A lot of people who are coming into the course tend to think that the mind or the human brain
is like a video camera, so you can rewind and replay faithfully the information you've
accumulated, or the information is somehow limited, so people can only store a certain
amount of information before they lose it to something else. Is that how the mind works,
or what's a better conception of the way that memory works?
Now that's a very good question. I once taught a course where the structure was in
all the critical ways that we differ from anything like a tape recorder, and it really
is just a whole array of things. But people's general notion that they work something like
a tape recorder or any kind of recorder leads them to do very non-adaptive things. They
take notes like a court stenographer in a course, trying to remember something, and
a court stenographer can get every word down all day long and not be able to tell you what
the whole trial was about.
Then also some notion that when I retrieve information, I leave it the way it was before,
which should be true of a compact disc or something, but whereas in the case of human
memory retrieval, it's a very dynamic process. It alters the state of the system. It makes
what you retrieve more retrievable in the future, things in competition with it less
recallable. So both on that kind of what memory researchers call the encoding side, and on
a retrieval side, we differ in just absolutely critical ways.
One of the mysteries, one of the continuing interests in just how people learn and how
they should learn, is why wouldn't we—across our schooling years and stuff, just from the
trials and errors of everyday living and learning—why wouldn't we learn how the thing works? That
really is a mystery. About one component of that, I think, is we may not understand the
engineering details of the computer memory, memory in the computer, or how a disc of some
kind works, but we sort of understand the logic of it. I think or we think, well, we
probably work something like that. We don't work like that at all. It's a very different kind of architecture.
So given what we do know now—you've had a long career of studying how people remember
and retrieve information—what's the best way to try to maximize that? How do you—again,
some of the people who are watching this course want to know how to study better, how to retain
information better. It probably isn't very intuitive, given what I know about your work.
What they think they know about memory and how to remember information probably isn't accurate. What is?
Yes. It makes a lot of difference what activities you engage in, trying to learn. There are
a couple of key things to remember that then lead to important—just things to have in
your repertoire when you're trying to learn. One is we've already sort of mentioned that
we don't work like a tape recorder. A key feature of storage in our memories is that
that's a process of linking up any new information with what we already know. In fact, rather
than thinking of your memory as some sort of box or tape that the more that you have
in it or on it, the less room you have, actually memory storage creates capacity for additional
storage. The more knowledge you have in some domain, the more ways there are to link things
up and hook things up. It's almost like a scaffolding structure, that the more it's
built up, the more places there are to put things.
So always, you want to make an effort to link this to your everyday experience, to what
you already know; think of an example, try to extend it—all of those things really
help at the stage of trying to encode the information. Almost any way you can be active really helps.
A very broad principle is to test yourself. Practice trying to generate the information.
Do you know it? Get together with your friend. Ask each other questions. When you just look
at information in a text or on a screen, your judgment of whether you understand it, know
it, could answer questions about it is very flawed; whereas if you test yourself with
a friend or by yourself, you get good information about whether you know it or not. Another
benefit, of course, I mentioned earlier—is the very fact that retrieving it will make it more recallable in the future.
Then there's a third important thing. It potentiates the effectiveness of your subsequent
study. If you've tested yourself—and I don't mean testing in such a formal way.
You can just stop and think: could you summarize this? You're together with a friend; try to
come up with a question and a structure you might ask. Those things will then help you
study better. They'll potentiate the effectiveness of study the next time you study. That's
absolutely important. The key is to test yourself.
I sometimes tell undergraduate students that, just an overall principle, is that they should
input less and output more. Spend less time highlighting, copying, rereading—spending
more time trying to come up with another example, trying to answer a possible question, trying
to reproduce the outline of this chapter, all these things, try to sort of generate
this material, rather than trying to have it write itself on you. The whole effort to
just copy it down, with the whole notion that it will sort of write itself on you if you're
diligent enough, is just so wrong and so wasteful, that to spend that much time—often, students
have come who are disappointed in their exam. I ask them to bring their textbook, their
notes, tell me how they're trying to study. There's evidence of a massive effort, a
huge amount of time spent on this. Sometimes things are highlighted to the point the only
thing that stands out is what's not highlighted. That activity is not a productive activity, so you really have to learn.
Then there's other principles like the very well-known spacing effect. If you're going
to study something twice, don't just read this chapter again right away to try and see
what you missed. Go on to other material, other courses, and then come back to it. That's
called the spacing effect, and spacing your study opportunities can lead sometimes to doubling of your later recall.
How you manage yourself really matters, and there's a whole series of things to learn
about just managing your own study activities.
Then some sense of how easy it is to get misled—some of the poorest things that you can do from
a learning standpoint, create an illusion that you're learning rapidly. Massing study
sessions that are practiced makes people improve rapidly and then forget very rapidly.
Becoming sophisticated as a learner has a lot of components. You have to monitor your
state of learning well; you have to control it, a whole series of knowledge about sort
of activities, use technologies well, rather than poorly. It matters.