Study Arata!
You’re sitting at your desk with a test in front of you.
The question is there and you’re sure you know the answer.
You’ve studied that subject.
You know that answer is somewhere in your head.
But, unfortunately, you’re unable to retrieve that information.
You try to remember the answer in all possible ways, trying to dig deep inside your memory,
trying to remember what you studied.
But you just can’t.
Time is running out.
You leave the answer field blank.
You don’t get the score you could have gotten.
And that could make you fail your exam or cost you a job promotion.
Why do people’s minds go blank like this?
Why do we sometimes fail to remember the answer to a question, somebody’s name, the password
we created to log in on an app?
When this happens, we have a problem in the third and last process of formation of memories
(encoding / storage / retrieval).
We’re having problems in the process of retrieval.
Retrieving is the act of remembering information that is stored in the long-term memory.
In the last episodes of the Study Arata series, we’ve been talking in depth about how our
memory works.
First of all, we saw there are three kinds of memory: sensory memory/ short-term memory/
long-term memory.
Sensory memory registers everything your five senses are able to capture, but this information
stays in your mind for no more than a few seconds.
Short-term memory or working memory is capable of selecting some pieces from all that information.
Something between five and nine units of information.
Yet, long-term memory can remember the most important memories for days or even years
after you received that information.
It’s as if it were a funnel with a filter.
At the longest part of the funnel, all five senses capture everything that happens around
you.
Only a few things pass through the filter and to the middle of the funnel; this is your
short-term memory.
And only the most important information gets to your long-term memory at the end of the
funnel.
In order for all this to happen there are three processes by which memories are formed:
encoding, storage and retrieval.
Encoding is the act of getting a piece of information from your short-term memory to
your long-term memory.
To do that, you can use techniques like rote rehearsal, chunking, mnemonic devices, self-referencing
and spacing.
We’ve talked about these encoding techniques in episode 20 of the Study Arata series [source:
https://arata.se/study20].
Storage is your brain’s ability to retain that information until the time you need it.
Storage was the subject of our previous episode [source: https://arata.se/study21].
Retrieval is the act of remembering the information that was stored in your long-term memory at
the moment that you need that information.
At the time of a test.
At the time when you see someone you were introduced to at an event.
At the time when an app asks you for the password you created.
In today’s conversation we’re going to understand in detail how the process of retrieval
of memories works.
Your brain uses some cues to retrieve information from your long-term memory.
Whenever you try to remember something that’s in your memory, you’re activating the retrieval
process.
What defines whether you’re going to actually retrieve that memory or not is the use of
retrieval cues.
Mainly the cues you left during encoding.
In order to retrieve information that’s stored in your long-term memory, you need
to associate one of those retrieval cues with the cues that were present at the time you
encoded that memory.
That’s why the way you encode a memory is so important.
An example of a cue would be the context in which you encoded certain information.
Researchers conducted an experiment to see the impact that the learning context has when
a student needs to retrieve information.
In this experiment, the students of a diving course were split in two groups.
One of the groups received the information under water and the other group received the
information on shore.
Those who received the information under water got more right answers when they did the tests
in the water.
And the ones who received on the ground got more right answers when they did the tests
on shore.
Another example of retrieval cue is state-dependent memory.
If you’re feeling sad, you’re more likely to remember information that you learnt when
you were sad.
If you’re feeling anxious, you’ll remember more easily the information you learnt while
you were anxious.
Even if you were drunk, it’s easier for you to remember information you received when
you were drunk.
This rule is quite easy to understand.
When you encode information, your brain creates a memory associating some cues with that encoding
moment.
At the time of information retrieval, your brain looks for cues that can be associated
with the point at which you acquired that memory.
This is why the encoding process is so important.
If you encoded something using the chunking technique, you’ll need to remember the groups
at the moment of retrieval.
If you used a mnemonic cue, you’ll need to remember that mnemonic cue when retrieving.
If you used self-referencing, you’ll need to remember the story you made up.
Your memories are more often reconstructed than retrieved.
Our brain doesn’t work like a computer that retrieves memories exactly as they were saved.
First of all, not all memories we have stored in our memory are accessible.
Some of them stay in our subconsciousness and we’re unable to access them whenever
we want.
In addition to that, when you manage to access one of those memories and retrieve information
from your memory, this memory doesn’t look exactly the same way it looked when it was
first registered.
This difference between the fact itself and what we remember about the fact happens because
the person who registered the memory is not the same person who’s now trying to retrieve
that memory.
You have changed, the context has changed, your interpretation of some events has also
changed.
That’s why a lot of psychologists say that the process of memory retrieval should actually
be called reconstruction of memories.
Every time you retrieve a memory, you change slightly what you’re remembering.
These small changes depend on your state-dependent memory, on your humour, on the references
you acquired with time.
Everything that happened between the moment you encoded a memory and the moment you try
to retrieve that memory affects the way you retrieve information.
This happens even with memories of great emotional impact, such as the birth of a child or the
death of a family member.
Even if you think you remember exactly how those facts happened, even so you’re reconstructing
some details.
Our memory isn’t a film recorded in our mind.
We don’t reproduce memories exactly as they happened.
There is always some reconstruction.
There are three ways of retrieving information from your memory.
When you try to retrieve information that’s in your memory, your brain uses one of three
main methods: free recall, cued recall and recognition.
The first and most difficult method is free recall.
Free recall is very similar to the example we gave at the beginning of this conversation.
You’re there with a test in front of you and you try through all possible means to
remember the answer to an open question.
In free retrieval, it’s very common for the brain to only remember some pieces of
information.
It’s usually easier to remember what you learnt at the beginning or at the end.
The second method is cued recall.
For example, let’s say that a test asks you about the first planet in the solar system.
And the answer starts with the letter M written before a blank space for you to complete the
name of the planet.
The letter M gives you a clue and this clue lets you know that the answer is whether Mercury
or Mars.
Your brain’s work to retrieve information has become way easier.
The third method is recognition.
In this method, your brain only needs to recognise which is the right answer.
That’s why recognition is a comparison method.
For example, a multiple-choice test in which different answers are presented as alternatives
for you to select the right one.
Your task simply consists of recognising the right information among the presented alternatives.
Some specialists point to the existence of a fourth method called relearning.
But relearning isn’t exactly the retrieval of memories.
For example, imagine you learnt to play the piano as a child but afterwards you didn’t
play it again.
Decades later, you decide to play again.
But you’ve forgotten everything you knew and you have to relearn how to play the piano
again.
In theory, this relearning process should be slightly easier than learning to play the
piano for the first time.
So, we can focus on the main three methods of memory retrieval.
Free recall, cued recall and recognition.
These are the techniques you have to use to remember information whenever you need.
In order to be successful at retrieval, the secret is having used a good technique when
encoding that memory.
Retrieval is a key process when it comes to memory.
If you can’t remember something whenever you need to, then it’s worthless to understand
how human memory works.
To retrieve memories well, you need to follow the cues that were left during the encoding
process of those memories.
There are techniques to do all of this.
And that’s why I invite you to visit https://arata.se/intelligence now, so that we can work together in a detailed
training for you to have a perfect memory.