How To Recall Better: Chunking

However, just because our memory sucks now doesn’t mean we can’t improve it. We know that the average number of list items we can store in our short-term memory is seven, though that can be increased with practice.

Through repetition, practice and becoming an expert in certain field...

We didn’t always have the attention span of a goldfish, but today it sure seems that way.

Imagine our memory had been so bad, once we finally became old enough to pass on knowledge from generation to generation.

We wouldn’t be here today, had the elders not remembered a few important ...

Before the invention of writing or electronics, people used to keep palaces devoted to memory. Not physical palaces, but mental ones!

1. Think of a place you know well… a childhood home, perhaps, or where you live now.

2. Imagine walking up to that place, and putting ...

Anything that was written before 200 BC had no punctuation, all texts were basically just word strings. If you didn’t already know what you were reading, reading was useless.

In 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, and it was all downhill from there.

The memory palace is a technique where you walk along a route you know really well, and put memories in certain locations along the way.

For example, you could go through your childhood home and place the items from your shopping list on the kitchen table. Then, when you’re in the groce...

Memory, and indeed most intellectual skill, is not fixed. Anyone, by using the right techniques and practising, can expand their mnemonic capacity beyond what many people would even think possible—an excellent party trick, or simple a useful tool to remember phone and credit card numbers

The major system allows you to convert numbers into sounds and thus words, thereby making them memorable. Each number keys to a certain kind of consonant, and vowels and some other sounds are unassigned. 1 is T or D. 2 is N.

The Major System is based not around letters but ...

The cognitive stage: The skill is performed consciously and manually. This is when the brain is developing new strategies to do it more effectively. At this stage, there is improvement in fits and starts because the brain is monitoring performance and removing errors.