Reading vs Recall: Training Your Synapses To Remember

Ever envied people with photographic memories?I’ve always longed for the ability to flip through a mind-album of experience, examining each Polaroid snapshot for details and information.

When I was younger, I came close to that having that level of recall. I could read a textbook chapter, and while I might not remember a specific detail, I could usually tell you what page and paragraph the detail could be found on. The mental photos were out of focus and sometimes spotty, but it was enough to give me a serious edge in school.

That skill weakened over the years (actually while I was still in high school) and it was one of the losses that most frustrated me. I *liked* having that edge, dangnabbit!

But a recent article by Mark Shead (of Productivity501) gave me hope I might yet recover that skill, and I suspect that anyone might use a method like this to develop a similar level of recall.

____________________________________

Productivity501: How To Memorize Verbatim Text touches on brain plasticity, electrical pathways in the brain, and most importantly, the difference in how the brain processes different tasks — in this case, the difference between *reading* a bit of text, and *recalling* a bit of text. Different neural pathways, and even different parts of the brain, are involved in the two tasks.

So the key to memorization, reasons Shead, isn’t reading in reading an item over and over, but to actually practice recalling it. This should strengthen the neural pathways involved in recalling the info, which will make it easier to fire up those same pathways later, when you need the information. He’s developed a very useful method for learning to recall the information, starting with familiarizing ourselves with the text in a variety of ways… for example, reading it aloud, copying it by hand, creating an outline, or listening to someone else read it.

Next, he suggests we use the first letter of each word as a trigger to start recalling the the text.

Take the Preamble to the US Constitution as an example:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This becomes:

“W t p o t U S, i o t f a m p u, e j, i d t, p f t c d, p t g w, a s t b of l t o a o p, d o a e t C f t U S o A.”\

He’s even developed a nifty javascript tool to strip out the extra letters, available at the end of his article. Personally, I found it more helpful to reduce the text myself, making that part of the process of familiarization.

____________________________________

Once you have the altered text ready, look at it, and try to reconstruct and recite the Preamble. You may not get far, and that’s ok. Mark Shead suggests backing up a few letters and trying to figure it out.

I found I needed to consult the original text very quickly, and took a slightly different approach; on the phrases I was struggling with, I filled in a few more letters, so that the text became something like this:

“W t p o t U S, i o t f a m p u, est just, ins dom tranq, prov f t com def, prom t gen welf, a sec t bles of lib t o a o post, d orda a est t C f t U S o A.”

As I mastered the various words and phrases, I reduced them again to the single letters.

Then I reduced the whole thing to the first letters of phrases, like this:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

“W… , i…, e… , i… , p… , p… , a… , d…”

And.. tada!

____________________________________

So Little Miss Impaired Memory (who never did memorize the Constitution, even in school) does indeed seem to be mastering at least the Pre-Amble.

This certainly isn’t the only recall/memorization method out there, but it clicks for me (mnemonics and memory “chunking” techniques never did make sense with the way my thoughts flow ).

Since the Productivity501 method is based in strengthening neural pathways, it seems well suited to my desire to improve general memory and brain function. Though there isn’t any strong science supporting it (yet) it just seems like it would be a good addition to any brain-tweaking program.

So I’ll add it to my little experiment… anyone have a favorite bit of poetry or prose to suggest I memorize next week as part of my project?____________________________________

MindTWEAK: “Memory is not wisdom; idiots can by rote repeat volumes. Yet what is wisdom without memory?” -Martin Tupper

____________________________________