Memory Tip #3: What’s in a name.

By contributing author Paul Li, a neuroscience graduate student at Columbia.

If you are like me and have trouble remembering the names of people you first meet, then this mnemonic is dedicated to you. A helpful way to remember names is to say that person’s name after meeting him, and from then on associating his name with something interesting (i.e. his appearance, a rhyme, or an image). By making associations with his name, it strengthens effective encoding in the brain. Inventing the association helps your brain encode the information at least twice, by hearing it from the person and by verbalizing it yourself. It also helps to use the name throughout the conversation, since rehearsal and attention are the key components for memory retention (just don’t overdo it).

Memory Tip #2: Chunking memories and monsters

By contributing author Paul Li, a neuroscience graduate student at Columbia.

Memory strategies – or mnemonics – can be used to help you put things into memory so that they’re easier to remember later. Those who forget their keys or have trouble remembering peoples’ names could benefit from these tips. We previously described a way to use the linking technique to make it easier to remember a grocery list. What if the elements don’t fit together as a story?

“Chunking” is a common technique used to remember several items. Specifically, chunking is used to break down a long series of units into easy-to-remember groupings. Phone numbers or social security numbers, which are usually broken up into 3 to 4 digits by hyphens, make use of chunking.

Using this strategy in Monster Garden, one of the Lumosity spatial memory games, you can group monsters together into a single memory element. For example, if 5 monsters display but 3 of them form a triangle, try to remember the triangle of monsters plus the other 2 individual monsters. This will require 3 working memory slots as opposed to 5. See if you can improve your Monster Garden score with this approach. Chunking is also linked to advanced skills, such as expertise in chess, and ultimately captures the idea that we can remember more things if we chunk them together into groups.

Brain Building with Exercise

We’re big proponents of physical exercise as a way to build the strength of both body and brain. The NY Times published an excellent review of how aerobic exercise can benefit brain health and performance. Some interesting points covered include:

• running may lead to neurogenesis – the birth of new brain cells
• exercise can reduce psychiatric illnesses, such as depression
• rodents that exercise perform better on spatial memory tests

"Lobes of Steel" is worth a read, but only available to those with NYTimes access.

IQ and working memory

Working memory capacity is closely related to general intelligence. This has been observed in several different studies that evaluate the correlation between measures of intelligence and working memory.

A study published last week affirmed this finding, and also furthered our understanding of the factors underlying working memory capacity. Awh, Barton, and Vogel’s research showed that working memory capacity (on average, about 4 items) is not affected by the complexity of the items remembered. More complex stimuli will be remembered with less detail, but the amount of information remembered is about the same.

Working Memory: What it is and how it works

Elizabeth Buchen, neuroscientist, science writer and advisor to Lumos Labs, explains why working memory is such a critical cognitive process, and how it works:

In an earlier post, I described the cognitive process of “attention,” which allows the brain to manage the surfeit of the world’s information by selecting only the most relevant information at any one time. What happens to this information once it successfully passes through the attentional funnel?

If cognitive processing ended at attention, you would conduct your life strictly from information received at the present instant, without any internal state of the mind or abstract thought. The words of this sentence would dart ephemerally in and out of your brain, becoming wholly devoid of perceptible meaning…

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Memory Tip #1: How to remember a list

Remembering a list of items or things-to-do is a chore that comes up often in everyday life. A great approach to remember a list is called the link technique. Here’s how it works:

Let’s memorize this grocery list using the link technique:
milk
paper towels
french baguette
ketchup
dishwashing soap

Create a vivid mental image of the first item on the list; in this case you could picture a glass of cold milk on your kitchen table. Next create an association between the first item and the second item on the list. Imagine using paper towels to soak up spilt milk. Continue down the list linking each item with the next. The paper
towels might wrap a warm french baguette, which then requires ketchup to make a good sandwich. Lastly, the ketchup could be cleaned off of a dinner plate with dishwashing soap.

This is a relatively straightforward technique, which becomes more powerful as you elaborate further on each link and image. The key is to create vivid images with details you can relate to. Instead of just thinking of an abstract glass of milk, you should create a specific image – a tall glass three quarters full of cold milk sitting in the corner of your tiled kitchen counter.

An excellent resource for memory related tips and techniques is Cynthia Green’s Total Memory Workout: 8 Easy Steps to Maximum Memory Fitness.

Upcoming news story on memory enhancement

If you do something to improve or maintain your memory, NBC news 4 health team wants to know about it. You can submit to them here.

Improving memory

Did you know that our brains have a practically limitless capacity to store information on a long-term basis?

Despite this amazing ability we have a hard time recalling a 12-item grocery list. Working memory, which is functionally and biologically distinct from long-term memory, is the brain’s ability to keep track of and manipulate information over a short period of time. Working memory is typically limited to about 4 to 10 items and is important in everything
from remembering a grocery list to problem solving and reading comprehension. This type of memory is considered among the most important cognitive abilities that underlie general intelligence. Moreover, new research suggests that we can improve general intelligence by training and improving working memory.

In a study presented at the Bay Area Neuroscience Gathering in Jan of 2007, scientists found that training with Lumosity significantly improved working memory in a group of adults. The subjects in this experiment were evaluated with validated neuropsychological tests before and after training on the Lumosity program. After training for about 30 days, the subjects’ working memory improved by 15%. You can download a pdf presentation of the experimental details.