Here's a Better Way to Remember Things

H B R  :by H. James Wilson  |   8:00 AM December 11, 2012

A group of Brazilian entrepreneurs who have come north for a week's worth of ideas on growing their ventures, are leaving a class, when one of them breaks from pack toward the coffee maker, where I'm heading too. He works the machine first, reciting something again and again in Portuguese as he watches his cup fill.

"Excuse me?," I say, unsure he's talking to me.

"Sorry, I am repeating what the lecturer said," he explains, "so I remember later."

Remembering new information is an underappreciated skill. The fact that most of us have never evolved our technique beyond the rudimentary and ad hoc approaches we used as middle schoolers suggests this. It is required for any sort of professional growth, since the need to learn is high, and can separate the exceptional performances from the mediocre ones. After all, would you prefer to hire the consultant who presented using cue cards or the one who pitched from memory?

Fortunately for us, insights from cognitive psychology have vastly improved our understanding of how we remember. Many of these are accepted wisdom in the neurological and psychological realms. But it hasn't been easy to transfer that knowledge to actual tools for individuals. Until recently, anyway. Easy-to-use auto-analytic tools that exploit our understanding of memory can now help you treat remembering as the skill it is, and improve it the same way you improve any professional skill, like public speaking. Here's how to get started.

First, focus on the right unit of measure. Yes, your objective is to remember better, but you'll get the best results by focusing on forgetting as your base unit of analysis.

Experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus's pioneering discovery of the forgetting curve shows that we forget the majority of newly learned information within hours or days, unless we review it again and again. This alone won't be a shock to many of us. But Ebbinghaus demonstrated how systematic forgetting. It occurs exponentially on a predictable curve — researchers call this "exponential decay."

Different things you're trying to remember will have different curves. For instance, that piece of operations data that you remember clearly, since you prepped and presented it to your team, has a flatter downward curve (you'll remember longer) than that the now hazy sales figure a colleague mentioned during the same team meeting. Evenso, each curve is predictable.

Practice remembering at the right time. Think about how you really use your memory for things that matter to you and your career, like in preparing for a speech. Maybe you're a crammer who tries to prime your memory by doing as many dry-runs as possible the night before. Or perhaps you've committed to ploddingly rehearsing your lines each afternoon for a month from 3 pm to 4 pm. Or maybe you're an improviser who finds time here and there, rehearsing what you'll say at random moments between meetings.
The forgetting curve suggests you should follow a very different memorization process than any of these entail. It shows that there's a precise moment that's best for practicing your lines. That moment is just before you are about to forget them.

So sessions aimed at learning new content should happen at "about-to-forget" moments, with spaces between practice sessions increasing as you approach mastery. This learning process is called spaced repetition, and can help us avoid the inefficiencies and risks of ad hoc memorization methods like cramming.

Incorporate auto-analytics tools. OK, so you get the idea that you should try to commit things to memory only when you are just about to forget them. But how do you know when that critical moment is about to happen? How do you know what your forgetting curve looks like?

Almost like your fingerprint, your forgetting curve is very different from anyone else's. But a type of auto-analytics tool called "Spaced Repetition Software" or "SRS" can learn the idiosyncrasies of your memory, and then ping you to practice at the optimal time.

These mobile and desktop tools are like automated flashcards, though you work through your "pile" according to your personal algorithm and the rules of spaced repetition.
They fine-tune your algorithm using a straightforward rating system. Let's say you're a newly appointed manager learning some finance for the first time, and you're trying to improve your recall of many new terms. When the term "Leverage" appears you recall its meaning effortlessly and assign it an A. But when "Arbitrage" appears you assign it a D since you must labor to recall its basic meaning, and even then it remains fuzzy.

The tool continually hones its prompts based on your input. No doubt you'll see "Arbitrage" sooner than "Leverage," as practice sessions for the second concept would be scheduled later and less frequently to maximize efficient memorization.

Map your practice to your priorities. Finally, be very selective when choosing what you want to get better at remembering. In theory, you could work on mastering numerous new domains at once, but experimental research and case studies suggest this isn't practical for full time workers.

Focus instead on a single development opportunity integral to your career. (See the accompany chart for examples of cases where you could use SRS.) Does this opportunity require learning new terms, concepts, or narratives? If yes, then it makes sense to focus on hacking your memory with these computing tools to pursue it.

In short, when you're on a steep learning curve, remember the forgetting curve, and then beat it.

H. JAMES WILSON

H. James Wilson is senior researcher at Babson Executive Education.

 He is co-author ofThe New Entrepreneurial Leader: Developing Leaders Who Shape Social and Economic Opportunity (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2011).

Why Remembering Names Is Hard — And What to Do About It

Source : Time :Maia Szalavitz : January 13, 2012 :




Can't remember people's names but can rattle off phone numbers without a hitch? 
There's a reason for that..

I’m utterly horrible at remembering names, something that always seemed odd to me because my memory is otherwise quite decent. Give me a statistic or an odd fact and generally it will stick— but introduce me to someone and milliseconds later, the name is gone.

That’s why I was delighted to see this round-up of research on the issue on an excellent British psychology blog, PsyBlog. So why are names so tricky even for people with good memories to recall?

The author writes:

The most popular explanation in the research is that names are essentially arbitrary and meaningless.

For most of us our names give away few clues about our appearance, our personalities or anything about us, except maybe a rough age, ethnicity, social class and whether our parents were celebrities (hello ‘Moon Unit’, ‘Tu Morrow’ and ‘Moxie Crimefighter’—yes, all real names of celebrity offspring).

If, for example, I was called ‘The Pink Panther’, and I happened to look like a pink panther, you’d almost certainly find it easy to remember my name.

Similarly, names that link people to their occupations are also more easily recalled. And oddly, people who have names that link them to a job (either humorously or seriously) tend to be more likely to actually engage in that line of work. Indeed, for years, the British magazine, New Scientist has made a sport of finding the best examples of what it labeled “nominative determinism.”

Some highlights: Eric Hacker is a computer security specialist and Dr. Eric Sade, a dentist; Priscilla Feral is an animal rights activist; Jonathan Treat Paine is a neurological surgeon; Dr. Richard Payne is a pain medicine doctor; Chris Moneymaker, a poker star. I’ll leave it to you to Google for the many urologists with double entendres.

Even stranger, other research has found that the first letter of one’s name is also linked to occupational and geographical preferences. For example, women named Virginia are more likely to live in Virginia Beach and Philadelphia has more than its share of Philips. This holds true for last names as well, so it’s not just that parents choose names that link to locations. If you are named Dennis, you are more likely to become a dentist; Larry and Laura’s are overrepresented in the legal profession.

These names— since they are not just arbitrary— are easier to remember.

I always thought that unusual names—like mine— have an edge, making my own lack of reciprocation in remembering other people’s names even more obvious. Apparently, however, the research is conflicting on this and one study finds more common names are actually easier to bring to mind.

So how can you counter this embarrassing deficiency? There’s a hint in the name/occupation connection— that is, if you can find something, particularly something humorous or vivid that links a person to their name, you’re more likely to recall it. Of course, proceed with caution on this to avoid embarrassment.

Repetition also works: if you repeat someone’s name back after you are introduced and try to use it at least once in conversation, that, too, can help fix it in mind.

My own name recall deficiency is so bad that I thought perhaps I had trouble with faces, too— and that this was what made me particularly weak. However, after taking this online test, I discovered that I performed slightly above average, so I think the problem may be one of comparison.

I have both an unusual name and unusual looks—I’m short with long, curly red hair. This probably makes it easier for others to remember me— but often leaves me at an even greater disadvantage when I can’t remember them. It’s hard not to take it personally when someone seems not to remember you, but fortunately it usually reflects a memory flaw, not one of personality or manners.

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer for TIME.com.