Producer: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal where we are exposing the mysteries of executive function. As always, I’m here with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, Sucheta. So, why are you going to be talking about pi? Now, I’m not talking about the pie that I like to eat. We are talking about the pi that is known around the world as 3.14. What do you mean by that?
Sucheta Kamath: Yes, great to be with you, Todd, and yes, we are going to talk a little bit about pi and I will connect that to our story in a second, but every math enthusiast knows is that pi the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. One spectacular element of the pi is that it is an irrational number and that implies that it’s a real number that cannot be expressed by a simple fraction. With that, there is no exact value of pi. Therefore, it is known as an infinite decimal which meets after the decimal point, the digits in pi go on forever, and some pi enthusiasts and committed computer scientists or computer programmers have calculated the value of pi more than 22 trillion digits. So, that’s a little bit about the pi which is now again, why do we care? But every March 14, this particular day is celebrated globally as the pi they because the date spells out 3.14 of the pi, and people like me just simply satisfy with a slice of real pie on that day, but there are many who enter competitions, and one particular thing I would like to share that in 2015, the event was even more special because for the first time in a century, the date represented the first five digits of the pi which was 3.1415.
So, on March 21, 2015, something incredible happened. The VIT University in Vellore, India held its competition, and a brilliant candidate Rajveer Meena from – I think he must have been from VIT University but successfully recalled – get this, Todd – 70,000 decimal places of the pi.
Producer: Wow, I can’t even imagine that.
Sucheta: I know. Well, listen to this: the whole recall took close to 10 hours and Rajveer was blindfolded throughout this memory test, apparently, and Rajveer broke the Guinness world record of reciting 67,819 digits of pi which was held since 2005 by Lou Chow of China.
Now, you’re wondering why am I talking about the pi? Well, mostly, I’m talking about memory and memory is an enigma to an average Joe, person doesn’t know anything about neuroscience, executive function, cognition. Everybody knows memory and typically, a layman or a common person associates I intelligence with great memory skills, and you and I have always encountered people in our lives have phenomenal memory. I in fact had a friend – my husband’s friends in college would literally sit in an easy chair, browse through Gray’s anatomy – they both went to medical school and as he flipped through the pages, he would actually somehow, it would become part of his memory and when he took a test, he could imagine the page, whether it was left side, right side, page number, the images that go on the page, and everything who could recall, and of course, you can imagine, he aced all the tests.
So, the question comes to mind, memory a gift or a skill? And that’s what we’re going to talk about our guest today. Our guest is a professor of neuroscience at Texas A&M University and his name is Dr. William Klemm who has served as a project director for two NIH grants and two other grants from SF, all into developing science curricula for grades 6 to 8. Prof. William Klemm studied basic and applied research on learning and memory, and has published 20 books. He is a distinguished lecturer in the Scientific Research Society contributor, he provides teachers with lectures and workshops on teaching and learning. He has over 2.5 million views off his posts on learning and memory at Psychology Today. He is a prolific blogger and he has his own blog which will be linking in this podcast.
An interesting fact about him is that he is a retired colonel in the US Air Force reserve of research and development planning, human system division. He is also a company president. He cofounded a company called Forum Enterprise which is a maker of collaboration software. So, we have a very talented interesting, fascinating speaker that we will get started with very soon. What do you think, Todd?
Producer: Well, as usual, Sucheta, I always look forward to these conversations and I’m still thinking about Rajveer and 10+ hours of recitation of pi. I can’t even remember the third decimal for goodness sake, so that’s an amazing story and I have a feeling this is going to be an amazing conversation.
So, let’s get to it. Here is Sucheta’s conversation with Dr. William Klemm.
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Sucheta: Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Klemm. It’s such a pleasure to have you.
Dr. William Klemm: Yeah, it is great to be here.
Sucheta: So, let me start. You are such a prolific writer and a researcher, and as a neuroscientist, how do you define memory, and can you help us understand a little bit about the biology of memory and its relationship to daily life, and how best to understand it?
Dr. Klemm: Well, memory is what you remember and it occurs in two forms. So, we have the active working memory which I noticed that you mentioned in your Ted talk, and also the stored memory which is stored in long-term. The active memory or the working memory is actually generated by a pattern of nerve impulses in various parts of the brain that happened to be processing the information associated with this memory, and as long as that pattern of impulses is operating or following, then you have access to that information. On the other hand, is that pattern should change because you start thinking about something else or you get a new stimulus, then you lost it. Unless you have thought about it enough so that it gets stored in long-term for, and the storage and long-term form is actually anatomical/biochemical change in the synapses or junctions between nerve cells and those circuits that handle that information. I don’t know if it tells you enough or not.
Sucheta: Absolutely. So, it’s so interesting, there is a fading quality to that temporary storage which is referred to as working memory, or you are also called it active memory, and that means it’s not so much out of sight, out of mind but it’s literally [0:07:37] stock holding on to it while working with it, and if it disappears and you are no longer holding to it, it disappears, and so that’s the working memory. And so, in order to move things into stored memory or long-term memory, what kind of process is involved in that?
Dr. Klemm: Actually, it’s a protein synthesis change in the synapses of the neurons, and that takes a little time, and this conversion process is crucial to making memories last. Otherwise, you will forget them; you may remember the course while you are thinking about it but if you don’t get it stored, if you don’t get these protein syntheses changes occurring, you’re going to lose it because [0:08:19] many practical implications of this consolidation phenomenon, it’s called, and it relates to interference of information. In other words, if you are trying to memorize something there is some interfering stimulus or information, it will prevent this consolidation process. This is the real problem in education, that there are so many distractions going on in the classroom that it’s easy just erase your active memory and it doesn’t get preserved in long-term form. This is the problem with multitasking: you jump from thinking about one thing to another thing, to another thing, and every time you make this job, you are interfering with what it was that you had learned temporarily preventing you from learning permanently.
Sucheta: Got it, and so as you are learning, you need adequate attention and focus, and then in order for it to become a part of your long-term memory, you need some sort of processes that information has to go through some process. So, do you mind, what contributes to the memorization process itself? What are the key elements of that?
Dr. Klemm: Well, the first one is attention as you pointed out, and focus where you don’t get distracted by other kinds of [0:09:41] or stimuli, and then you have to protect this information and recall that I said that you have this pattern of nerve impulses flowing around in circuits, and they contain the information, and that pattern has got to be sustained long enough to initiate these protein syntheses changes in your synapses so that you can store it permanently, and this requires rehearsal, thinking about the same thing again and again, and it also requires protecting it from distractions and interference.
Now, how rapidly it gets consolidated, it depends on lots of things. In other words, how important is it to you, does it have emotional appeal? Is it an intense magnitude of stimulus or information? Is it relevant to some immediate problem you have – how much emphasis or priority you give it, those kinds of things will speed it up. It will speed up the consolidation process.
Sucheta: And then, how about recall and the role of queuing to bring that information out summer is a part of also memory, memorization process?
Dr. Klemm: Yeah, and I’m glad you asked that question because there hasn’t been much research on retrieval. Anecdotally, we know, of course, that if you can think of some cues or some items that were associated with the original memory, they may help you retrieve it, but this whole process of retrieval is not understood very well. There’s been a lot of research on consolidation, but then very little on retrieval, and I think in part it is because we don’t know how to study retrieval.
Sucheta: You know, in my practice, I work with a lot of people. My practice focuses on concussions and grained injuries and those individuals who struggle with actually forming new memories, and one of the processes, the training process involves in focusing on self cueing and recall the analogy of a teabag. If you put tea, you have hot water and you put the teabag, you need that little thread with that paper rectangle that you tug on to pull it out, pull the teabag out, and so retrieval cue is forming a strong thread that you can pull on so that you can get the teabag out there though the analogy is not the best because you don’t want – the teabag is not what stores the memory but the infused water is, but nevermind, you know what I mean?
Dr. Klemm: Yeah, and these cues are very important to the information which brings up this point: when you memorize something in the first place, it’s strengthened by having lots of other items associated with it because those other things will serve as cues later on, if you can remember some of the cues, they will help you retrieve the basic information that you wanted the first place.
Sucheta: So, I can’t remember information a lot by spatial cues, where I was sitting, what I was wearing, what kind of environment I was in.
Dr. Klemm: Yeah, absolutely.
Sucheta: So, that seems to trigger a lot of my thoughts about stories of where an event took place, and I seem to be able to reconstruct that what exactly the exchange was about. Can you tell us a little bit about why that is a good way to think, or there are other ways to do it too, but what is that all about?
Dr. Klemm: Well, the part of the brain that forms – it sort of does this conversion from short-term to long-term memory is called the hippocampus, and there are cells in the hippocampus that do something different. They mapped location in space, and apparently, they help map information spatially, and so here, you have a system and a brand that does both things that are complementary. In other words, where the information is helps you remember what the information is and you are not [0:13:44] as in that regard. That is the basic property.
Sucheta: Thank God. One thing about me that’s normal here. So, tell me why some people have good memory and some people have terrible memory, and I’m not talking about having incurred some injury, but I’d like to describe Velcro memory – information that goes in without much effort or at least appearance of external process of making intentional Association, rehearsal, and these individuals seem to remember so much more effectively than those who need a lot of extraneous effort or explicit effort, do we have any understanding why?
Dr. Klemm: I’m not sure there’s been much research individual differences, but I can speculate reasons why some people have poor memories. One is, they don’t pay attention very well, they don’t get the information registered or encoded robustly. Another is, they are easily distracted and in fact, this is a problem with old age and also with children which is kind of an interesting comparison, but it’s a fact that children and in old age, you tend to be more distractible, and if you are distracted, then of course, you interfere with this consolidation process, and finally, I think an important factor is how much value you place on memory? If you want to memorize, you are more likely to be able to do it.
Sucheta: You know, this brings me to the idea of executive functions. So, executive function as you know are the supervisory skills that assess value of information, purpose, they connect intentions to actions, and they see that goal as pursuit, and I find this, they often, particularly the ADHD children and young adults, and college kids that I work with, that they appear to have bad memory, as you mentioned, primarily because of inattention or lack of attention to detail, but second is, their lack of understanding of value and importance of that information in the future. So, they are not future-oriented, they don’t understand that if I don’t understand this content in front of me, when I get tested on it three weeks down the road, I will not be able to use it, and so there is very little effort in their ability to stay connected to the intent of that particular exchange of information. Do you see that as well?
Dr. Klemm: Yes, absolutely, and in fact, one problem I think a lot of students have is, they have a short-term horizon for their learning. In other words, the idea is to learn the information for the next quiz, and they don’t have – and they tend not to have a goal for learning it forever, and of course, if you want to develop real expertise, you need to learn things goal of remembering it forever, not just for the next quiz.
Sucheta: Yes, you see that a lot of modern education, I came across this research somewhere about people who are asked about their memory and people equated their capacity to retrieve information from Google, same as the capacity to retrieve information from their brains.
Dr. Klemm: I was about to give a keynote express at the Learning and Brain Conference in San Francisco, and the title of my talk was Google and Memory. Google’s condition Google’s condition is to diminish the emphasis we put on them because we can always go look them up, but that’s not how you develop expertise in any field. You need it in your head, not on the Internet.
Sucheta: You know, I grew up in India, and we have a very [0:17:17] edition particularly in the spiritual context, and our scriptures are 5000 years old but the writing came much later in the, so to speak, on board, but before that, it was oral tradition to pass information from one generation to another by kind of memorizing, and so when I went to school, I learned tables, mathematical tables, so you memorize multiplication tables as far into it, like 25 or 30, 30×1, 30×2, 30×3, and I don’t see that when I raise my voice as an they were not at all taught any memorization skills. In fact, they almost were taught to be looking down upon memorization skills. So, what are your thoughts about that?
Dr. Klemm: That’s my pet beaver about education. They are so focused on teaching children what to learn but they don’t teach them how to learn, and these memory skills need to be taught, but they’re not taught through the teachers. The teachers don’t teach it because they don’t know either, and so reminds me, I’m helping write curriculum for middle school, and in adolescence, I have a section in there where I teach the memory skills in the specific context of the content they are expected to memorize. In other words, I will give them some tips on how to memorize this or how to memorize that, and so forth, and the techniques differ, of course, depending on what the information is.
Sucheta: So, can we walk through some strategies, do you mind sharing with us what are some fundamental memory strategies and is there like homegrown ways of kind of improving your memory on your own?
Dr. Klemm: Well, one thing that they should be doing at the onset is to think about strategy for how you are going to learn a given batch of material, and that’s a little different depending on the subject matter, whether it’s math or chemistry, or history, or whatever, the strategies will be a little different. In this context, once you understand the challenges, then you should organize the information in a way that makes it easy to remember, and this may be done with the different kinds of notes or drawings, or organizing files and reference sources and things of that sort. Now, in terms of the actual memory, the most important thing of all is to use mental images, not words. Words are very hard to memorize for everybody, but mental images are very easy to memorize for everybody, and one reason is [0:20:07] head was devoted to vision, whereas your language, it involves two small areas in the brain about the size of a quarter apiece, just don’t have as many neural resources available or words that you do for vision. So, the more robust memory techniques involve turning your information into mental pictures that relate to the words that you are trying to memorize, and there’s several techniques for this and one of them involved thousands of years ago in this oral tradition that you talked about in India, the most famous technique was originated in ancient Greece where these orders would give speeches lasting for hours and they did it all from memory, and he used a technique called memory palace, and the memory palace is a technique where hate, you try to relate the new information to information you already know and you do it in the form of images. Now, the information you already know or your palace, so to speak, might be your home. The objects in the kitchen or the objects in the living room, or the object in the dining room. You don’t have to memorize that, you already know what they are. So, in memory palace technique, you take a new item of information like a word, let’s say you are memorizing vocabulary and you convert it into an image, and then you mentally attach it to an object in your palace, in your dining room, or in your kitchen, or whatever. It can also be beyond objects, like locations in your car or on your bicycle, all sorts of things that serve as anchor points for attaching these mental images of the things you are trying to memorize. Now, you can also use the same approach in what I call story changes where you can take the information you are trying to remember, converted into mental images, and then make a story out of them, and stories are variously easy to remember. That’s just the way that our brains are wired in kind of an entertaining way to memorize to, then there’s just a simple approach and I call it subject, object, and for because that’s the way our language is, and here, the idea is it is you take the item you’re trying to memorize and make a sentence of it, but it’s a visual sentence. In other words, you see these items as a subject, a verb, and an object. For instance, if you wanted to remember in the capital of Arkansas which is Little Rock, you might ask yourself, well, when I think of Arkansas, what is the first thing I think of? Oh, Bill Clinton. Okay, you got this mental image what Bill Clinton looks like, and then now, you have an image of people ordering rocks at him throwing rocks at him through the sexual misadventures that he conducted. So, now, you have this little rock being thrown at the guy from Arkansas and it helps you to remember that Little Rock is the capital. So, that’s the simplest approach that you can use for almost everything.
Sucheta: Got it, got it, and I also use pegging method which is also –
Dr. Klemm: well, yeah. These are pegging methods, but there’s another peg method and maybe that’s what you are referring to based on numbers where –
Sucheta: Numbers, yeah. I was [0:23:46] pegging number, yeah.
Dr. Klemm: You are familiar with that technique?
Sucheta: Yeah. I don’t mind –
Dr. Klemm: and, that’s the basic idea. You have an image for each number and you make images of what you are trying to remember and attach it to the image for each number in the peg. This is a good way to memorize every page or the essence of every page in a book.
Sucheta: Exactly.
Dr. Klemm: In fact, when I was in high school, my dad was a salesman or the Dale Carnegie course, and when they are trying to recruit people –
Sucheta: Oh, really?
Dr. Klemm: Yeah, and when they are trying to get people to sign up, they want to show off the material in this course and of them, the aspects of the course was this peg system using numbers, and so he taught it to me and I guess I was turned into a [0:24:34] because I would put on display for the idea of memorizing magazines, and they would say to the audience at the beginning of the meeting that I have this magazine that Billy has never seen, we’re going to give it to him now and in 30 minutes, we will come back and test him and he will be able to tell you what is on every page, or you can tell him what is on a page and you will tell you what the page number is, and I can do that. [0:25:00]
Sucheta: That’s so great! My God, so your father turned you into a neuroscientist?
Dr. Klemm: Well, I didn’t realize it was happening at the time.
Sucheta: Yeah, but you got fascinated or discovered maybe this gift you had for easily processing conflicts information and creating some wonderful system for yourself.
Dr. Klemm: And, even when you’re not using the techniques, I think it stimulates your creativity, your imagination which makes it easier to generate associations that you are trying to use as cues for remembering.
Sucheta: You mentioned about organizing information, notes, files, reference sources, but I find that a lot of people who struggle with this organization don’t have the organizational principles. Underneath the organizational processes that categorization and systematic making connections with information using features or characteristics of information, and that they don’t have the complex ability to identify the backbone of information, so they don’t see similarities or differences, or activity, and that is one of the reasons they find information to be much more separate that cohesive. Do you –
Dr. Klemm: Well, our brains are certainly were to categorize things and maybe they just don’t know how valuable that is with things and categories, and if you put similar things in the same category, it makes it – if you remember one or two things in that category, it helps to remember the rest in that same category.
Sucheta: You know, one of my favorite examples about that as you mentioned, the brain is wired to categorize, Steve Jobs once gave an interview and he talked about this iPod came out with a shuffle function and that was like, the greatest innovation from that time that you don’t go in chronological order but random order, it is people started complaining that they have heard the song, and so he put his team behind it, and then they found that actually, it wasn’t that the song was repeating itself consecutively, but people had this associations that they believed that this song is very similar to another songs that they would feel that the songs were the same. So, they wouldn’t distinguish the two.
Well, as we come to the end of this discussion, do you have any thoughts about memory in general and how to maintain healthy memory to our yesteryears?
Dr. Klemm: Well, now, we need to talk about physiology and medicine because if you are not physically healthy, you are not mentally healthy, and if you are not mentally healthy, you won’t have a good memory, and as we age, of course, we start to – our health starts to deteriorate and so does our memory, and for older people, I think when they see that they are having memory problems, they need to start working for on their health, they need to do more exercise, they need to do more mental activity, and they need to improve their diet which is usually poor, and their memory will improve. Exercise, for reasons nobody really understands helps memory a lot, and of course, older people tend not to want to do much exercise. They want to sit on the couch and watch TV.
Sucheta: Yes, I interviewed Dr. Ken Kosik who is a researcher known for Alzheimer’s and one of the messages that he was sharing that this process of memory deterioration or change – physiological changes begin 20 years before the actual symptoms become concerning to those individuals.
Dr. Klemm: Yeah, a physical person starts to deteriorate around the authorities.
Sucheta: Exactly, and so as you are mentioning, it sounds like it’s a good thing to start adapting a healthy lifestyle but more very physically engaged or active life will contribute to memory which is not a lot of times people think.
Dr. Klemm: They need to do it for a lifetime, not wait till your 70 to start being healthy.
Sucheta: Exactly, exactly.
Well, thank you so much for your wonderful wisdom and great thoughts. I’m going to link love your articles on this topic and your couple of bucks, and that will be also a great resource for all the listeners. I can’t thank you for your time and it has been a great pleasure to talk to you.
Dr. Klemm: Okay, well, I’ve enjoyed it too. Thank you.
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Producer: Alright, great, great conversation with Dr. Klemm, Sucheta, I really enjoyed that one. Any initial thoughts as we sit back and think and reflect on that great, great talk?
Sucheta: Yeah, no, just I think I started off by saying is memory a gift or is it a skill? And I hope people take away this idea that memory is a skill and we must work on it, just don’t be bedazzled by those who have is a Velcro memory where everything glues to their brain, and for some, if it’s effortful, don’t minimize that pooh-pooh that as oh, I’m so bad. I often hear that somehow, people believe that they are supposed to be having decent memory or they are very quick to test their memory, but I rarely hear people investigate and explore their own memory skills. This reminds me of a story of Jonathan Fore. He was a New York Times reporter – science reporter and he did a story on memory athletes, and so when he got to these competitions where would it turn in early actually enter into the arena to test their memory and there would be different competitions such as the fastest ways you will recall all numbers of playing cards or the number of numbers you can recall in a minute, or things like that, and so he got so fascinated that he worked with a memory champion for a year and then he himself took part in the competition and won, and he went on writing this incredible book which I highly recommend everybody to read. It’s called Moonwalking with Einstein. So, yes, there are living examples of people who have turned their memories on its head. So, Sternberg in 1999 said that memory is the means by which we draw on our past experiences in order to use this information in the present, and so really, like the memory is extremely contextually sensitive, it has this nature of acting as a catalog and we have a way to reference back or go through that filing cabinet, and of course, the most important thing that we will be nothing without memory and it’s essential to our existence. It links this past and kind of allows us to envision the future. So, if I can say finally that the memory in its essence brings meaning to human experience in the given moment.
Producer: So, I didn’t realize frankly that the invisible parts of the memorization process requires complex – comment on that, please.
Sucheta: Yes. You know, so interesting, so people literally think that when we are exposed to information, we are memorizing it, and as Bill kind of pointed out that no, it has like, these five important components. There is register information or paying attention to it, actively making associations and personalizing information, and then rehearsing information throughout the passage of time, until a kind of begins to - all those associations you have made kind of begin to strengthen and finally, consolidation process so that meaning, it becomes part of past – connecting with past knowledge, and finally, like memory is nothing if you can’t recall it. It’s cueing and recalling the information.
The most important thing I thought, we will quickly talk about the take away here is that attention is the true gateway for information processing. You cannot remember things he did not pay attention to. So, first and foremost, the information has to register and in order to register, you must pay attention. So, a neuroscientist Michael Posner described this as an orienting and executive attention whereby we deploy resources sounds and light stimuli in order to bring that information into our brain, and so some other researchers, Grady and his colleagues have said that whatever is not registered is not remembered, and all these things to me sound fairy like, of course, commonsensical, but many, many people complain about memory and in fact, if they really, really get their attention under control, their memory will significantly improve.
Producer: Well, you know, while I was listening to you and Dr. Klemm, I was thinking, have I used any memorization techniques, and I guess the two times in my life when I really did it, I guess was when I was in college. I never had any discipline there – actually, have a technique to do and it probably explains why I was not the best student, and then I guess I give a lot of speeches in my professional career, but I didn’t have to memorize. I had guide notes that enable me to recall what I needed to recall and delivering the presentation.
So, anyway, can you elaborate again on the linking technique please?
Sucheta: yeah, you know what, that is a great question you ask because it’s one of my favorite techniques. I think as I was talking about earlier, that there is association process whereby you take information, hash it out, break it down into smaller parts, and then take each part and create some sort of link to your prior knowledge, and you know, let us take quickly the example of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, these are the planets from the sun in that order, and how do you recall it? And so, I’ll share with you one of the memory champions, Michael Tipper who has a blog called happychild.org, or rather, the story he talks about, so I thought I’ll sure that quickly how he describes he would go about memorizing this order, so every comes before Venus, then Earth, then Mars, and so he kind of says, this is how he creates a story. So, Michael says that imagine a huge ball of glowing orange fire that represents the sun, and you can feel the heat coming off of it, and this huge orange ball, you can imagine like flames dancing around it. So now, you have this visual imagery of this orange flaming ball, then out of this orange ball is a huge two, and it’s a thermometer. As the glowing ball gets hotter and hotter, the mercury inside the thermometer rises. So, what he has done now is he has taken this imagery of the orange glowing ball with a very, very, very high degree of heat and now, you have a thermometer, and we don’t need to memorize the thermometer carries Mercury. That is prior knowledge, and so now you can link the orange ball with the thermometer and the mercury is the first planet after the sun. Then, he says, eventually, the mercury gets so hot that it explodes out of the end of the thermometer with a huge bang and its sprays mercury droplets everywhere. These mercury droplets have tiny silver beads of metal that fall into a beautiful blonde goddess wearing a white toga, and guess what? This lady exudes love and compassion because she is the goddess Venus. So now, the link is that the mercury explodes and almost breaks into this tiny silver ball, and now, they look like a part of an ornament who will wear it but nothing but the most beautiful woman on this – imaginary woman on this solar system, I guess, is Venus. So now, he goes on and on and I think what I live in this example, that many times, people’s struggle like you said, you describe yourself is not the best student, what to me that means, that you ever paid attention to your own learning process, but I don’t think you lack these abilities. If somebody nudge you to develop these skills, you would do them really well. What the teachers can’t really do or educators can do is like you cannot take Michael Tipper’s technique of imagining orange flaming ball and a thermometer popping out of it. That has to be something personal to you. So, the associations need to be personal and that is where I think giving time to students to great these personal associations is something that is not built into daily life, and that is why these linking techniques which are easy and accessible may not be implemented.
Producer: well, no, it’s funny you say that because you mentioned earlier how important attention, paying attention is, so the study of space and astronomy was always fascinating to me, and so I did pay attention and I could rattle off the order of the planets without any kind of process because I was just into it in paying attention and reading about it, but most subjects in school were not images, so I didn’t really pay attention and that is why struggled, but you’re right, as you said, it’s not a gift; it’s a skill and I just never worked on developing a skills. So, great, great stuff.
All right, so I guess before we wrap, Sucheta, any final closing thoughts?
Sucheta: Yeah, you kind of summarized it yourself, that memory is a skill and that skill can be acquired and it can be certainly – it can certainly be improved with the right techniques. The critical thing is that a very few people actually know how to improve memory, and memory improves with intentionality. So, strategizing learning to retain and recall information is very much an intentional process. The important thing is that visual domain, brain has a larger area are located for visual and spatial information than for auditory information. So, using visualization can be a key and it is the strongest approach for better memory. The memory champions and those with really great memory in the world of all cultivated powerful techniques and the self-discipline to use them consistently.
So, the University of California Irvine researcher Aurora LePort who studies individuals with highly superior autobiographical memory or sometimes called as hyperthymesia found that even those individuals don’t score high on routine memory tasks. So, to do well on memory, you must practice and bring intentionality. So, do not be fooled by people who say, “oh, I got that.” Like you said, with interest, there is likely that the will retain information with less effort, but any information you want to retain, if you put effort, you can retain it really well.
Producer: Great, great stuff. Let me try that and learn like, 10 decimals on pi just to see if I can develop the skill a little bit more.
All right, that’s all the time we have for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for tuning in and listening today, and we look forward to seeing you again here next week with our second conversation with Dr. William Klemm. We will see you then.