Category: Memory

The method of loci, or memory palace, is an effective technique to enhance memory and even to create a store of positive memories.

The ‘method of loci’ technique (literally method of places) for enhancing memory has been around for thousands of years.

The method of loci technique was recommended by the Roman philosopher Cicero.

In 2006 Lu Chao used the method of loci technique to recall π to 67,890 places (he recited it for 24 hours and 4 minutes before he made a mistake).

But you don’t have to be a specialist memoriser or super-brain to find the technique useful; it has dramatic effects on recall for even the most humble of us.

And the method of loci technique might even be useful for fighting depression — but more on that later…

The method of loci technique

The method of loci technique, which relies on spatial memory, is remarkably simple to explain, but does require some mental effort to set up.

What you do is think of a place that you know really well, like a house you lived in as a child or your route to work.

Then you place all the things you want to remember around the house as you mentally move around it.

Each stop on the journey should have one object relating to a memory.

The more bizarre and surreal or vivid you can make these images in the method of loci, the better they will be remembered.

Doubling memory capacity with method of loci

Remarkable things can be achieved by training memory using the method of loci technique.

People in one study doubled their memory capacity in just 40 days of working 30 minutes per day (Dresler et al., 2017).

Even without doing any further training, their memory was still working at a higher level four months later.

Professor Martin Dresler, the study’s first author, said:

“After training we see massively increased performance on memory tests.

Not only can you induce a behavioral change, the training also induces similar brain connectivity patterns as those seen in memory athletes.”

Becoming a memory athlete

Researchers took brain scans before and after the training.

They found that after training in the method of loci technique people’s brains were more similar to ‘memory athletes’ — those who train their memories for international competitions.

Typically, top memory athletes can memorise a series of 500 digits in just five minutes.

None of the memory athletes were born with special memory skills, they simply worked on them over the years, said Professor Dresler:

“They, without a single exception, trained for months and years using mnemonic strategies to achieve these high levels of performance.”

The two training methods used in the study were:

• Practising remembering sequences of numbers.
• Method of loci — sometimes called a memory palace.

Method of loci was most effective

After training, people could usually remember about twice as many words.

The method of loci technique, though, worked the best in the long-run.

Professor Dresler said:

“Once you are familiar with these strategies and know how to apply them, you can keep your performance high without much further training.”

The brain scans showed there were 25 critical points of connectivity among the memory athletes.

The research also highlighted two vital hubs of connectivity in the brain regions related to learning.

Professor Dresler said:

“It makes sense that these connections would be affected.

These are exactly the things we ask subjects to do when using method of loci for memorization.”

Memory palace of happy times

“I’m going to my happy place!”

Saying this in moments of stress has become a rather tired joke.

And the joke conceals the fact that having a so-called ‘happy place’, or even several happy places can help boost mood when times are hard.

However, the problem with thinking back to happy moments from the past is that it’s hard if you’re not in the habit.

Indeed, people experiencing depression find it particularly difficult.

Worse, when they do recall happier times, they tend to do it abstractly, focusing on the causes, meaning and consequences, and looking for clues as to how to regain it.

Unfortunately it’s re-experiencing the pleasure that gives you the boost in the moment, not thinking about it abstractly.

The problem is frequently memory.

To feel better by thinking back to past glories, you’ve got to pull up the right memories and in the requisite detail.

This can be hard enough for the most equable of souls and nearly impossible when low mood strikes.

What is required is a really strong technique for instantly conjuring up the right moments from the past so that you feel right there, in the moment.

And this is where the method of loci fits in.

If you carried out this process for a series of good memories, you’d have what is called a ‘memory palace’ of happy times that you could return to in moments of stress.

Testing the method of loci for emotions

But, can creating a memory palace be effective even for depressed people: those who find it particularly difficult to remember happy times?

That’s what was tested in a study by Dalgleish et al. (2013) who recruited 42 participants who were currently experiencing a major depressive disorder or who had suffered in the past and were now in remission.

Half the participants were taught the method of loci technique.

Here’s an example of how one person encoded a memory to give you the flavour:

“…one participant in the main study had generated a memory of an important conversation over coffee in New York with her best friend. She associated the memory with the front of her childhood home (one of her selected loci) by imagining the fascia of the house transformed into an outlet of a popular U.S. coffee chain with her friend standing outside smiling and dressed as a barista.”

Everyone rehearsed 15 of these self-affirming memories and placed them around their memory palaces using the method of loci technique.

They then practised going around their individual mental routes until they could easily retrieve the memories and the associated feelings in high levels of detail.

The rest of the participants also recalled 15 positive events but used a memory technique that you’ll be more familiar with from school.

They simply rehearsed them over-and-over again until it seemed to have gone in.

The results

Unsurprisingly, both groups reported that remembering happy past memories made them feel better.

But, the key for the researchers was to see whether people could still recall the memories one week later, in a surprise telephone call.

The results showed that the participants who had rehearsed the memories repeatedly had forgotten, on average, two of them.

In contrast, the average barely dropped for those who had used the method of loci.

This is an encouraging result and suggests that the method of loci is an effective way to easily a set of happier times, even in people who find it difficult to do so.

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Memory loss risk reduced by this common drink.

Coffee could reduce the risk of memory loss by up to 70 percent, research suggests.

The study found that drinking three or more cups per day was associated with better memory than just one cup per day.

In women over 80, the reduction in risk was 70 percent for those drinking three or more cups.

In those over 65, the risk reduced by 30 percent for the same amount of coffee.

While this study focused on women, others have shown a neuroprotective effect in men as well.

The study suggests that drinking coffee may help to delay dementia, although it cannot prevent it.

For the French study, 7,017 people were tracked for four years.

Their coffee intake was measured and they were given memory tests.

The results showed that women had better memories when drinking three or more cups of coffee per day, especially at higher ages.

Although the same effect was not found for men, more recent studies have detected the same neuroprotective effect for men.

Dr Karen Ritchie, the study’s first author, said:

“Women may be more sensitive to the effects of caffeine.

Their bodies may react differently to the stimulant, or they may metabolize caffeine differently.”

Although caffeine slowed the rate of memory decline, it did not reduce the chance of developing dementia.

Dr Ritchie said:

“While we have some ideas as to how this works biologically, we need to have a better understanding of how caffeine affects the brain before we can start promoting caffeine intake as a way to reduce cognitive decline.

But the results are interesting — caffeine use is already widespread and it has fewer side effects than other treatments for cognitive decline, and it requires a relatively small amount for a beneficial effect.”

The study was published in the journal Neurology (Ritchie et al., 2007).

Absent-mindedness in psychology is inattentive or forgetful behaviour that can result from distractions, vagueness, blankness or zoning out.

We’ve all done it: forgotten someone’s name, where we parked the car, or left the house without the front-door key.

These are all examples of Schacter’s (1999) second sin of memory: absent-mindedness.

While the first post in the series looked at the transience of short-term memory, how memory degrades over time, absent-mindedness occurs when we’re not really concentrating in the first place.

There are two central factors in how and why we are absent-minded.

One is how deeply we encode a memory, the other is how much attention we’re paying at the crucial moment.

Let’s look at attention first.

Attentional absent-mindedness

One of the most striking experimental demonstrations of how central attention is to absent-mindedness is seen in psychology experiments on change-blindness.

In one well-known example, participants watch a video of people passing a basketball between each other, and they are asked to count the number of passes.

I’ve been a participant in this experiment, and it worked like a treat on me.

I sat watching the video, counting the passes.

Then, after the video was finished, I was asked if I noticed anything unusual.

I was completely bemused: “What do you mean anything ‘unusual’,” I said. “I’ve just seen people passing a basketball to each other. What are you talking about?”

The experimenter smiled and set the video clip running again, but this time with no instructions to count the passes.

I watched in amazement as after about 30 seconds of people passing the basketball, a person dressed in a gorilla suit walks right through the centre of the scene, stops, turns, looks at the camera, then turns again and walks out of shot.

The gorilla is visible for fully 5 seconds.

I didn’t notice a thing.

And I’m not alone.

In the version carried out by Simons and Chabris (1999), on average around half the people who took part didn’t notice the gorilla.

The original version of this experiment was carried out more than 30 years ago, but it still has the power to amaze (Neisser & Becklen, 1975).

The door study

Another well-known demonstration of how absent-minded we can be is the ‘door study’.

Here unwitting students are asked by an experimenter for directions.

While they are talking, two men carrying a door walk between the experimenter and the student.

Also hiding behind the door is another person who swaps places with the original experimenter and carries on the conversation with the student.

The student is now continuing the conversation with someone completely different.

Do they notice?

Like the gorilla experiment, only about half the students notice that they were actually talking to a different person.

Another failure of attention.

Memory encoding: depth of processing

The second element vital to absent-mindedness is the depth at which we process information.

This is demonstrated by a classic experiment carried out by Craik and Tulving (1975).

They set about testing the strength of memory traces created using three different levels of processing:

1. Shallow processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about the font it was written in.
2. Intermediate processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about what it rhymes with.
3. Deep processing: participants were shown a word and asked to think about how it would fit into a sentence, or which category of ‘thing’ it was.

Participants who had encoded the information most deeply, remembered the most words when given a surprise test later.

But it also took them longer to encode the information in the first place.

Crucially, though, participants also had to do the right type of encoding.

For example pondering a word’s meaning for a long time did help its recall, but putting equivalent effort into thinking about its structure didn’t help recall.

Prospective memory lapses

We’re not always trying to remember something we’ve already been exposed to, sometimes we’re trying to remember to do something in the future.

This is what psychologists call prospective memory.

Here are some examples:

• Call your mother after supper.
• Fill up the car with petrol on the way home from work.
• Buy those concert tickets at the weekend.
• Drain the pasta in 8 minutes.
• Take the medication at 12pm.

All these tasks involve us setting ourselves a mental alarm clock that is either triggered by some event occurring, like finishing supper, or by a particular time.

Psychologists have found the ways in which we are absent-minded in prospective memory can depend on whether we are trying to remember a future event or a future time.

Normally we depend on external cues to jog our memories.

For example we drive past the petrol station, or write a note to ourselves to buy the tickets.

We tend to forget event-based prospective memories when we fail to spot the cue.

For example we don’t notice the petrol station on the way home as we are distracted by an accident on the other side of the road.

Time-based prospective memories, though, depend more on how good we are at generating cues for ourselves.

For example you might remember to take your medication at the same time by always doing it after lunch.

Absent-mindedness: curse or blessing?

Given our propensity for absent-mindedness, it’s sometimes amazing that anything run by humans works at all.

Slips of memory in so many different types of vital activities – e.g. surgeon, train driver, pilot – can have disastrous consequences.

The fact that things often run smoothly shows we are remarkably adept at focussing when we need to and attending to important cues in our environment.

Absent-mindedness might even be seen as a blessing.

The case of the Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevskii illustrates the point dramatically.

Shereshevskii’s memory was so perfect he could remember everything that was said to him and maybe even everything that had ever happened to him.

Tested by the famous neuropsychologist, Alexander Luria, no limit could be found to his memory.

But this amazing gift had its down-side.

He found it difficult to ignore insignificant events.

As a result, a simple cough would be imprinted on his memory forever.

Also, all his memories were so highly detailed that he found it difficult to think in the abstract.

It can be difficult to think about the idea of, say, a bridge if your mind is immediately assaulted by hundreds of specific examples of bridges.

It is reported that Shereshevskii became so tortured with the accumulation of memories that he developed a special technique to help him forget.

He would imagine the memories he wanted to ditch written on a blackboard and then mentally erase them.

This seemed to work for him.

Perhaps we should be thankful for our absent-mindedness.

It saves us from remembering all of life’s crushingly dull moments as well as setting us free to think in abstract terms.

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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Short-term memory is what is in your mind right now while long-term memory is what gets stored away for days, months or years.

Short-term memory is the the ability to hold a small amount of information in the mind for a few moments.

For psychologists, it refers to things that are currently being used by your brain right now.

For example, as you’re reading this article the words you’ve read go into short-term memory for a very short period, you extract some meaning (hopefully) and then the meaning is either stored or discarded.

Typically, short-term memory is gone from the mind in a few seconds.

Unless, that is, it is transferred to long-term memory, which can last for many years.

Long-term memory, however, can be just as illusive, as most of us know to our cost.

Example of long-term memory failure

My memory continues to surprise me, and not usually in a good way.

I recently reread a book which I first read, and greatly enjoyed, about 13 years ago.

It is fiction by one of my favourite authors – the writing is vivid, the story exciting and the set-piece action breath-taking.

Despite all this I had almost no memory of reading the book the first time.

Almost everything about the book seems to have seeped away in the intervening years.

I couldn’t remember the plot, most of the characters or any of the scenes.

The only thing I vaguely remembered was the main character’s name, but I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t invented that memory, after all I couldn’t recall anything else about the book.

Short-term memory vs. long-term memory

This is an example of what Harvard psychologist Daniel L. Schacter calls the first deadly sin of memory: transience (Schacter, 1999).

Transience can be seen in both short- and long-term memory.

Short-term memory, for psychologists, means the things that are in your mind right now, and only those things.

On the other hand, long-term memory is anything you store to be retrieved at a later time.

Studies have shown that both types of memory can be extremely fragile over their respective timescales.

Short-term memory loss

A classic experiment on short-term memory loss was carried out by Peterson & Peterson (1959).

It demonstrates how quickly short-term memory loss occurs.

They asked participants to memorise a three-letter sequence, then count backwards in sets of threes.

Participants were then asked to try and recall the three-letter sequence after different lengths of time counting backwards.

Participants did surprisingly poorly on this test of short-term memory.

After only six seconds of counting backwards in threes, on average half of the original three letters had disappeared from memory.

By the time participants had been counting backwards for 12 seconds, less than 15% of the original memory remained.

Finally after 18 seconds it was all but gone — short-term memory loss was complete.

This experiment clearly shows how quickly information leaks out of short-term memory.

The experience of short-term memory loss is usually perfectly normal.

Size of short-term memory

The psychologist George A. Miller is famous for coming up with a magical number related to short-term memory.

What this magical number represents – 7 plus or minus 2 – is the number of items we can hold in our short-term memory.

So while most people can generally hold around seven numbers in short-term memory, almost everyone finds it difficult to hold ten digits in mind.

At the other end of the scale, 5 numbers is the bare minimum for what people can hold in short-term memory.

Long-term memory: slow forgetting

To return to my example of the novel, though, it seems to me that some aspects of the book must have become lodged in my long-term memory.

No doubt much was lost in short-term memory, but surely some of it must have stuck in long-term memory.

Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to follow the story and would have ended up reading the first page again and again.

So, what types of processes affect how much we retain from long-term memory?

In fact, relatively little is known about how our long-term memory fades over substantial periods of time.

Thirteen years is a long time for an experimenter to wait just to find out if I can remember the details of that book.

Nevertheless, studies do suggest that forgetting probably follows a power function.

That means we lose a lot of information soon after it goes in, then, over time, the rate of forgetting slows down.

How short-term memory becomes long-term

Of course not all long-term memories are created equal, and so the reasons why we fail to recall information are many and varied.

Indeed, some psychologists have argued that we never really forget anything.

Perhaps, they say, the memory is still in our minds but we can no longer access it.

Cues are clearly important to retrieving long-term memories.

The smell of varnish might remind us of the day we spent canoeing in the rain, lost in solitary thought.

Conversely, some experiences can hinder the retrieval of certain long-term memories.

The long-term memory of a parent’s anger at our childish misdemeanour might completely block out the memory of what we actually did.

Long-term memory is certainly more likely to fade if we don’t use it.

The retrieval and rehearsal of long-term memories has been shown to enhance their storage.

Interestingly, there’s no actual evidence in humans that long-term memory which remains unrehearsed or unretrieved actually does dissipate over time.

Perhaps all our long-term memories really are still in there.

Gone, and forgotten

But even if my long-term memory of reading that book the first time is still in there, it’s doing a very good job of hiding.

Especially since rereading the book should be a massive cue to its recall.

Maybe we do completely forget or maybe I have just forgotten that I didn’t actually read the book in the first place.

Either way, perhaps I’ll be able to enjoy the same book all over again in another 13 years!

→ This post is part of a series on the seven sins of memory:

1. Short-Term Memory vs. Long-Term Memory: Definition And Examples
2. Absent-Mindedness: 2 Factors That Cause Forgetfulness
3. Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon Or Lethologica
4. Misattribution: How Memories are Distorted and Invented
5. Suggestibility: How Memory Is Biased By Suggestions
   • False Memory: Dramatic Examples Of Fake Memories
6. Commitment and Consistency Bias: How It Warps Memory
7. Long-Term Memory: When Persistence Is A Curse

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Some of the most widespread beliefs about memory are myths and misconceptions.

One of the classic criticisms levelled at psychology is that it’s just common sense.

And there’s nothing that winds up psychologists more than having this old saw repeated back to them.

If it’s true we should be able to ask the general public six easy questions about the psychology of, let’s say, memory, and they should do pretty well.

After all, everyone has a mind of their own and can introspect and see what’s going on inside it, so they should be able to answer these questions easily, shouldn’t they?

Myths about memory

Simons and Chabris (2011) had 1,838 Americans polled with six basic statements, testing some common myths about memory.

Great care was taken to try and get a representative sample of the general population.

Their responses were compared with those of almost 100 psychologists.

Amongst these were 16 professors with at least 10 years experience in researching memory.

The statements are all below in their original form:

1. “People suffering from amnesia typically cannot recall their own name or identity.”

Fully 83 percent of people agreed either ‘mostly’ or ‘strongly’ with this statement.

In contrast, all the experts disagreed ‘mostly’ or ‘strongly’ with this statement.

In fact, people suffering from amnesia normally can remember their own name and identity, so it is a myth about memory.

The reason people get this so wrong is probably because they are often exposed to incredibly inaccurate depictions of amnesia.

Films like ‘The Bourne Identity’ (and every sitcom ever made that uses an amnesia plot) are partly to blame; while films like ‘Memento’, with its much more accurate depiction of amnesia, are in the minority.

2. “In my opinion, the testimony of one confident eyewitness should be enough evidence to convict a defendant of a crime.”

37 percent of the public agreed, while all 16 experts disagreed.

Actually eyewitness testimony can be frighteningly inaccurate, so it is another of the myths about memory.

One of the problems with memory is that people are surprisingly suggestible.

Even relatively small differences in the way eyewitnesses are handled can have a huge impact on what they claim to have seen.

For a good example have a look at this article on suggestibility.

3. “Human memory works like a video camera, accurately recording the events we see and hear so that we can review and inspect them later.”

63 percent of the public agreed, while all 16 experts disagreed.

This is a surprisingly high percentage given how most people frequently have problems recalling basic facts.

In fact, it is one of the myths about memory, since it works nothing like a video camera.

In reality, what we recall is affected by our current emotional state, our motivations and so on.

And, of course, a lot of the time we can’t remember it at all.

See this article on the short-term memory vs. long-term memory.

4. “Hypnosis is useful in helping witnesses accurately recall details of crimes.”

55 percent of the public agreed, while 14 experts disagreed and 2 didn’t know or thought it was unclear.

Hypnosis is a bit more controversial, but still the public had a lot more faith in it than the psychologists.

Part of the problem with hypnosis is that it can make people incredibly suggestible to completely false information.

Through hypnosis, eyewitnesses can come to believe things that never happened.

One great example is the ‘lost in the mall‘ study.

5. “People generally notice when something unexpected enters their field of view, even when they’re paying attention to something else.”

78 percent of the public agreed and 13 experts disagreed, while 3 agreed.

This one was the most controversial for the experts, but probably because there’s little evidence about how often we fail to notice when something unexpected comes into view.

The general point here is that people are much more absent-minded than they think.

That’s because of the paradox that we don’t notice what we don’t notice.

For all the classic examples check out this article on absent-mindedness.

6. “Once you have experienced an event and formed a memory of it, that memory does not change.”

48 percent of the public agreed while 15 experts disagreed and one thought it was unclear.

This is yet another myth about memory.

Actually even so-called ‘flashbulb memories’—like where you were when Kennedy was shot—can be quite inaccurate or easily change over time.

For a great example of how malleable memories are, check out this previous article on misattribution, how memories are distorted and invented.

Not common sense

By and large, then, according to memory experts, all these statements are false — they are all myths about memory.

So, should anyone say to you: “psychology is just common sense”, try asking them if they agree with a couple of the above six statements.

If they do, your work is done.

You’ll have spotted that the context for these questions is often related to eyewitness testimony.

That’s because in court, lay beliefs about memory are so important. Simons and Chabris conclude by saying:

“The prevalence of mistaken beliefs in the general public implies that similar misunderstandings likely are common among jurors and could well lead to flawed analyses of testimony that involves memory. At least for these basic properties of memory, commonsense intuitions are more likely to be wrong than right.”

Try not to think about what kind of effect these mistaken models of how memory works have on our legal system and public life in general or you’re likely to become mighty depressed.

→ Continue reading: Facts About Memory: 10 Interesting Things You Should Know

Learning to play music can have a powerful effect on long-term memory and overall brain function.

Professional musicians show superior long-term memory compared with non-musicians, research shows.

Their brains are also capable of much faster neural responses in key areas of the brain related to decision-making, memory and attention.

The results were presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, DC (Schaeffer et al., 2014).

Dr Heekyeong Park, who led the study, said:

“Musically trained people are known to process linguistic materials a split second faster than those without training, and previous research also has shown musicians have advantages in working memory.

What we wanted to know is whether there are differences between pictorial and verbal tasks and whether any advantages extend to long-term memory.

If proven, those advantages could represent an intervention option to explore for people with cognitive challenges.”

Music and memory study

The 14 professional musicians in the study — all of whom had been playing for 15 years — were given a series of pictures and words to remember.

Their results on a long-term memory test were compared with a group of 15 non-musicians.

While they did the test, their neural responses were measured using electroencephalography (EEG) technology.

The musicians had the advantage in long-term memory for the pictures, although not the verbal items.

Measures of the musicians’ brain function also showed that their neural response was faster than non-musicians.

Areas in the mid-frontal region — those associated with decision-making — were between one-third and half-a-second faster.

In the parietal lobes — which are associated with the senses, memory and attention — their neural response were sometimes almost one second faster than non-musicians.

It’s not yet known why these advantages in processing and memory occur, but Dr. Park speculates that learning to navigate musical scores may be partly responsible.

This study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that musical training has a wonderful positive effect on cognitive abilities.

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