MORE MEMORY EMPOWERMENT

By understanding memory as a dynamic process intimately related to thinking, there are actually lots of things you can do to develop a richer and more robust memory. In the last article I wrote about two things— encoding your data to make it more memorable and organizing so that you can easily retrieve what you want to remember.

Semanticize the Data — Make it Meaningful A great way to frustrate yourself is to take material that is random, meaningless, and irrelevant and try to memorize a list like that! This is what memory researchers often do; they ask college students to memorize meaningless lists of things. Yet what do people do in such experiments? They try to find, create, or impose meaning on what’s essentially meaningless. They intuitively know that memory is enhanced by making something meaningful. The more meaning you give to something, the easier to remember.