the trial-and-error condition, participants were given a cate
gory (such as food ) and prompted to provide two guesses before seeing part of the
word they were supposed to remember (such as ap ). Inevitably, some of the guesses
were incorrect. However, both young and old groups were better able to remember
the words that they d learned through guesswork.
Through trial-and-error learning, which sometimes results in mistakes, you proce
ss information more deeply, which is to say you give it greater distinctiveness, e
xpend more mental effort, and infuse the information with greater meaning. As a
result, its memory trace will be more enduring than if you passively read the in
formation or even are given information that appears flawlessly organized. The
older adults in the Cyr and Anderson study were particularly benefited by errorgeneration because it forced them to do deeper encoding than they might otherwis
e engage in on their own.
Errorless learning may not be the best way to guarantee that you ll remember new i
nformation, then. By working your way through the material, even if you re wrong a
t first, you ll truly be able to learn from your own mistakes.
5. Completing difficult tasks mindlessly.
We ve just seen that making errors while you re learning new information can work to
improve your memory by engaging more of your mental wheels. However, there are
cases in which you don t want to make an error. Perhaps you set your alarm to wake
up early in the morning only to oversleep the next day, finding out too late th
at you d set it for P.M. instead of A.M. Your mistake was one of failing to take i
nto account the very first step in a process, not the last (as in the prospectiv
e memory error case). This is called an initialization error. You might also make
a fatal error after you ve completed a task. How many times have you went to cop

y a document only to find that you left the copy sitting in the machine after yo
u d completed the task? This is called a post-completion error.
Human factors researchers Maartje Ament and collaborators (2013) at University C
ollege, London, compared the effects of device-oriented with task-oriented instr
uctions on an experimental task in which participants either made or destroyed e
xperimental monsters. In the device-oriented condition, the task was broken down
by various widgets that controlled different outcomes. They viewed a screen sho
wing the widgets, not what the widgets actually did. In the task-oriented condi
tion, participants went about the job of either adding or removing body parts, f
ocused not on the device itself but on what they needed to do to achieve a parti
cular subgoal. They saw pictures of the body parts controlled by the devices, no
t the devices themselves. As the memory load of the task increased, performance
deteriorated significantly more in the device-oriented condition. Participants s
imply lost track of where they were in the sequence of steps they needed to perf
orm.
An analogous situation in real-life to the Frankenstein task occurs when you are
programming a DVR. The newer models allow you to choose the program from a guid
e where you make your decision on the basis of the clear choices the guide prese
nts. In the older models, you needed to go through a series of steps in which yo
u can t see the program you re going to record until the very last step and even the
n, you may fail to push a button to confirm unless you know the button is there.
We don t always have a choice when it comes to picking the way we complete a compl
ex task involving a series of steps. However, if you know that the steps will no
t be intuitively obvious, the Ament et al. study suggests that you either write
down a checklist of what you need to do separately, or build in yes-no reminders
that will force you to make sure you ve actually gone through the steps in the ri
ght order, and through to completion.
Memory is a mental muscle that benefits from exercise. The more you use it, the
stronger it will be. These five common memory errors show that, no matter what
your age, you can benefit from a few relatively simply tricks to keep that muscl
e strong and effective.
_
People frequently ask me What s the best way to improve my memory? (or
my child s mem
ory? my elderly parent s memory?). The answer most commonly given is to use memory
aids, that is, mnemonic devices such as associating mental images of new inform
ation with images of already learned images that serve as pegs on which to hang
new information. I explain these devices in great detail in both of my books, Mem
ory Power 101 and Better Grades, Less Effort.
Mnemonics are essential if you want to become a memory athlete and show off prodig
ious feats of memory. After you have used such mnemonics for a while, some of th
e benefit persists long after you quit using such mnemonics because the brain ha
s been trained to be more facile and imaginative in making associations.
But for real-world practicality, it is hard to beat the usefulness of thinking a
bout what you are trying to remember. Thinking unifies the essential elements of
learning, which I view as follows:
Knowledge ? Understanding ? Creative Insight
When people try to acquire knowledge, they of course must remember it, which the
y usually attempt by mentally repeating it again and again. This rote process is
the least effective way to remember. When you think about what you are trying t
o remember, your efforts to understand it actually constitute rehearsal in meani
ngful ways. Attempts to understand include associating and

cross checking the new with your understanding of what you already know, thinkin
g about what else might be relevant, reflecting on the merits of the new informa
tion, and self-examination of your level of understanding. Then, as understandin
g is gained, you become poised for creative insight, making application of the n
ew information for your own needs and purposes. In the process, you might even t
hink of things about the new information that others have not discerned. This pr
ocess automatically creates mental associations that not only cement the new inf
ormation in memory but also integrate it with all the things you already know as
well as perhaps even generating ideas that nobody else has thought of.
The biological basis behind this thinking process of memory rehearsal is now bei
ng confirmed. The original basis of the idea comes from suggestion some 20 years
ago that multiple areas of brain participate in formation of memory.[1] (link i
s external) Thinking engages multiple areas of brain and, when performed on what
you are trying to remember, strengthens the memory representation in the brain
areas that are creating the engram.
Some recent support for multiple-area formation of memory includes a recent brai
n-scan study of male and female college students during consolidation of a recen
t fear-induced experience revealed increased activity in multiple brain areas (a
mygdala, parahippocampus, insula, thalamus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and
anterior cingulate cortex) during a resting state lasting 10 minutes immediately
after the conditioning.[2] (link is external) Rest occurred immediately after res
ponding to the fear-inducing stimulus and probably involved a process of reflect
ion on the learning task or an equivalent subconscious process.
Decreased activity occurred in the striatum (caudate, putamen). This decrease ma
y have occurred because this area of brain includes the positive reinforcement (
reward) system, and fear conditioning is aversive, not rewarding.
I should add that the extensiveness of brain areas participating in thinking and
its associated memory consolidation was surely under-estimated. MRI brain scans
measure metabolism, which is not a direct index of the nerve impulse signaling
required for processing learning events.
+
It's that time of year when many students start to worry about how they're doing
in their classes.
Commonly, students approach instructors with similar complaints: They're spendin
g a lot of time studying and don t understand why that isn t leading to good test pe
rformance. As instructors, my colleagues and I often hear things like, I re-read
my notes several times, or I looked at the material and felt like I understood it
when I was looking at it, so I don t understand why I did so badly on the test. Usu
ally, it's not that students aren t spending time studying (although sometimes tha
t s an issue too). Rather, it's that they're simply not doing the right things wit
h their time.
What are the right things?
The answer isn t intuitively obvious. In fact, one of the problems with figuring o
ut how to study and learn is that our intuitions about it often lead us astray.
Not only is our moment-to-moment sense of how well we are learning something fre
quently wrong, but it often leads us to believe the exact opposite of what actua
lly does help learning. For example, consider this study (link is external) of h
ow people learn about a particular artist s style of painting. The researchers com
pared such learning when different paintings by the same artist were presented t
ogether sequentially with when the paintings by one artist were interleaved amon
g paintings by different artists. Although the interleaved presentation method l
ed to better learning of an artist s style, people thought that they were learning
better when paintings by the same artist were presented together. In short, peo

ple s intuitions about what was best for their learning were the exact opposite of
what actually helped learning.
This disconnect may be one reason why people tend to do things like highlight, u
nderline, or re-read things, all of which have been deemed relatively ineffectiv
e by Dunlosky and colleagues in this Scientific American MIND article (link is e
xternal) and described elsewhere (link is external). It may also be a reason why
people believe that teaching to their preferred learning style (link is externa
l) helps learning (see this article (link is external)), or why people rely on h
ow well they feel like they understand something in the moment, while they are l
ooking at it, as a gauge of how well they learned it. It feels in the moment lik
e this is a good indicator of learning, when in fact, it's actually not a good i
ndicator. As described below, being tested on the material later, while not look
ing at it, is a better indicator.
So what methods actually are beneficial to learning?
It turns out that two of the most effective methods are testing and spacing (lin
k is external). Testing is just like it sounds test yourself on the material, pref
erably often! Spacing refers to spreading studying out over time in multiple ses
sions rather than cramming it all into one or two sessions.
Combining testing and spacing (link is external) is a great way to become a supe
r-learner.
Of course, getting students to understand and believe in science-based methods i
s one of the challenges to getting them to be better learners. It's hard to over
come intuition, and intuition often leads people to believe that merely looking
at or re-reading the material is effective (when setting it aside and being test
ed on it is actually much more effective), and that massing repetitions together
in a session is more effective than spacing them out. Teaching students this is
a goal of my colleagues (Ed DeLosh (link is external)and Matthew Rhodes (link
is external)) and I in developing a university-wide freshmen course on applying
the science of learning to studying better.
But believing is only half the battle. Actually implementing these techniques in
daily life is the other. In my freshmen seminar on applying the science of lear
ning to developing study skills, students usually come to believe (after some in
itial resistance) that testing and spacing are very effective methods. Still, ma
ny of them admit that they fail to actually use these techniques despite coming
to understand that they should. Students get busy, time flies, and then suddenly
the exam is upon them and they find themselves cramming at the last minute and
not having time to effectively test themselves.
So, how can people overcome the tendency to not plan ahead enough to take full a
dvantage of testing and spacing to maximize learning?
A great way to force yourself to implement testing and spacing into your everyda
y learning is to utilize standard apps that you probably already have at your fi
ngertips. Most calendar apps will allow you to type questions in for yourself to
appear at particular times on particular days, as if they were scheduled events
. You can schedule these questions so that their reminders appear for you at tim
es when you know you ll have a moment to try to answer them. You can think of ques
tions to ask yourself at the time that you are first learning the material, such
as during class or while reading a textbook; just type the questions into your
calendar app to appear at later-scheduled times. As you are carrying your device
with you throughout your day, you will be prompted to answer your own questions
that you had previously come up with. You can even set them to repeat several t
imes a week so that you have to answer them repeatedly, and spaced across time.
This will allow you to combine testing and spacing to achieve higher levels of l

earning.
Instructors can help by pausing now and then to encourage students to think up q
uestions to test themselves on later, or even to suggest specific questions.
Other apps and systems (link is external) utilize or have utilized these princip
les of testing and spacing, such as some flashcard apps (link is external) for l
earning foreign language vocabulary, or the SpacedEd system for learning describ
ed here (link is external), here (link is external), and here (link is external)
. For ideas on how to push your extreme learning even further, see this blog pos
t on cuing memories during sleep.
_
t has long been known that sleep plays a role in establishing new memories. As l
ong ago as 1924, Jenkins and Dallenbach (link is external) showed that memory fo
r syllables from a list was dramatically improved if people slept between studyi
ng the list and being tested rather than remaining awake during that period. The
benefits of sleep for memory have since been shown across many studies (link is
external)and with many forms of memory (link is external).
A specific phase of sleep in particular, deep (or slow-wave) sleep, is thought t
o play a critical role in strengthening memories. This type of sleep can be meas
ured with electrodes on a person's scalp. In recent years, researchers have test
ed whether cuing people with sounds during this phase of sleep (link is external
) (without waking them up) improves memory for information that was learned with
the sounds while awake.
The results have been striking.
In a study published in Science (link is external), Rudoy and colleagues had peo
ple learn the locations of images on a grid, such as a cat in the lower left-han
d corner of a screen, or a teapot in the upper right-hand corner. The images wer
e accompanied by their corresponding sounds. So, the cat would appear along with
a meow , and the teapot would appear along with a whistling sound. Then, the parti
cipants went to sleep while wearing electrodes on their heads to measure the dif
ferent phases of sleep as they slept. When their brainwaves indicated that they
were in deep, slow-wave sleep, the researchers played some of the sounds that ha
d been heard earlier while learning the locations of images on the grid, like th
e "meow". When a person had awakened from sleep, the researchers tested his or h
er memory for the locations of the images on the grid. The person had to try to
place each image into its correct location on the grid by moving it. What was fa
scinating was that people had superior location memory for those images whose so
unds were played during slow-wave sleep compared to those whose sounds were not
played during sleep.
More recently, Antony and colleagues (2012) (link is external) demonstrated that
this type of sleep-cuing is not limited to memory for learned locations of visu
al images on a grid: It also benefits the type of skill learning that occurs whe
n learning things like how to play a musical instrument. When participants learn
ed to play a musical sequence on a piano keyboard by following moving colored ci
rcles on a screen to learn the sequence, they were better at playing the sequenc
e later if the melody itself had been played during slow-wave sleep.
In short, cuing memories during slow-wave sleep using sounds can dramatically en
hance those memories, whether they are primarily visual memories or memories for
motor skills like playing a sequence on a piano.
So, how do we do this at home to strategically benefit our own memories and abil
ities?
One simple method might be to study, learn or train while listening to particula

r pieces of music and then play those same pieces of music softly throughout our
sleep so as to be sure to hit the slow-wave sleep.
However, new technologies and smartphone apps may make it possible for us to str
ategically strengthen memories as we sleep in a more sophisticated fashion. Take
, for example, the Zeo system (link is external) for tracking your sleep phases
as you sleep (update: Zeo went out of business (link is external)). Like other s
martphone apps that interface with brainwave electrode devices, such as this med
itation app (link is external)or this music-from-brainwaves app (link is externa
l), the Zeo system uses electrodes that you wear on your head. By wearing the el
ectrodes to bed, Zeo's app will record your brainwaves as you sleep, giving you
data on how much time you spent in the various phases of sleep during the night.
Its SmartWake feature will even allow you to set a time range in which you woul
d like to be woken up so that your alarm selectively goes off during a good phase
of sleep from which to be awakened.
The SmartWake feature is explicitly designed NOT to wake you up during deep slee
p (as that is a terrible time to be woken up). However, if users were allowed fl
exibility enough to control the phase of sleep in which sounds are presented, as
well as to control the sounds themselves (as you might when choosing the chime
or bell sound for your alarm), as well as how loudly it presents the sounds, we
might just be able to strategically set our devices to cue us with specific soun
ds during slow-wave sleep in order to enhance our memories. You would want to se
t the sounds volume to be just loud enough to hear them (in order to trigger memo
ries during slow-wave sleep), but not loudly enough to wake you from slow-wave s
leep.
A sleep app with this type of flexibility could lead to endless possibilities fo
r the future of memory enhancement and skill development. And an app with this f
lexibility is surely just around the corner.
+
Who hasn t experienced something like this with old friends?
That was a great day in the park.
It rained.

No, it was the beach.

There was sun.

We wore overcoats.

We went without shoes.

It is our friend s memory that is faulty, not ours we say. We are certain we re righ
t because the picture is so clear to us. We may forget much about what happened,
but what we do remember we are sure is correct. Of course, our friends believe
the same about their memories.
Now Daniela Schiller, of Mt. Sinai School of Medicine and her former colleagues
from New York University give us a new insight (link is external) into the natur
e of memory.
Not only are our memories faulty (anyone who has uncovered old diaries knows tha
t), but more importantly Schiller says our memories change each time they are re
called. What we recall is only a facsimile of things gone by.
Schiller says that memories are malleable constructs that are reconstructed with
each recall. We all recognize that our memories are like Swiss cheese; what we
now know is that they are more like processed cheese.
What we remember changes each time we recall the event. The slightly changed mem
ory is now embedded as real, only to be reconstructed with the next recall.

One implication of Schiller s work is that memory isn t like a file in our brain but
more like a story that is edited every time we tell it. To each re-telling ther
e are attached emotional details. So when the story is altered feelings are also
reshaped.
Schiller says, My conclusion is that memory is what you are now. Not in pictures,
not in recordings. Your memory is who you are now. So if we tell our stories dif
ferently, the emotions that are elicited will also differ. An altered story is a
lso an altered interior life.
In his MIT Technology Review article about this work, Stephen S. Hall writes tha
t Schiller s work suggests radical nonpharmacological approaches to treating pathol
ogies like post-traumatic stress disorder, other fear-based anxiety disorders, a
nd even addictive behaviors.
In an intriguing way, Schiller s highly technical work on the biological functioni
ng of the brain brings us back to an earlier time when talking therapy held sway
and the humanities for psychological healing were as valued as the hard science
s. We ll have to see how far this new direction will take us.
_
Do you consciously monitor your working memory? That s the limited-capacity memory
you use when looking up a phone number, for example. If you fail to keep the nu
mbers actively in mind while dialing, you may have to look up the number again.
In other words, do you check yourself to see if you are still paying attention t
o what is in your working memory? Is your mind wandering away from what you are
trying to hold in working memory? The cure is to deploy your brain s innate capaci
ty for executive control over working memory.
For more complicated memory chores than dialing a phone number, are you consciou
sly aware of updating what is in your working memory at a given moment with new
information? Do you think about being able to recall information you have just r
eceived as when you are reading? Or do you ever willfully suppress what is in your
working memory as for example, expunging an unpleasant thought.
These questions deal with how well you are consciously aware of the likelihood y
ou can recall what you are experiencing. I suspect that most of us exert some co
nscious executive control over working memory, but not nearly as efficiently as
we could or should. Does it matter? Well yes, because controlling what is in you
r working memory affects the ongoing thought processes that are using the inform
ation that is in working memory. Moreover, how well you monitor your working mem
ory affects how well the information registers in your brain and how well it can
become consolidated into a more lasting memory.I explain the consolidation proc
ess and ways to enhance it in my book, Memory Power 101.
Executive control of memory is relatively new in memory research, but one group
reports studies suggesting that such research will prove fruitful. A year or so
ago, this group s poster presentation at the Society of Neuroscience meeting intri
gued me, and I am delighted that the work has now been formally published.
One of their experiments evaluated listeners ability to monitor their moment-to-m
oment working memory storage capacity as new information arrived. As they listen
ed to recorded word lists, experimenters told the subjects to pause the input at
the maximum point that would still allow them for perfect real-time memory reca
ll. That is, they pressed a key to pause the input of words in the list at the l
atest point at which they believe they would have perfect recall. Interestingly,
all subjects paused the recording consistent with their known working memory sp
an, as had been determined in pre-experiment testing. In a follow-up experiment,
experimenters reduced the sound volume of the word list so that more effort had
to be exerted to perform the task. Under these conditions, subjects were much l

ess accurate in matching their listening to their natural working memory capacit
y and thus their learning was not optimal.
Obviously, such results suggest that making tasks more difficult can degrade thi
nking and learning. Teachers and professors who speak softly or with foreign acc
ents should take note. Whatever benefit accrues from the challenge to pay better
attention under difficult situations is offset by limitations in working memory
storage capacity. Examples of degrading influences in addition to sound volume
in listening to information include:
Listening is made more difficult by:
Extraneous noise
Unfamiliar speech accents
Speaking too rapidly
Speaking too softly
Simultaneous presence of visual stimuli that conflict or distract
Irritating or distracting mannerisms of the speaker
Reading is made more difficult by:
Font and page design selection
Convoluted syntax, awkward sentence structure
Unfamiliar vocabulary
Distracting visuals
Wordiness, poor grammar
Poor reading technique (tracking with finger movements, random eye fixations
, small fixation span (a few letters or one word at a time)
In all situations, an important factor is whether the listener or reader has con
trol over the speed of information presentation. Thinking and learning are compr
omised if a person has no control over chunking of information input and matchin
g the input to their working memory storage capacity.
Another factor, not considered in this study, is the likelihood that people diff
er significantly in conscious executive control capability. We know, for example
, that some people can hold focus much better than others can, and this certainl
y affects their ability to optimize working memory storage of information input.
Can working memory executive control be trained? There are already effective tra
ining protocols for expanding working memory capacity (as in the number of items
you can hold in working memory). I suspect that we will soon see training progr
ams to enhance executive control of working memory.
To summarize, you can optimize thinking and learning by willfully controlling th
e ease and convenience of information input as well as by how well you have deve
loped a habit of conscious executive control.
_
School is ending for the year, and students surely welcome the break. But they w
ill do well to think on how they learn to learn so that next Fall they can be mo
re successful with less effort. Interesting how that reminds me of my e-book for
students, Better Grades, Less Effort.
In my experience with students, both the college students I teach and the second
ary students that teachers tell me about, the biggest weakness students have is
that they either try to remember school material by rote memorization or have no
strategy at all, relying on some kind of magical mental osmosis.
Even among students who rely on rote memory, they generally lack much of a stra
tegy for memorizing, relying on varying degrees of casual looking over the instruc

tional material until they think they can remember it. Experiments show that stu
dents routinely over-estimate how much they remember and under-estimate the valu
e of further study. Moreover, many educators at all levels have disdain for memo
rization, stating that we should focus education on teaching students to think a
nd solve problems, as if you can think and solve problems without knowing anythi
ng. Too many teachers regard memorizing as old-fashioned and even destructive of
enlightenment.
Disdain for memorization is a relatively new phenomenon in education. In ancient
times, people took great pains and pride in memorizing huge quantities of infor
mation. The advent of printing greatly reduced the need to memorize history and
cultural mores. In modern times, we have the Internet, where you can just Google
what you need to know. So who needs to get brain-strain trying to remember thin
gs?
Now we have a book by Samuel Arbesman, The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We
Know Has an Expiration Date, where he argues that there are no lasting facts. T
hey all have a half life, that is, the number of years it takes to falsify half
of what you think are facts. He argues that new facts are made all the time, often
replacing what we had previously thought were facts. He argues we should just s
top memorizing and look up whatever current facts we need on the Internet. But i
f there are no lasting facts, how are those you find on Google any more valid th
an those you memorize and can deploy in real time.
There are some serious errors in Arbesman s position.
Many facts are immutable; that is, they don t have a half-life. Events in hist
ory did actually occur, and while revisionist writers of school history textbook
s may change the reporting of those events, the facts remain true. Nixon covered
up Watergate, Obama obfuscated Benghazi. The fact of DNA as a basis for heredit
y is not likely to change.
Many facts that do change will not change in a given person s lifetime and thu
s will be useful in daily living.
The Internet is flooded with error, propaganda, and un-vetted assertions.
You don t always have Internet access.
In many situations, it is not practical to look up what you need. Ever try t
o read or speak a foreign language where you have to look up most of the words?
Ever try to use computer software where you have to repeatedly refer to the inst
ruction manual?
Expertise in any field of endeavor requires a great deal of memorized facts. A
nd if you want to succeed in life, it pays to be an expert.
I can easily make a strong case for memorization, especially for schools. Here i
s a list supporting the importance of memorizing:
Memorized information is always with you, even when you lack the time or acc
ess to sources where you could look it up.
We think and solve problems with what is in working memory, which in turn is
memory of currently available information or recall of previously memorized in
formation. The process of thinking is like streaming video on the Internet: info
rmation flows in as short frames onto the virtual scratch pad of working memory,
successively replaced by new chunks of information from real-time or recalled m
emory. Numerous studies show that the amount of information you can hold in work
ing memory is tightly correlated with IQ and problem-solving ability.
We think by shuttling small batches of information as we experience it or fr
om memory onto a virtual scratchpad called working memory. These batches are s
huttled sequentially into our processing networks ("thought engine"). How well
we think depends on what is on the scratch pad.From Klemm, 2011. Atoms of Mind,

Springer.
Memorization provides exercise for the mind. This is the reason schools used
to require students to memorize poems, Bible verses, famous speeches, etc. The
true advantage of such exercise is that generates mental industriousness. Any te
acher will tell you that many students today are mentally lazy. Memorization als
o trains the mind to pay attention and focus intensely. Such skill also seems to
be lacking in many youngsters, which is most obvious in the growing number of k
ids diagnosed with ADHD.
Memorization trains the brain to develop learning and memory schemas that fa
cilitate future learning. Learning schemas develop as you acquire competence in
an area call it skill A. Now, when you need to learn a new and related skill, B, y
ou mind says to itself, I don t know how to do B. But I do know how to do A, and so
me of that can be applied to learning B. Memory schemas are memorized frames of r
eference and association, where having memorized fact A, you have an association
handle for memorizing fact B.
If you learn strategies for memorization, as opposed to the rote memory appr
oach of looking information over repeatedly, you accelerate the ease, speed, and
reliability of learning new things.
Bottom line: the more you know, the more you can know!
Regardless of where you stand on the importance of memory, most people believe t
hat learning is a good thing. But what good is learning if you don t remember it?
_
As each of us goes through life, we remember a little and forget a lot. The stoc
kpile of what we remember contributes greatly to define us and our place in the
world. Thus, it is important to remember and optimize the processes that make th
at possible.
People who compete in memory contests ( memory athletes ) have long known the value
of associational cues (see my Memory Power 101 book). Neuroscientists have known
for a long time about memory consolidation (converting short-term memory to lon
g-term form) and the value of associational cues. But now, important new underst
anding is arising from a research lab at Northwestern that links cueing to re-con
solidation and reveals new possibilities for optimizing long-term memory formatio
n.
The underlying research approach is based on such well-established memory princi
ples as:
When information is first acquired, it is tagged for its potential importanc
e or value.
Such tagging is influenced by multiple factors such as repetition, attention
, emotion, or purpose.
Valuable memories get preferentially rehearsed, either through conscious wil
l or by covert (implicit) brain processes.
Rehearsal episodes reactivate the memory and enhance long-term remembering b
ecause each re-consolidation episode builds on prior ones and strengthens the ne
ural circuits that store the memory.
Effectiveness of recall during rehearsal is promoted by use of relevant cues
, that is, information that was associated with the original learning material.
Such cues are effective, even when delivered during sleep.[1] (link is exter
nal)
The study involved 60 people in their early 20s, screened for good memory abilit
y.[2] (link is external) All subjects participated in a four-hour learning perio
d beginning in late morning. The learning consisted of 72 images placed in speci
fic locations on a tile-like screen and presented one at a time. As each image a
ppeared, a corresponding sound was associated, intended to serve as a learning c

ue. For example, a dog picture would be associated with barking, cat with meow s
ound, etc. To create a value bias, each image had a superimposed number represen
ting how important it was to remember this item and its location upon later test
ing. Subjects were given financial reward for how well they remembered, and thus
remembering high-value images was a priority. Half of the images had high value
assignments, while the rest had low values.
Subjects were assigned to four groups:
Groups 1 and 2 were tested to see how well they could remember where each ob
ject had appeared during the learning phase. They then took a 90 min nap while t
heir EEGs were recorded. Half of these subjects heard white noise while the othe
r have was presented the original sound cues of low-value images during non-REM
sleep at a level that did not cause awakening. At the end of the nap, recall was
again tested.
The procedure in two other groups was similar except that these subjects did
not nap. One of these groups watched a movie during the 90 minutes after the le
arning session, while the other group listed to the low-value sound cues while p
erforming a working memory task.
Not surprisingly, the studies revealed that high-value images were remembered be
tter, irrespective of whether or not a nap was taken. The practical point is tha
t we remember better the things we value and find to have positive reward value.
This reminds me of the sage saying that T. Boone Pickens repeated from his bask
etball coach, who told players after each game: Don t dwell on your mistakes. Think
about what you did right and do more of that!
In the study, half of the low-value associations were rescued by cueing during w
akefulness and all of them were rescued by cueing during sleep, even though only
half of the images were cued. Notably, the best effects occurred during the dee
pest stage of sleep. No explanation was given to explain the sleep benefit, but
I suspect it is because the sleeping brain is not distracting itself with irrele
vant thoughts. This is consistent with the finding that low-value memories were
not rescued well during REM sleep, when the brain is busily engaged in dreaming.
The REM-sleep finding is at variance with other studies that reported a memory
consolidating benefit of REM sleep. Apparently, the test conditions make a diffe
rence and more research is needed here.
Low-value associations were preferentially forgotten in the group that was not a
llowed to nap. This likely signifies that a brain busily engaged with other thou
ghts is less able to selectively consolidate memories, and only high-value items
are likely to survive. This accords with the long-held theory that distractions
and multi-tasking interfere with memory consolidation.
In summary, memory optimization would seem to require one to:
Create associations that can serve as memory cues.
Place a high value on the cues and their targets.
Repeatedly present the cues and replay the initial information. When awake,
present the cues in self-test mode. When asleep, even better results would obtai
n if cues were presented at a level that does not cause awakening during the ear
ly night sleep when sleep is deepest and there is little dreaming.
_
Physical exercise can rehabilitate bodies that have grown soft and flabby. Can m
ental exercise rehabilitate brains that have deteriorated because of disease or
age? Maybe.
A published scholarly review has examined the research literature on this issue
and arrived at several useful conclusions:

Focus, Reduce Distractions. The two common causes of forgetting, in both nor
mal people and those with impaired memory, are a) failure to register new inform
ation effectively, and b) interference from conflicting sensations and thoughts.
Customize the Rehabilitation Needed. Rehab need to take into account the typ
e of memory therapy and the cause and severity of the impaired memory capability
.
Learn in Small, Frequently Repeated Chunks. New information has to be re-pac
kaged for memory-impaired people so that it is in simple, concrete form, in smal
l chunks, and repeated frequently
with patients required to re-state the informa
tion and make explicit associations with what they already know. (Notice how thi
s sounds like the way one needs to teach young children).
Practice Attentiveness. Attentiveness to new information can be enhanced by
self-cueing, wherein patients remind themselves to be more attentive at crucial
moments. This can even be done by creating a conditioned reflex in which a cue s
ignal conditions greater attentiveness. (Notice how this sounds like how you clic
ker train dogs).
Uses Mnemonics. Mnemonic tips and tricks can help. This includes using acron
yms, rhymes, stories, and constructing mental images.
Find Ways to Compensate. Even in patients with severe impairments, some aspe
cts of memory, such as subliminal or implicit memory, may have been spared and c
an be exploited to compensate for the lost ability.
Spread Rehearsals Over Time. Memory rehearsal is more effective if it is spr
ead out over time rather than bunched into a few closely spaced sessions.
Manipulate the Cues. Be more aware of cues you are using. A vanishing clues ap
proach can help. For example, in a rehearsal session, cued retrieval might begin
with cueing the first three letters of a target word, then repeating later with
two, then one, and eventually no letter cues.
Minimize Error, Lest you Learn the Errors. Trial-and-error learning is gener
ally less effective than learning conditions that minimize error, because error
responses can get stored as memories that compete with the right answers. In sho
rt, it is better to not know than to generate wrong answers.
Use Memory Crutches. Using external memory aids (sticky notes, wall charts,
notebooks, etc.) should help, bearing in mind, however, that using such aids may
themselves be a memory task. It is like having a schedule calendar and forgetti
ng to check the calendar. Smart phones and radio paging devices ( NeuroPage ) can be
especially helpful because they remind the patient when to check on the stored
information. In some patients, repeated use of such aids develops a habit for ta
rget tasks and these may even generalize to certain non-target tasks.
These ten approaches are some of the same approaches that work especially well i
n people with normal memory capabilities. To make them work in patients with imp
aired memory just takes more effort, patience, and time.
_
It is frustrating when I can t remember something. I would like to think that my m
ind is a steel trap. Unfortunately, it isn t. Minutes ago, I found myself thinking
, Why can t I remember the name of that book? I know it s in my head somewhere: I jus
t read the title a second ago on that piece of paper. Where s that piece of paper?
Well, to be truthful, it is pretty hard to tell if that information was actually
put into my memory in the first place (i.e., if it was encoded) or if I was jus
t having difficulty getting the information out (i.e., retrieving it). Nonethele
ss, there is a bounty of research that tries to figure out what kinds of techniq
ues help with learning and memory and a surprising one testing has been shown to b
e very beneficial.
A great thing about this technique is it is relatively easy to do and as a colle
ague of mine, Jessica Logan, and I recently found out, it is helpful for both yo

unger and older learners (find original Psychology and Aging article here (link
is external)).
Student taking a test.
In the study, we found that testing helped adults of various ages learn and reme
mber more about important, everyday things, like armadillos. (We re from Texas- th
at seems like an important topic to us!). We wanted to see if the benefits of te
sting applied to people of various ages, so we included people in our study who
were college undergraduates (the kind used often in psychological research), but
we also included younger adults from the community (aged 18-25) and older adult
s from the community (aged 55-65).
For the experiment, everyone engaged in an initial study session (reading four N
ational Geographic articles on armadillos, black holes, the human heart, and tsu
namis). Next, each learner restudied two of those articles and also took a quiz
on the other two articles. After that (or 2 days later, depending on what group
each person was assigned to), each person was given a final test on all four art
icles.
Memory was much better on that final test for the topics that had been previousl
y tested compared to those that had only been restudied. For example, if you did
the experiment and took an initial test on black holes and the human heart, but
only restudied armadillos and tsunamis, you would have performed really well on
the final test for questions involving black holes and the human heart (the pre
viously tested topics), but not as well on the questions involving armadillos or
tsunamis (the restudied topics). An important thing to note, is that learners w
ere asked to refrain from studying the topics in between the experimental sessio
ns (i.e., if they had to come back two days later to do the final test, they did
not study the topics in between, meaning the benefits from testing were not rel
ated to finding out what they got wrong and going back over the material, but to
actually retrieving the information in the previous test session). Also, of imp
ortance, age group did not matter. Everyone benefitted from testing and the bene
fits were seen immediately and after 2 days.
So what does this all mean? Testing actually helps you remember things more than
staring at a piece of paper and rereading the information does and definitely m
ore than osmosis does (sorry!). Perhaps instead of staring at a piece of paper a
nd rereading the title several times, I should have tried to quiz myself about t
he title. Then, I would have been much more likely to remember it.
So, even though the idea of taking a test may make your palms sweat or may even
make you want to fake having a terrible and rare (but temporary) illness, give i
t a try. Of course, you may want to save this technique for things that you actu
ally want to remember, like the name of your new boss, and not things as seeming
ly trivial as a book title, but you get the idea. Also, if you quiz yourself, yo
u don t have to show anyone your grade! You can just reap the benefits of a well-d
eserved memory.
_
When discussing memory systems, it seems the most common point made is regarding
the difference between short- and long-term memory. It seems pretty well-known
that short-term memory operates over a period of seconds to minutes and has limi
ted operating space (i.e., the famous 7 +/- 2 items), whereas long-term memory h
as a potentially infinite storage capacity and the material placed in long term
memory is much more stable. In my experience, people are much less cognizant of
the fact that knowledge is stored in three different kinds of long-term memory s
ystems. Yet this is crucial because it speaks volumes about how our minds are or
ganized.

To get a handle on these memory systems, let me ask you three questions: 1) Do
you know if wearing helmets while riding your bike is a law or not? 2) Do you r
ecall when you first were learning how to ride a bike, perhaps the time you skin
ned your knee? and 3) Can you hop on a bike and ride it now without a problem?
The knowledge you have in regards to these questions come from three very diff
erent memory systems. If you knew the answer to the first question about helmet
laws, you retrieved it from your semantic memory system. The semantic system sto
res your factual knowledge about rules, norms, math or logic, and historical eve
nts. If you know answers to such questions as, Who was Jimmy Carter s vice presiden
t? , How many protons are in a Helium atom? , What is 6 cubed? , and What is the legal dr
inking age in Canada? , they are all stored in your semantic knowledge system. Thi
nk of the semantic system as your stored encyclopedia of definitional and concep
tual knowledge.
Now go back to the time you skinned your knee. Maybe you recall your dad run
ning behind your bike, the thrill you felt as he let you go, then the fear as th
e bike wobbled, the pain as your knee struck the pavement, and the comfort your
dad offered as he ran up to you. The episodic memory stores your sensory-percept
ual-affective experiences. They are normally stored as visual gestalts (sequence
d images), from a particular point of view (yours), and are usually stored based
on their affective valence (the stronger the emotional association with the exp
erience, the greater the likelihood you will recall you almost certainly don t remem
ber the third time you rode your bike around the neighborhood without falling).
Episodic-affective memories are the kind that are inhibited when people are tryi
ng to force themselves to forget some distressing experience (e.g., PTSD vets a
voiding flashbacks).
Although stored in different systems, both semantic and episodic memories are
called declarative memory systems. This basically means that they are accessible
to self-conscious awareness and people can report (i.e., declare) that they are
present (or not). Now, for the third question. Tell me, exactly, how it is that
you are able to ride a bike. People answer this the same way. I basically get on
the bike and ride it , which, of course, does not answer the question at all. At m
ost people will have some basic conceptual rules (e.g., it is important to get o
ne s speed up quickly because it is a lot easier to balance while you are moving).
But even these basic rules may not be present. Complicated action patterns are
stored in a totally different memory system, called procedural memory.

Procedural memories are largely nonconscious, as is evident by the fact that

you can t introspect and see them. The fact that procedural learning can take plac
e completely independently of the more conscious, declarative memory systems was
brought into very clear relief by one of the most famous patients in psychology
, HM. HM had bad seizures, and was operated on in a way that knocked out his abi
lity to lay down new conscious memories (link is external). Thus, if you came in
and saw HM, asked him a few questions, left for an hour and came back, he would
not recall you at all. However, researchers found they could teach HM procedure
s, such as drawing in a mirror or playing a game. He would deny he had any recol
lection of doing such activities, yet he was able to learn them as almost effect
ively as someone who had full conscious recall abilities, hence the clear separa
tion of procedural from declarative memory systems.
The main point to understand is that you navigate your world by integrating t
hese systems to act with purpose as a coordinated whole.
_
When it comes to improving learning and memory, motivation is way ahead of whate
ver is in second place. From my own experience and from observing hundreds of st
udents, it is clear to me that people will learn when they WANT to learn. Even i

n the face of bad textbooks, bad schools, bad teachers,

whatever, motivated stud
ents will learn. If people with few learning resources, like Booker T. Washingto
n or Abe Lincoln could do it in their day, our kids can certainly do it with all
the information available in the millions of books in public libraries and web
sites on the Internet.
One of my blog readers called my attention to a recent post on NannyPro.com (lin
k is external) web site, entitled 24 Blogs Filled with Ideas on How to Motivate Y
our Kids to Finish the School Year Strong. As author Michelle points out, motivat
ion of students in school commonly falls in the Spring sinkhole of Spring break
and end-of-year doldrums.
Advice to parents includes specific ways to set goals, tips for getting kids to
do homework, and ideas for pumping up motivation. Michelle s blog has links to oth
er useful sites. Those I checked that looked promising to me included one on 21 S
imple Ideas to Improve Student Motivation. Another helpful site is titled Reward E
ffort Before Test Day. Other site topics you might want to check out include:
Homework That Motivates
Lighting A Fire: Motivating Boys To Succeed
The Secret of Setting Successful Goals
Top Tips: Getting kids to do their homework
Michelle also lists some ideas for schools to do. Parents ought to take a look a
t these and make suggestions that could be appropriate for their local school.
Rideout, director of the Kaiser study on kids and media use, sees an upside for
parents in the new focus on multitasking while learning. The good thing about thi
s phenomenon is that it s a relatively discrete behavior that parents actually can
do something about, she says. It would be hard to enforce a total ban on media mu
ltitasking, but parents can draw a line when it comes to homework and studying tel
ling their kids, This is a time when you will concentrate on just one thing.
Parents shouldn t feel like ogres when they do so, she adds. It s important to rememb
er that while a lot of kids do media multitask while doing homework, a lot of th
em don t. One out of five kids in our study said they never engage in other media wh
ile doing homework, and another one in five said they do so only a little bit. Thi
s is not some universal norm that students and parents can t buck. This is not an
unreasonable thing to ask of your kid.
So here s the takeaway for parents of Generation M: Stop fretting about how much t
hey re on Facebook. Don t harass them about how much they play video games. The digi
tal native boosters are right that this is the social and emotional world in whi
ch young people live. Just make sure when they re doing schoolwork, the cellphones
are silent, the video screens are dark, and that every last window is closed bu
t one.
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