MEMORY

READING: HOW DO YOU SPELL AMYGDALA AGAIN?

Remember to take notes on your note-taking worksheet as you read. By the end of this lesson, actually, you should be able to tell me why taking notes as you read is a good idea. In fact, think about possible answers to that question as you go.

We briefly learned the terms encoding, storage, and retrieval, but now we want to dive deeper into those contexts.

First up in How to Make Memories, we've got encoding. That's where we do something with the information we want to remember. Notice how this doesn't say, "We passively listen without really listening." Not-listening doesn't gain any memories for anyone. We need to actively do something with the information in order to keep it locked away in our brains. (Hey, that sounds like an answer to a main idea question that could get asked later. Weird.)

Encoding can be visual, acoustic, or semantic. The types of encoding that work best for any given student, however, vary according to that student's learning style. Remember learning style from one of our first discussions? I thought so.

• If you're a visual learner, you'll encode memories better by interacting with the information visually. That could be reading notes, making flashcards, drawing timelines or outlines, or perhaps designing a comic book all about the periodic table of elements.

• If you're an auditory learner, you'll encode things best using acoustic methods, like recording your notes and listening to them, turning information into a song (see: this classic fifty states song), having a study buddy go through your flashcards with you orally, or repeating things aloud instead of reading them.

• Semantic encoding is a tough term. The word "semantic" means "meaning," and it implies that we are "making meaning" with the new information by attaching or scaffolding it to something we already know. 

Um, what? 

Basically, it means rearranging or organizing it, like through the use of chunking, mnemonics, or outlining.

After we encode memories, they are stored in either short-term or long-term memory. Normally, memories start out in short-term and, if we retrieve them often enough, they get promoted to the big corner office of long-term memory. 

How to put on pants: long-term memory. 

How you managed to ask for directions in Dutch that one time: short-term memory.

So…?

The point is, if you want to remember something, you need to do something with the information, store it somewhere, and then retrieve it over and over again. Well, if you want it to go to long-term memory, at least. If you want to cram something into your head five minutes before a test, answer the question, and then never think of it again, just encoding should do it. But where's the fun in that? Also, that'll probably come back to bite you in the butt in college.

This is the reason why multiple-choice questions are usually easier than short answer questions. With multiple-choice, we only need to identify the correct answer. With short answer, we need to retrieve it from our memories on our own, without anything to help or prompt us. It's also why re-reading a handout isn't as helpful as making flashcards—the process of going through the flashcards forces us to retrieve the information. The more we practice retrieval, the more solid the memory is.

With that in mind, we should probably talk about ways to, um, encode and retrieve memories. Every good memory trick involves encoding, storing, and retrieving information, but as I mentioned above, the types of encoding that work best depend on your learning style.

On a Teacher's Boundless Love of Flashcards

Flashcards are my favorite memory device, and I'm pretty confident they work for just about every subject in school ever. They're not just for learning our colors or numbers, people. Flashcards are the wunderkind of the memory device world, and I love them so much I'd like to throw them a parade. Unfortunately, I don't have the budget for yet another parade (lame), so instead I'm just going gush about how great they are.

Check out this infographic on the benefits of flashcards (if the image starts out small, click on it to zoom in).

Then consider your current feelings on the topic. Are you pro-flashcard? Violently-anti? How about encoding method? Do you read them silently (visually) or aloud (acoustically)? Oh, and technology! Do you like online flashcards or the old-school index card variety?

READING: LAZINESS IS THE REAL MOTHER OF INVENTION

Most people are lazy. I like to think of it as efficiency, though. If there's an easier way to do something, I'm all for it. Hike for three days to get to Macchu Picchu? Get out of here. We have trains for that now.

Somewhere along the line, someone figured out—probably by studying learning styles—that it's significantly easier to encode and store information if it appeals to multiple learning styles. Enter: the infographic. (Oh hey, maybe you could try turning your notes into one.)

For example, we could write a 3,000 word essay on the ins and outs of proper social media use, or we could make an infographic on it. Consider the following questions:

• Which one would take longer to read?

• Which one presents only the key information in a simple way?

• If you were taking a test on this, would it be better to re-read the essay over and over, or to study the infographic?

For the purposes of actually remembering something, the infographic wins hands down. It gives us only the essential information, it's more interactive, and it has images to add interest. This is memorable, digestible information. The 3,000 word essay, on the other hand, is not, unless we have an eidetic memory, which is uncommon albeit really, ridiculously awesome.

In the online world, infographics are booming because they communicate information to the reader in a short, visually interesting, efficient way. This means that the company or blogger is likely to get more readers/hits/sales, and that makes the marketing and sales teams happy.

The truth is, most readers online and off want to do as little work as possible. I don't blame them. They don't want to pore through pages and pages of text; they want information quickly and efficiently, which is exactly what we want while studying! Weird.

I'm not saying everyone needs to hire an illustrator and a marketing team to design custom study infographics for that big test on the causes of the American Revolutionary War, or anything. That's extreme, but we can make and use our own graphic-friendly study aids to help us encode information visually. I've rounded up some prime examples, so look through each of the following links carefully and report back when you're done:

• timeline

• flowchart

• instructions

• maps

• diagrams

• the "fun fact" infographic

Some types of infographics ( using "infographic" as a catch-all term here) are better suited to some types of content. For example, timelines are useful for series of historical events or plots in literature, and flowcharts and instructions are useful for remembering scientific processes, like maybe life cycles or lab procedures.

The classic infographic, the "fun facts" kind, is a solid all-around pick. It works for pretty much anything that goes into lecture notes. Since infographics are by definition condensed and simple, creating these also forces us to focus on only the essential information, which frees up precious memory space for other things, like remembering what we need to buy at the store later today.

What Infographics Don't Do

In summary, infographics are the cat's pajamas. I'm not sure where that idiom came from or why there is a cat wearing pajamas, but that's beside the point. Infographics are great for visually encoding information. However, I should point out that infographics do not have a built-in retrieval process like flashcards do.

Of course, the process of creating the infographic itself appeals to visual and kinesthetic learning, so just making the thing in the first place is going to be a big help. It's also a good reason why you should not outsource this part of the process. Your little brother may be willing to transcribe all of that information for the bargain price of a bag of M&M's, but trust us that it doesn't benefit you in the long term.

To incorporate retrieval, you could do one of these things:

• Re-draw it from memory until you get it all right.

• Cover specific areas and fill in the blanks.

• Have a study buddy quiz you aloud ("What happened in 1770?").

READING: SAY IT WITH ME

For auditory learners, acoustic encoding methods are the best ways to encode and retain information.

In the last two readings, we discussed visual encoding methods like flashcards and infographics, and depending on how we use them for retrieval, they could work for auditory learners. For example, reading flashcards aloud or being quizzed aloud on the parts of an infographic could work well. These strategies don't so much appeal to acoustic encoding, or processing of the information, though.

To encode information acoustically, we need to interact orally with it, i.e., speaking or listening. Here are some study options for acoustic learners:

• Record yourself reading your class notes with a program like Audacity

• Read notes aloud

• Re-teach the concept to someone else via lecture

• Turn the information into a catchy song

Let's focus on the last method. For some reason, songs stick in our heads way more easily than plain text, even when they aren't in English. Specifically, I'm talking about "Gangnam Style," which I only just got out of my head last month. These songs are called earworms, and how they work is still a bit of a mystery.

Today, read more about earworms in this article and think about which songs often get stuck in your head. You can take notes on your note-taking sheet or maybe record some notes into an audio recorder.

FYI, memorization songs get a bad rap as only useful for small children learning things like what to do if you're happy and you know it (uh, clap your hands?). This is not the case, however. It's not true! Memorization songs work for everything from the multiplication tables to literary elements.