We Are What We Remember
Memory is an intrinsic part of our life experience. It is critical for learning, and without memories we would have no sense of self. Understanding why some memories stick better than others, as well …
Memory
The Spacing Effect: How to Improve Learning and Maximize Retention
We are not taught how to learn in school, we are taught how to pass tests. The spacing effect is a far more effective way to learn and retain information that works with our brain instead of against …
Richard Restak: Mozart’s Memorization of Miserere and Improving your Memory with Visual Chess
In 1956 George Miller, a Princeton University psychologist, set out an important principle that you’ve probably heard of in a paper titled “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.” Miller revived …
Memory and the Printing Press
You probably know that Gutenberg invented the printing press. You probably know it was pretty important. You may have heard some stuff about everyone being able to finally read the Bible without a …
Mozart’s Brain and the Fighter Pilot
To get smarter, we need to exercise our cognitive powers – in the same way that we strengthen our bodies by exercising our muscles. To do this, we need to put ourselves in rich and varied …
Remembering More of Everything: The Memory Palace
“When information goes ‘in one ear and out the other,’ it’s often because it doesn’t have anything to stick to.” — Joshua Foer *** That’s a quote from the book Moonwalking with …
The Many Ways our Memory Fails Us (Part 3)
(Purchase a copy of the entire 3-part series in one sexy PDF for $3.99) *** In the first two parts of our series on memory, we covered four major “sins” committed by our memories: …
The Many Ways Our Memory Fails Us (Part 2)
(Purchase a copy of the entire 3-part series in one sexy PDF for $3.99) *** In part one, we began a conversation about the trappings of the human memory, using Daniel Schacter’s excellent The …
The Many Ways Our Memory Fails Us (Part 1)
(Purchase a copy of the entire 3-part series in one sexy PDF for $3.99) *** Recently, we discussed some of the net advantages of our faulty, but incredibly useful, memory system. Thanks to …
Is Our Faulty Memory Really So Bad?
[This introduction is the first of a four-part series on memory. Also see Chatper One, Two, and Three on the challenges of memory.] The Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has some brilliant insights …
To Learn, Retrieve
Mike Ebersold is a neurosurgeon. In neurosurgery and indeed life there is an essential kind of learning that only comes from reflection on personal experience. In the book Make It Stick: The Science …
A Plunge and Squish View of the Mind
How can we bring our knowledge to bear on a problem? Does this resemble how we accumulate knowledge in the first place? A thoughtful passage by David Gelernter in Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software …
Real vs. Simulated Memories
Software memory is increasingly doing more and more for us. Yet it lacks one important element of human memory: emotion. This thought-provoking excerpt comes from Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software …
Remember Not to Trust Your Memory
Memories are the stories that we tell ourselves about the past. Sometimes they adjust and leave things out. In an interesting passage in Think: Why You Should Question Everything, Guy P. Harrison …
Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, a book by Daniel Levitin, explores “how humans have coped with information and organization from the beginning of …
Harold Macmillan: The Fragility of Memory
Harold Macmillan beautifully describes the fragility of human memory in the foreword to Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, an early 1980s commonplace book. Those of us who have reached extreme old age …