Chapter 6

Maximizing memory effectiveness

Smart Thinking — Art Markman, PhD

• Getting information into memory requires deep and active processing.
• To change your thinking, change what you are thinking about.
• Use different modes of description to help you change your thinking.

The brain is a very energy-hungry organ that makes up only about 2 percent of your body weight, but uses about 20 percent of the energy that your body consumes each day. While your brain consumes a lot of energy, Smart Thinking certainly doesn’t feel like the sort of intense physical labor. In fact, when you’re trying to solve a hard problem, a sense of extreme physical effort is most likely a signal that you’re doing something wrong.

The memories you have involve a conscious recollection of a past experience. These conscious recollections are called explicit memories. There are two important observations we can make about explicit memory. The first is that recalling information from memory is effortless. If you are exposed to a piece of information, then you automatically bring to mind memories related to that information. The second observation is that the information you call to mind is always related to what you are currently thinking about.

A lot of times when people discuss memory for life events, they are interested in the accuracy of those memories. The information you recall about for example a birthday party from when you are a child could be an accurate memory of your experience. But it also might be a mixture of a few different parties you attended as a child. It might even have elements of things that you saw in home movies or videos of the party when you were older.

For the purposes of Smart Thinking, though, it doesn’t really matter how accurately your memories reflect a particular event of your life. Your memory did not evolve to support an accurate playback of your life. Instead, it evolved to give you the information you are likely to need when you need it.

How memory works

The basic principle that determines what information is going to be retrieved from memory is straightforward: Information is retrieved from memory when the current situation matches the situation in which that information was learned.

The key word here is situation, which psychologists also call context. When you learn new information it becomes associated with the context in which you are learning—sights, sounds, tastes, smells, feelings, and even thoughts that were present at the time. Since your memory is built on the principle that knowledge is likely to be important when the same situation occurs again, your memory wants to give you the information that is most likely to be helpful for you.

To explore the influence of this principle further, let’s delve a bit into your own past. If you are like most people, you have not always lived in the same house or apartment. You probably have some memories of a childhood home. Just providing a simple cue like “childhood home” is likely to be enough to help you call to mind some memories. When you have some time, let your mind wander through your memories of that childhood home a bit. If you form a mental image of your bedroom, does that bring to mind even more information? The reason you remember even more once you start forming these mental images is that you are re-creating a little more of the mental context from when you used to live in that home, which allows you to remember additional aspects of that home. If you were able to get even more of the context, then you might remember things you had not thought of in years. Sitting down with your parents or siblings, looking at an old photo album, or even revisiting your childhood home would add sights, sounds, and even smells that may have been part of the original context of some of your early memories and thus might help you remember things from your past.

When you lose something, your ability to recall can be enhanced by mentally retracing your steps. I used to misplace my car keys in the house frequently.

This core principle of memory makes it clear that using your knowledge effectively requires getting High-Quality Knowledge into your memory and then creating a context that is similar to the one in which the memories for that knowledge were created. To use your memory effectively, then, you have to influence both the way you get knowledge into memory as well as the strategies you use to help you get information out of memory.

Getting knowledge in

The discussion of the Role of 3 in Chapter 3 – Promoting quality learning by knowing your limits and the influence of self-explanation in Chapter 4 – Understanding how things work were both aimed at improving the quality of your knowledge. What these two suggestions have in common is that they require that you be an active learner. Making sure you focus on the key points of an event after it is over involves doing some work to control what you are most likely to remember and putting in effort to connect the important information to your existing knowledge. Self-explanation is also clearly an active process. It requires that you generate explanations as you go along to identify the gaps in your causal knowledge

What this ought to make clear is that there is no magic trick for acquiring High-Quality Knowledge.

Deep thinking

Getting High-Quality Information into your memory requires lots of hard work. You have to think about things deeply to get them into memory successfully. What does it mean to think deeply? Take a moment and try to answer that question for yourself. The problem is that if you simply read what is written here, you may not really store all of the information in memory.

Desirable difficulties

It turns out, though, if the lectures are too clear, and the students in the class don’t need to really think hard to follow the lectures, then they may not actually learn as much of the material as they would if they were challenged to teach themselves more of the material during class. These challenges create what calls desirable difficulties. That is, some hard work during learning may be frustrating, but it leads to better learning in the long run than a situation in which you do not have to work hard.

There is a lot of good evidence that supports the importance of desirable difficulties in learning. The more you think for yourself in a learning situation, the better your memory for that information. In experimental research, this improvement is called the generation effect because you are generating the information for yourself rather than just having that information presented to you by someone else. When you listen to a really fluent lecture, you do not have to do much work to connect the dots in what you are being told and so you may end up learning a lot less about the topic than if you had to work harder during learning.

Active learning

The generation effect works for a few reasons. First, generating information on your own ensures that you have actually understood the information that you are thinking about. That is the effect of self-explanations discussed in Chapter 4 – Understanding how things work . The value of self-explanation is that it helps identify the gaps you have in your understanding of the way things work. By generating an explanation, you help guarantee that your knowledge has no gaps.

Second, generating information helps solidify the connections across pieces of information. Think of your knowledge as a pile of peanuts. If all of the pieces of your knowledge are independent, then it is like having a bunch of salted peanuts in a bowl. Picking up any one of them will not affect your chances of picking up another. Even if you try to pick up a bunch in your hand, there is always a chance a few will slip through your fingers. But if you pour caramel over the peanuts and let it harden, then you get peanut brittle. Now, picking up one peanut allows you to pick up all of the other ones stuck to it. Generating information provides the connections among ideas that allow them to be drawn out together.

Third, generating information for yourself reinforces the relationship between the information you are learning and the internal state of your memory. You encounter new information in a variety of situations. You might be reading or attending a lecture. Perhaps you tuned into a documentary on TV. If you are passive while learning, then most of the context that will be associated with the new knowledge involves the situation in which you are learning. If you watch a lecture passively, then the new knowledge you are gaining is most strongly associated with aspects of the scenario at that moment. The voice of the lecturer, the sounds and smells of the room, and even the temperature all become associated with what you are learning. When you need that information later, though, you probably will not be in the same setting.

When you learn actively and work to repeat key information and produce explanations for yourself, you create a rich mental context in which you are learning. This internal context consists of the thoughts you are having that relate to the material and the goals you have for learning about it. Even if you are in a very different location when you need the information, there may be many aspects of your internal context that are present when you need the information again. So processing information deeply helps you make the information more strongly associated with your internal mental context rather than with transient aspects of the outer world.

For all of these reasons, it is important to process information deeply when you are trying to learn it. This deep thought will create elaborate memory representations that can be used in future situations. The more elaborately you learn, and the more connections you make among components of your knowledge, the easier it will be to find situations later that cue that knowledge to be retrieved from memory.

🚨 LEARNING IS A MARATHON NOT A SPRINT

From the elite runners who plan to finish a 26.2-mile race in a little more than two hours to the recreational runners who may take four or five hours to complete the run, participants in a marathon all have one thing in common: Each of them has trained extensively for this difficult achievement. Solid marathon preparation requires months of training, and most runners will train at least four or five days a week. Nobody would seriously consider preparing for a marathon by trying to run a huge number of miles in the week before the event. Often, however, we do not give the same level of preparation for acquiring High-Quality Knowledge. It is common for students in high school and college to cram, reading the material and answering all of the review questions the night before the exam. The results of this method are no more successful than trying to prepare for a marathon in a week.

It is hard to pack an entire semester’s worth of studying into one night. But even if you had enough time, it is still less effective to jam all of your preparation into one last-minute study session than to spread it out over a longer period. When you study the material in one sitting, you end up associating all of that material with one context. The sights and sounds and smells and emotions that you are experiencing during that study session all become part of your memory for that knowledge. Unless you are in that same situation again, it will be difficult to retrieve what you have learned.

If you spread your studying out over a longer period of time, the knowledge becomes associated with many different contexts. When you learn material over several days or weeks, there will be many sights and sounds and smells and emotions across the many different times that you encounter the information you are learning. Even if you spend a lot of time learning new material while sitting at your desk or in a particular study carrel at the library, there is still a lot that will vary. You’ll be wearing different clothes. You may be hungry one time and full at another. Your mood may be different as well. As a result, there are many different kinds of contexts that may help you remember that information again in the future.

Studying in a variety of settings also helps reinforce the connection between the material and your internal context. No matter what the physical environment in which you are studying, however, chances are that your internal context—your focus on what you are studying—will remain constant. So the more often you study the material, the better the chance that just one bit of the material becomes a trigger to remember the rest of it. So treating study like a marathon helps insulate your knowledge from extraneous factors like the physical environment in which you were studying. Ultimately, High-Quality Knowledge is more than a set of facts. You will do a better job of building connections among the components of your knowledge when you study over time.

Change what you are thinking about

A widely accepted idea is that having amazing and revolutionary thoughts requires new modes of thinking. The popular phrase “thinking outside the box” also focuses on the idea that truly creative thinking must somehow go outside the prescribed lines. How can you really think in a different manner? I mentioned earlier that successful thinking doesn’t feel at all like physical exertion. Smart Thinking is not a strain. But what happens when you get stuck? At an impasse, you do feel frustrated. At that point, perhaps the mental heavy lifting begins.

As it turns out, the pathway out of every impasse starts with a white bear. To see what I mean, for the next 30 seconds, whatever you do, don’t think about white bears. Don’t do it. Resist it. How did you do? If you actively tried to prevent yourself from thinking about white bears, then you probably spent all 30 seconds thinking about nothing but white bears. Memory retrieval is automatic. You can’t stop yourself from pulling information out of memory. It just happens. The only way to avoid thinking about white bears for 30 seconds is to will yourself to start thinking about something else.

When you are stuck on a problem that you are trying to solve, you need to find a way to retrieve new knowledge from memory that might be relevant to that problem. The only way to get something new out of memory is to change the content of what you are thinking about at that moment. You need to change what you are using as a cue. At its core, Smart Thinking does not require you to think differently but to think about different things.

Instantly Smarter

When Retrieval Feels Hard

A key premise in this chapter is that memory retrieval is effortless. But every rule has an exception.

At this point, your facility in retrieving one name interferes with others that you might know about. In Chapter 2, we talked about memory as if it were a bunch of five-year-olds hoping to be picked for a prize and that each successful memory is retrieved both because it jumps higher than the others and because it pushes down the others effectively.

In this situation, it is often useful to take some time away from the problem. Experts refer to this as an incubation period. Early research on problem solving suggested that this break might have allowed a mysterious subconscious process to find a solution for you. Implicit in this way of thinking about problem solving is the idea that your unconscious mind does its own Smart Thinking and somehow gets back to you with the right answer when it has solved your problem.

For this break to be effective, it is important that you really avoid thinking about the problem in ways that would continue to keep the memories you retrieved active and actively pushing back competing memories. There are lots of ways to take this kind of break. One way is to work on something else for a while, so that you engage your mental resources in another task. Another possibility is to get away from working altogether and to exercise, go for a walk, or take a shower. These more relaxing breaks can aid Smart Thinking in two ways. First, because these tip-of-the-tongue states are stressful, your relaxing aids memory. Second, getting yourself away from the work environment is often a better way of keeping yourself from thinking about the unsolved problem than staying at work.

A language for smart thinking

To change what you are thinking about, you need to change the description of the problem. There are many modes of description. Clearly, we often use words to describe problems. However, we can also draw pictures and form mental images. We can even imagine sounds. All of these modes of thinking can influence the way we think about a problem.

How do images differ from language? Quite a bit of research shows that some things are easy to describe using words and sentences, but others seem best described in pictures. It is particularly easy to describe objects and the properties of those objects with language. We have a rich vocabulary of nouns and adjectives that allows us to talk about what things look like.

Other information is harder to state effectively with language. It is often difficult to describe specific spatial relationships. You do have measurement systems for describing exact spatial relationships (like the measurements for angles and distance), but you do not usually use them in normal discussions. And even if you did use an exact measurement, the person you are talking to would not be able to find that exact spot without tools. Instead, you tend to guide people by starting with their current location and then giving them general relationships like left, down, or farther.

One way to talk about space more effectively is to draw an analogy to a familiar spatial image that people already know. People often use the clock face as a visual analogy to the world.

Also, as discussed in Chapter 4 – Understanding how things work , you have a smaller vocabulary for talking about relationships between objects than you do for talking about the objects themselves. You have words for basic relationships. You can say that one event caused another. You can talk about general relationships in time (one event preceded another) or in space (one object is behind another). But this relational vocabulary is not very expressive.

Finally, you are not very good at talking about many sensory aspects of what you perceive. It is quite difficult to talk about tastes and smells in any specific way. If you read reviews of wines, you see many terms like oaky or fruity or with hints of earth that are meant to describe tastes and smells. But it is difficult for even experts to agree on the meaning of these terms, and these experts spend many hours trying to learn to distinguish among these tastes and smells. Similarly, while you can talk about general aspects of sound like pitch (high and low) and volume (loud and soft), it is difficult to provide a more specific description of sounds. Musicians also use terms like bright, dark, sharp, and rounded to describe the character of the tone of different instruments, but these terms are also quite broad. The reason it is important to know the limitations of language is that when you encounter a problem that involves spatial relationships, relations among objects, or other sensory elements, then you should consider using other methods of description besides language to form cues to memory.

Using Diagrams as Descriptions

Given the limitations of language, when you get stuck on a problem you can consider ways to express elements of the problem without using language by using imagery. Diagrams and sketches are particularly useful to help describe and understand the facets of an issue that are hard to describe with language. This, in turn, promotes acquiring High-Quality Knowledge and creates good cues to memory to allow you to Apply Knowledge.

When describing a process, it is often useful to create a diagram that lays out the order of steps. You might be able to do the same thing only with words, but the diagram provides a way to illustrate repetitions of steps and choice points in a more compact way than you would with words.

Diagrams can be useful for causal understanding as well. Describing the steps of a procedure with a diagram helps uncover the gaps in your understanding. Missing steps in the description of a procedure become obvious in a diagram. In addition, the links between one box and another in a diagram are often places where there is a causal relationship between one step and another.

Once you have developed a diagram for a problem that you are trying to solve, that diagram can then influence what you retrieve from memory. Diagrams of procedures are more complete than what can usually be stated with language. They are also generally more abstract, because they do not contain many specific references to objects. As a result, they can be quite useful for supporting the retrieval of analogies.

The Power of Sketches

Sketches are also valuable for Smart Thinking. Because it is difficult to talk about spatial relationships, it can often be useful to draw a picture of a solution to a problem. This can be particularly helpful when creating the design for some new object. You might be concerned about trying to use sketches in problem solving if you have never had any classes in drawing and are concerned about your artistic ability. Part of the power of sketches, though, lies in the difficulty of capturing a complete solution with a high degree of accuracy in a sketch.

Sketches are useful in the early stages of problem solving because they do not include many of the specific details that might be included in a prototype or model. New technologies have been developed that allow rapid prototyping in which an idea can be turned quickly into a real three-dimensional object.

Using Gestures

Expressing relationships can also be assisted by making hand gestures. If you watch people make gestures when they speak, there are a few different ways that people use their arms and hands. Some gestures are just rhythmic. They keep time with the cadence of a person’s speech. Some gestures are clearly meant to communicate. A person who says, “Look over there,” and points is using this kind of communicative gesture. Many gestures that people make function as much to help someone figure out how to say what they want to say as they do to communicate information to the listener. These gestures are particularly good at helping you to describe a relationship between the parts of a process that may be hard to describe with words alone. If you are talking about a process in which two components are combined together, you might start with your hands apart and bring them together while talking about combining the items. When talking about the speed and direction that something moves, you often make gestures that have a similar speed and direction. Even if your conversational partner isn’t looking at you (like when you are talking on the phone), you still make these gestures because they help you think about the relations.

A technique can help you when you reach an impasse during problem solving. The best problem descriptions for retrieving analogies are ones that focus on relationships among the objects in the problem. If you are still working out these relationships, then gestures provide a way of making your growing understanding of the problem more concrete. Thus you should allow yourself to gesture as you redescribe the problem, which will help you find relations that may provide the basis for calling knowledge to mind.

The Takeaway

As counterintuitive as it may sound, memory retrieval is effortless. If your attempts to retrieve and use your knowledge induce a sweat, you’re doing something wrong. And when retrieval does feel hard, that is an invitation to walk away from the problem for a while. Your memory did not evolve to support an accurate playback of your life. Instead, it evolved to give you the information you are likely to need when you need it. When you learn new information it becomes associated with the context in which you are learning. Using your knowledge effectively requires getting High-Quality Knowledge into your memory and then creating a context that is similar to the one in which it was created. Because your ability to solve new problems depends on the quality of your knowledge, you have to maximize the value of the information you store in memory. Effective learning requires that you process deeply, explain things to yourself, and be active in your pursuit of knowledge. Effective learning is a marathon, not a sprint.

The key to solving problems is to recognize that when you get stuck you are not calling to mind knowledge you have that might help you solve the problem. If you have knowledge that will enable you to solve the problem, then you need to change the description of the problem to create new cues to memory that will bring new knowledge to mind. Use the power of proverbs, stories, and even jokes to capture the essence of the relational structure of the problem. Use images, diagrams, or gestures, especially when problems involve spatial or causal relationships. Each of those descriptions provides another cue to memory that may help retrieve useful facts for solving the problem.