Entertaining mnemonics: we collect auditory memory from visual

Quite often you can hear someone say to themselves: "I have a bad memory." And if we have a little idea of ​​how memory works, then at this point we should ask the question: “Which one?” The fact is that there are many types of memory, and they can work (as well as break) independently of each other.

Firstly, different types of memory are allocated according to the length of time during which information is stored there. Long-term memory allows us to store information that may be required later, and short-term memory - to hold the information necessary to solve the current problem. There is also an “ultra-short-term” memory that supports the work of consciousness. For a split second, the entire contents of our sensory perception is placed in it, which ensures its continuity.

Secondly, there is an arbitrary and involuntary memory. Involuntary memory stores information “by itself”, without special efforts on our part. For example, we easily remember what is biologically significant, associated with strong emotions, or is in the sphere of our interests. Arbitrary memory, on the other hand, allows us to store information that does not directly interest us, but is needed, for example, to pass an exam. In this case, we purposefully decide to remember this and that.

Thirdly, there is a mechanical and semantic memory. Mechanical memory allows us to store information exactly as it arrived without processing. If we first isolate the semantic core from the information flow and then remember it, then this is semantic memory. Semantic memory works in conjunction with thinking, and we can store there only what we understand. An individual person usually has a tendency to either semantic or mechanical memorization. A holder of good mechanical memory can learn a chapter from a textbook and reproduce it close to the text without understanding a word in it, and a holder of good semantic memory can reproduce the author’s train of thought - but he’ll probably have to write out proper names and dates from this text on a piece of paper.

Fourth, by the type of information stored, we allocate visual memory, auditory, motor, as well as some specific types of memory. For example, facial memory is not a private aspect of visual memory, but a separate function that can be damaged independently.

Accordingly, if a person says that he has a bad memory, he can mean completely different things. For example, he may complain that he has poor mechanical memory, and he cannot remember names, phone numbers, or birthdays. It may well turn out that he possesses encyclopedic knowledge in those areas that do not require mechanical memorization. He may mean that he has problems with long-term memory, and what he seems to remember is then quickly forgotten. At the same time, we may find that to solve current problems, he operates with huge amounts of information, being perfectly oriented in them. He may also bear in mind that it is difficult to perceive information by ear, and to learn a poem for him is an insoluble task. It’s possible that he has excellent visual memory,and he can describe in detail how everyone with whom he spoke during the day looked like.

There are two main ideas. First, memorization tasks are not equivalent to each other; it matters what, in what form and for how long we need to remember. Secondly, healthy, well-functioning individuals are also not equivalent to each other in terms of how their memory works, and different people are to varying degrees effective in different types of memorization.

The problem is that the demands that life makes on us often do not take into account our individual characteristics. And if a child goes to school, then in any case he will have to learn a certain number of poems, he is inclined to mechanically memorize texts or not inclined. Hence, in fact, there is a need for mnemonics - techniques that allow you to control the efficiency of the memory.

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It is widely known that the memory volume of a healthy adult is seven plus or minus two units. What is meant? This refers to short-term, or working memory. To measure it, the subject is usually read out a list of ten short, simple, unconnected words. For example: house, forest, table, needle, brother, elephant, window, mushroom, honey, shawl. We expect that immediately after presentation, the subject will be able to repeat seven plus or minus two words from this list. If in an hour without warning you ask what words were on the list, then we will see how involuntary long-term memory works. And it may turn out that nothing was left from this list in long-term memory - because the psyche did not consider an arbitrary set of words as valuable enough information to store it. And if we warn the test subject in advance,that in an hour we ask him the same words again, we will see the work of an arbitrary long-term memory - actually the one that is required for study. Long-term memory first takes in the contents of short-term, and then exposes it to optimization by forgetting too much.

Forgetting is not so much the destruction of information as the difficulty of direct access to it. If we present the memory as a warehouse, then frequently used and recently downloaded information will be neatly laid out on shelves near the entrance, and unclaimed information will gradually move into the interior of the room, and ultimately it will be in the farthest corner in a pile of junk. If, for example, a person constantly operates with large amounts of information, we can expect that he will quickly lose access to irrelevant data - because they are quickly replaced by new ones.

The curve of oblivion was derived as early as 1885 by Hermann Ebbinghaus. He and we were very lucky that in those days the criteria of scientific nature were much milder, since the curve was built on a single test subject - namely, Ebbinghaus himself. Today, one must think that they would simply refuse to publish without a sample of forty people.



As we see, a significant part of the information is lost almost immediately after memorization, and then this process gradually slows down until its speed becomes negligible. With regard to studies, this means that of all the information we received, we actually save only a small part in the area accessible for extraction — but we save it reliably. This is the very education that remains with us after we passed the exams and forgot everything.

Why are we interested in the amount of short-term memory? Because it is a bottleneck between the sensory stream and the long-term memory through which information must pass in order to be more or less successfully acquired. We can say that we have a large warehouse, but we can send goods there only with cars, where seven plus or minus two boxes fit in - this is an amount for an adult healthy person. In a preschooler, the amount of short-term memory is normally equal to his age in years. If there are any neurological problems, then this volume is reduced even more. Accordingly, if a child of four years has a short-term auditory memory volume of three units, then an instruction like “put a red ball in a blue box” will be unavailable to him, because there are more semantic units,than he can remember at one time. One can imagine how much he will bear from what adults say to him.

What is a semantic unit? Based on how memory is measured, we could decide that the semantic unit is one word. In fact, everything is somewhat more complicated. In order to load the word “elephant” into short-term memory, we must already have in long-term memory the idea of ​​an elephant - a large animal of gray color and with a trunk - and the knowledge that this animal is called a certain word. We put in the memory cell not a set of sounds, but a link to some content that is already in the repository. If we have never heard of elephants, this is a new word for us, and we do not associate it with anything, then we may need more than one cell to pack it! For example, we can remember it as "moan, only the second letter is l." In approximately this way we sometimes remember names. For example, if we remember that the new friend’s name is the same,As a well-known writer, then in one memory cell will be stored access to an array of data about famous writers, and in another - an indication of a specific object from this set. And if later we are not able to find the contents of the second cell in long-term memory, then our memory will look like “his name is like some kind of classic”. On the other hand, quite a few words can fit in one cell if they have a strong semantic connection. For example, the current task of “going to the Klinskoye beer stall” will take up not three memory cells, as one might think, but only one if this is a typical, regularly repeated action.And if later we are not able to find the contents of the second cell in long-term memory, then our memory will look like “his name is like some kind of classic”. On the other hand, quite a few words can fit in one cell if they have a strong semantic connection. For example, the current task of “going to the Klinskoye beer stall” will take up not three memory cells, as one might think, but only one if this is a typical, regularly repeated action.And if later we are not able to find the contents of the second cell in long-term memory, then our memory will look like “his name is like some kind of classic”. On the other hand, quite a few words can fit in one cell if they have a strong semantic connection. For example, the current task of “going to the Klinskoye beer stall” will take up not three memory cells, as one might think, but only one if this is a typical, regularly repeated action.regularly repeated action.regularly repeated action.

But that is not all. Short-term memory works in several modalities, and there is auditory short-term memory, and there is visual. We expect that in an adult healthy person they both have a standard volume of seven plus or minus two units. This is not a single metaphorical machine where about seven boxes fit anyway; these are two metaphorical cars, one of which carries notes with text to the warehouse, and the other carries pictures. And if we present ten cards with pictures to the same subject, and then ask them to remember what was depicted on them, it may turn out that his visual and auditory memory differ markedly in volume. Say, nine units for visual memory and only six for auditory. What does this mean? This means that the memory of our subject works one and a half times more effectively in the visual modality,and it’s beneficial for the information to flow in it.

So, we have a warehouse and two trucks. Six boxes of verbal information are placed in one, and nine boxes of pictures in the other. Suppose we get a lot of text, and we feel sorry for the time and gasoline. What do we do in this case? We go to the trick and begin to use the second car, which has more lifting capacity. Instead of the word “house” we put in it a schematic representation of the house, instead of the word “forest” - three conventional Christmas trees, and so on.

How this works at the level of conscious mnemonics is, in general, understandable. We invent visual associations for each word, memorize the visual series and then reproduce the text on it. It is quite effective, but requires a focused effort. I would like to get something similar, only to make it work in the background.

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The main obstacle to the use of mnemonics, as well as many other useful tools, is that the psyche immediately encounters resources when it encounters them. And if it turns out that the development and application of the method takes more effort than the usual, moderately inefficient mode of operation, or the useful exhaust is not commensurate with the effort expended, sabotage mechanisms are activated - primarily laziness.

Accordingly, our first task is to convince the psyche that it is beneficial for it to rebuild the mechanism of memory. Not in all cases it will really be beneficial! If an individual has a volume of working visual memory one and a half to two times more than the amount of auditory, then he can afford to spend energy on the background conversion of information from one modality to another, because the gain in efficiency will outweigh these costs. And if the difference between the volumes of auditory and visual memory is small, or the subject does not have routine tasks requiring more memory than he has, then the conversion from modality to modality will be an unjustified expenditure of energy, and we are likely to encounter sabotage.

First of all, it is desirable that the individual be consciously dissatisfied with how his memory works. This is a surface level motivation that allows you to start doing something. In the case of a student, for example, the necessary discomfort can be created by deuces obtained in situations such as “taught, but forgot”. But this will only work if the grades are something significant for the child. If he has successfully defended himself against negative emotions by means of the depreciation of his grades, and he began to more or less give a damn what numbers he has in his diary, then he needs some other motivation connected with something that still retains subjective importance.

Then we begin to form a motivation of a deeper level - we need to "sell" mnemonics to the unconscious mechanisms of the psyche. If successful, the unconscious begins to cooperate with us, and the whole further process goes much easier, because we do not have to deal with laziness. To demonstrate to the psyche how cool memory can be optimized, we first ask the subject to remember ten words, as described above, and tell him the result. This can be a rather annoying result (which creates additional motivation). And the next time we ask for each spoken word to draw a simple picture, such as an icon, and we read out not ten words, but twenty-five at once. After an hour, we ask you to recall the words with the help of these sketches. If the subject discovers with amazement,Since a sheet of paper with pictures tripled its memory size, it just produces the desired advertising effect. Not that the amount of memory really tripled - the cheat sheet greatly simplifies the task of memorizing - but the emotional experience of "I can!" Is important to us here. You can also recruit yourself in this way, if you ask another person to choose and read out the words. By the way, something like this was done by Ebbinghaus: for his experiments with memory, he used cards with meaningless syllables, which he accidentally selected from a large, pre-prepared set of his maid.if you ask another person to choose and read out the words. By the way, something like this was done by Ebbinghaus: for his experiments with memory, he used cards with meaningless syllables, which he accidentally selected from a large, pre-prepared set of his maid.if you ask another person to choose and read out the words. By the way, something like this was done by Ebbinghaus: for his experiments with memory, he used cards with meaningless syllables, which he accidentally selected from a large, pre-prepared set of his maid.

We assemble the converter

Having enlisted the cooperation of the psyche, we can begin to modify its mechanisms. We need to get a transducer from an auditory modality to a visual one that can work in the background. This means that it must be well automated, and automation achieved by a large number of repetitions. Just doing the same thing is uninteresting, so we use the simplest game mechanics with personal bests.

Suppose, at the previous stage, the test subject (ourselves, if we are experimenting on ourselves) was able to reproduce fifteen words out of twenty using pictograms. Then for further exercises we take sets of twenty-five words and strive to “take the height”. As you improve, the bar for the number of words you can raise.

As soon as it becomes too easy (and boring), we move on to the next level of complexity: we begin to build in our converter a data compression mechanism. The fact is that when we use the cells of visual memory, then in one such cell we can stamp the equivalent of several words at once - and not necessarily related to each other - if we manage to assemble a single visual image from them. The words “elephant” and “window” occupy two cells of auditory memory, but the image of an elephant with a window on its side will occupy only one visual cell. In practice, we usually deal with more or less meaningful texts, so we will formulate tasks of the next level of complexity from meaningful and natural phrases. For example: to paint a landscape, an interesting book, delicious bread, I want for the holidays. The task remains the same:we draw an icon for each item on the list, and after an hour we try to remember all the phrases for these icons.

The pictogram serves here several functions at once. First of all, we actually set the reflexion of the conversion of a word into an image - in order to draw an icon, we must first think about it. Secondly, we are training to create a fairly compact and minimalistic image, without unnecessary details - this way the converter will work faster. Thirdly, a leaf with pictograms drawn in several rows performs the function of structuring the memory. On the one hand, this is a plan for the location of information boxes in our metaphorical warehouse, which makes it easier for us to navigate. On the other hand, this leads us to actually lay out the boxes in a certain order, rather than dumping them into a heap. If we create a graphic or pseudographic interface for our memory,setting spatial relations between semantic units (as diagrams and diagrams do), it becomes easier for us to navigate what we remember. In particular, this is how mnemonic techniques work with placing images in different places of a well-known space. For example, if we remember the words “elephant, mushroom, honey, shawl ...”, then we represent our kitchen, then we put an imaginary elephant at an imaginary table, put a shawl on a stool, boiled champignon and a jar of honey on the table, and so on . But we must keep in mind that if we tend to lose things in the physical kitchen, given in sensations, then images in the imaginary kitchen will be lost with the same success.this is how mnemonic techniques work with placing images in different places in a well-known space. For example, if we remember the words “elephant, mushroom, honey, shawl ...”, then we represent our kitchen, then we put an imaginary elephant at an imaginary table, put a shawl on a stool, boiled champignon and a jar of honey on the table, and so on . But we must keep in mind that if we tend to lose things in the physical kitchen, given in sensations, then images in the imaginary kitchen will be lost with the same success.this is how mnemonic techniques work with placing images in different places in a well-known space. For example, if we remember the words “elephant, mushroom, honey, shawl ...”, then we represent our kitchen, then we put an imaginary elephant at an imaginary table, put a shawl on a stool, boiled champignon and a jar of honey on the table, and so on . But we must keep in mind that if we tend to lose things in the physical kitchen, given in sensations, then images in the imaginary kitchen will be lost with the same success.then with the same success images in an imaginary kitchen will be lost.then with the same success images in an imaginary kitchen will be lost.

When memorizing phrases becomes too simple, you can go to the level of memorizing whole sentences or lines of poetic text. For example, we take “Bad advice” by Grigory Oster and sketch them with pictograms at the rate of one picture per line. Most likely, we will not be able to force the memory to compress information up to one image per phrase in this way, but for some cases this option will appear. Having mastered the level of memorizing phrases, you can relax - the conversion of information from text to image by this time should already be well automated enough to work in the background, and we will be able to observe the increased memory efficiency without drawing anything special.

You can add a couple of games to the actual memorization exercises. Firstly, this is a classic game of charades - it trains the ability to transmit verbal information through an image very well. Secondly, you can use the "Rory Story Cubes" to form the skill of operating pictograms.

Pictograms for almost all occasions can be found in Picto-Selector . It is mainly intended for alternative communication and creating visual schedules. In her icon library you can find many excellent examples of a very compact visual presentation of information. Here is, for example, the sign “wait for your turn to speak out”:



Now, let's change techniques. If you have any favorite tricks that make it easier to remember, please tell us about them in a comment.

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/undefined/