It was truly amazing. The young woman could easily have taken that act on the road and become famous. But instead, she worked as a restaurant waitress in and merely dazzled people with her talent. Fourteen invited guests were seated together at a long table to celebrate an anniversary. One by one the young woman passed among them taking beverage and dinner orders…in her head! It was if writing orders went against her beliefs. The guests watched and waited with the curiosity of a child at a magic show for her return. They could only gasp in disbelief as she correctly placed fourteen appetizers, entrees and beverages. How did she do it?
How is it possible for someone to stand before a studio audience of a late night talk show, ask their names and, one by one, recite them correctly? One of my fellow students at Michigan State University was known through the news media as the “ten year-old genius.” Imagine, a ten year old boy, too young to cross Grand River Avenue himself, taking Calculus and Analytic Geometry with me! There were two differences between us besides age: He never took any notes, and he understood what was going on!
The ten year-old genius is obviously an exception. Yet, all of us can recall a classmate with an extraordinary memory who never had to spend long hours drilling facts into his (her) head to get “straight A’s.” Too frequently, in our society learning is equated with memorizing, the latter is considered a valuable skill. We respect someone who can memorize facts more than one who knows where to look them up; we hold greater admiration for a musician who can play a piece “by heart” than one who sight-reads music.
Generally speaking, remembering things is considered good; forgetting is not. However, does this mean someone who forgets things is abnormal or stupid? Absolutely not! Although severe memory loss can be indicative of a brain disorder, most memory loss is quite normal, especially as we get older. How many times have you walked into a room for something and forgotten why? The ability to remember can be enhanced, but first it’s important to understand what memory is and how it works. Information is first experienced through your senses which scans, briefly retains and then encodes– that is, organizes– it into a format suitable for storage. This is called, “short-term memory”, and usually, occurs in your most-valued sensory system or representational system. For example, assuming you represent visually, while reading a story, information is coded to internal pictures of the event which are being described. Someone who primarily represents experience by how it feels, will store information as a feeling. Short-term memory lasts briefly and there is a limit to the number of “bits” of information that may be scanned and stored in this way. The results of some research suggest that most people can remember, for short periods, seven plus or minus two bits of information simultaneously.
Recall a time you were in a phone booth, called information for a number and hadn’t anything on which to record that number. Perhaps it was even in a different area code. How did you represent the information given you by the operator so you could dial it momentarily? Did you picture the numbers? Say them to yourself? Most importantly in terms of short-term memory, when you completed your call, could you still remember the phone number? Not likely; unless you did something inside.
Long term memory is the recoding of information from short-term memory in a way that lends itself more readily to retrieval. This conversion is accomplished through rehearsal. Repetition of events makes a memory more robust– more resistant to “decay.” While it is possible to store events for the short- term in more than one representational system, this is what frequently happens through rehearsal in long-term memory. A mnemonic device is an example. How did you first learn the alphabet? Do you picture the letters in your head while you sing that song? What about the colors of the rainbow? How many of you first picture– then say– that fictitious person’s name (Roy G. Biv) before reciting the colors? Medical students, law students and others do this in order to be able to recall monumental quantities of information. Essentially, to the extent that you can represent information in several sensory systems, and relate that information to something else familiar, you will enhance your memory. A friend’s phone number when dialed on a touch-tone phone, plays a familiar tune, which when combined with picturing the numbers, creates an unforgettable experience…unless he changes his number!