By Yana Weinstein

This post continues a series of posts on the value of memory. I wrote a few months ago about how memory is used in everything we do, and we recently published a post-humus guest blog by Ralph A. Raimi in defense of rote memory. Today I continue this theme by discussing an article from the 1990s (1) that argues for the importance of both memorization (i.e., rote learning) and understanding. I came across this article while putting the finishing touches on the book Megan and I are writing, illustrated by Oliver Caviglioli and to be published by David Fulton (Routledge). Look out for it this summer!

Memory Improvement helps you double and triple your memory comprehension with an ancient memory method that he has already taught to thousands. This book shows you how to give presentations and speeches without notes, remember names and faces years later, memorize chapters of books word for word, enhance short-term and long-term memory. Jun 06, 2020 Memory Improvement helps you double and triple your memory comprehension with an ancient memory method that he has already taught to thousands. This book shows you how to give presentations and speeches without notes, remember names and faces years later, memorize chapters of books word for word, enhance short-term and long-term memory.

The article I found, titled 'The Intention to Both Memorise and Understand: Another Approach to Learning?', first describes an earlier literature that drew a distinction between two approaches to learning. According to this older literature (2), students approach learning in one of two ways: either in a kind of utilitarian, surface manner, wanting only to memorize as much as possible, in order to pass exams; or in a deeper, more meaningful manner, wanting to understand the material and relate it to their personal lives. A quotation from the explanation of this 'deep' learning approach really resonated with me:

Purrfect Memory 1 03 – Memorization And Study Tools

Using a deep approach a student has the intention to understand. Information may be remembered, but this is viewed as an almost unintentional by-product. (p. 343)

Reading this, I had a bit of an 'aha' moment. It made me realize what teachers are talking about when they say they want their students to learn through understanding, rather than memory. When I hear that, I am often surprised because I hear it as a denial of the importance of memory as a process, whereas I don't believe there is any other way to demonstrate learning other than by encoding and retrieving from memory! But it's not that people don't believe memory is important or necessary - it's more that they believe understanding will naturally lead to memories being formed, without any effort to specifically commit things to memory, and practice retrieving them. As I was writing this post, I shared the quotation with Dr. Jen Coane, who also studies memory. Her response was 'But really remembering (and knowing) is hard work'. This leads us to the main thrust of the paper: the author proposes a hybrid approach, where development of understanding takes place alongside or in conjunction with intentional encoding and strengthening of information in memory.

Evidence for this approach is cited mainly from education systems in Asian education systems, including Hong Kong, China, and Japan. The author makes the very important point that these systems are often mis-characterized in the West as being heavily based on passive, rote memorization. But based on studies that included careful observation of the teaching techniques used in these education systems, the author concludes that they actually rely on a hybrid understanding/memorization approach. This approach can go in two directions. One version is to develop understanding, followed by memorization. In this approach, students develop a deep understanding of the material (through what we might call elaboration), and then students practice that information so that they can remember it accurately (through what we might call retrieval practice). However, it is important to note that we encourage students to use retrieval practice in a meaningful, elaborative way rather than 'just' for memorization.

An alternative version of the hybrid approach is that students memorize some information first, and then over time come to understand it more and more deeply. Although this example is not used in the paper, I immediately thought of multiplication tables. There is a big debate in teaching regarding whether children should or should not memorize their multiplication tables. Briefly, those who argue against it hold that this is meaningless memorization and does not lead to understanding (3), whereas those who argue for it maintain that it decreases working memory load so students can later concentrate on more advanced math without having to perform additional mental operations to multiply numbers (4). For example, if you want to teach a child how to 'solve for x' and the equation you give them is 12x = 144, they could concentrate on solving the equation (i.e., rearranging it to x = 144 / 12 ), rather than laboriously doing the arithmetic. By the time children are able to solve these equations, they understand more about how numbers work. In this case, it can be said that memorization came before understanding.

I liked this article because it comes from an adjacent field to mine (Education, not Cognitive Psychology), but taps into some of the same ideas that we attempt to study. In a similar vein, I recently co-authored a piece comparing the teaching strategies used by Applied Behavior Analysts with those recommended by cognitive psychologists(5); we found many of the same conclusions, but different terminology leading to a complete lack of cross-talk between the fields. It is sometimes difficult and uncomfortable to read literature from such fields, because terms that we so carefully define in one field are used somewhat different in another. However, I think it is a worthwhile exercise, and I would encourage other researchers and teachers reading this post to do so.

You can also browse the best books I have seen on memory techniques and relatedareas here.

In this post I’ll teach you how to have perfect recall of lists of items. Lengthis not much of an issue, it can be your shopping list if 10 items or it can be alist with 50, 100 or even 1000. And in a forthcoming post I’ll show you how youhow to apply this technique to learning new languages. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

The technique we’ll be learning is called the memory palace, and is alsoknown as the method of loci (for the latin word locus meaning place) andalso the mind palace. A useful tool in everyone’s toolbox.

The memory palace

The memory palace technique began in the 5th century B.C., when Simonides ofCeos, poet, was attending an unfortunate banquet in Thessalia. While he was awayto talk with a courier who asked for him outside, the hall’s ceiling crumbled,killing everyone. There was no way to recognise the corpses… Until Simonidesrealised that it was no problem to recall who was where, without having done anyeffort.

Think about it: It is not hard to remember who sits beside the host, whereyour friends sit, who is beside them and so on. This dawned upon Simonides, andhe is credited as the “inventor” of the memory palace technique. Widely spreadthrough antiquity, there was not a lot of written accounts on it: it appears inthe anonymous Rhetorica adHerrenium and Cicero’sDe Oratore. It is not that strangethat there were no written accounts, it is like writing a book about how to putyour trousers on. Everybody knows how to do it.

The memory palace is well suited to how our brains have evolved. Back in ournomadic days we needed to know how to get somewhere (the lake, the plain) andremember what was there (fresh water, hunting). By taking advantage of this factwe can build an array of impressive memorisation techniques, to ordered orunordered lists.

Remembering lists may sound lame, who wants to memorise a list…? But lists arejust an ordered array of knowledge. What you study for a history exam is a listof ordered dates accompanied by facts and causes (sub-lists). When you learn anew recipe, it is a list. A telephone number is a list of numbers. A poem is alist of phrases.

Your first memory palace: building and filling

Let’s start by creating our first memory palace. It does not need to be apalace, in fact, it should not. Just think of your home, and as a sample I’llassume is really small: from the door you get to a small hall, connected to aliving room which leads to a kitchen, a WC and a bedroom with a balcony. This isa sample, to memorise correctly you have to visualise your home or any otherplace you may know well. You can of course use this mental image of animaginary house, but memorising may be harder, be warned.

Now consider the following shopping list: lettuce, bacon, onion rings, SD cardand oranges. We want to memorise it. I picked a short list to make the postshorter and make it fit in our small imaginary home: try your hand with a longerlist if you don’t believe we can do it with longer lists.

To remember the list, we have to place each item somewhere in our mind palace.This of course can mean one item per room or several items per room, each one ina special spot in the room. The simplest method is to put each item in its ownroom, when you are confident enough, create additional trapping space in eachroom. Thus, our small 5-room house could be easily a 5, 10 or 15 places memorypalace.

To place an item, we have to visualise it in the room, and to make sure weremember it it has to be an extremely odd image. It has to leave a clearimpression and to do so, it has to be surprising, bizarre or sexual, among otheroptions. If the image is dull, remembering it is close to impossible.

Begin with the list. When we enter the front door, we are greeted by Kermit thefrog, only that this special Kermit is made of lettuce, like a talking lettuce.Can you see it? Feel the freshness of Lettucit’s leaves? In the living room astampede of pigs followed by Kevin Bacon with a fork should be bizarre and clearenough! In the kitchen, Scarlett Johansson plays hoola-hop with an onion ring.You enter the bedroom, and to your surprise, the bed is a gigantic SD card: youcan hide the bed by pressing it in to be read. Finally, you open the balcony tofind that the sun is now a big, luminous orange. It starts to drip juice overthe desert in front of your window!

You should put all these images in a place you know like the palm of your hand:your home, the house you grew up, your office. This is important.

You may not believe it works at all, but you will be surprised. I wrote thefirst part of this post in the afternoon, and now more than 3 hours later Istill can see clearly all the images. Of course this is a short list… But itwould not matter: you could remember a list 5 times as long as easily as withthis one.

Finding an array of memory palaces

To remember a lot of things you need to have a lot of places to put all thesememories. You will need to find your own array of memory places. The first timeI considered this problem, I thought about creating imaginary palaces, linkedsomehow by corridors. The problem? Artificial palaces get blurry fairly quickly,and you tend to forget them. It is far, far better to use real places, or atleast places you can revisit in real life, like pictures from a book, levels ina computer game or buildings you can visit.

Then I started to think about houses and places I could use… And I found thatthere are plenty. I still remember school mates houses from 16 years ago, hotelsI’ve been, buildings I have visited. I am sure you will find a huge array ofplaces you can use. To begin with the technique, use known places, likeyour house or office and as you get more confident with the technique, startusing older places.

You can read more about this in Building Your Memory PalaceCollection.

Final words

You have to get the knack of the method. Get some degree of experience inconverting everyday objects (like lettuce) into long-lasting impressions (likeKermit the lettuce-head). This only comes with practice, like walking aroundyour images of memory palaces. Practice, practice, practice!

By the way, can you recall the shopping list above?

In case you want to read more:

• Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (Joshua Foer)
• How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week: 52 Proven Ways to Enhance Your Memory Skills (Dominic O’Brian)
• Quantum Memory Power: Learn to Improve Your Memory with the World Memory Champion! (Dominic O’Brian)
• Maximize Your Memory (Jonathan Hancock)

Purrfect Memory 1 03 – Memorization And Study Toolkit

I have written another related post called Remembering Facts: Using MentalAssociativeChains,and also expanded the method to find memory palaces in Building Your MemoryPalaceCollection.You can also read a translation of this post in Spanish here: Aprende arecordarlo todo: el método del palacio de lamemoria.