Test #7A: Draw It

See how long you can retain a visual image. You can do this as a series
of tests or you can draw two, three, or four images at the same time.
Look at each image below for 30 seconds and remember as much
as you can. Then, close the book and try to draw it from memory.
Next, without looking back at the image or your drawing, do something
else for 30 minutes and try to draw it again. Compare your two
drawings to the original to see how much you remember. Then, try
the same test 30 days later and see how your second set of drawings
compare to your first test. 57

Remembering Images

Finally, how well do you remember what you see? To test yourself,
the first is a recall test where you draw as much as you can remember.
The second is a recognition test, in which you try to remember
which images you saw before and what’s missing.

Test #6: Faces and Names

Look at the following set of faces for 4 or 5 minutes; then cover it
up, and see how much you can remember in the second set. Take
this as an immediate or delayed memory test, as you choose.
After you fill in as much information as you can for the faces
that were in the first test, give yourself 1 point for each correct face
recognition, 1 point for the correct name, and 1 point for the correct
occupation. Subtract 3 points for each face you incorrectly identify
as having been in the first test. Then, try this test again in 30 days,
and compare the results. Make sure to write down whether you took
this test immediately or after a delay, so that when you repeat the
test, you use the same conditions.

Remembering Faces and Names

How well are you able to remember faces and the names and occupations
that go with them? In the following test, you’ll see a dozen
faces with the information about them. Then, you’ll see a set of faces
that includes most of the faces you have seen. How well do you remember
if you have seen that face and how well do you remember
what you know about that person?

Remembering Numbers

How good are you at remembering phone numbers, bank account
numbers, passwords, and other sets of numbers and letters? Here’s
a chance to test yourself in the following tests, where you have an
increasing number of numbers to remember. To do the test, look at
the initial list for 1 minute, then close the book and try to recall as
much as you can, using an immediate or delayed recall test. Write
down what you recall, and afterwards compare it to what’s in the
book. Give yourself 1 point for each number or letter in its correct
place in the sequence.

Test #4A: Lists

Take a minute to review the list and remember as much as you can.
Then, close the book and write down whatever you remember in
sequence. Give yourself 1 point for each item you remember on the
list—until you miss an item. Take this as either an immediate recall
test, or as a delayed recall test, where you do something else for 20
minutes and don’t think of anything on the test. In either case, use
the same timing—immediate or delayed—when you retake the test
using the list in Set 2, and compare how well you did after working
on memory improvement for 30 days.

Remembering Lists and Directions

Following are some tests for remembering lists, such as a shopping
list, and directions. How well can you recall what’s on the list? Sure
you can write down what you want to remember, but what if you
lose the list? Or what if someone gives you directions on the telephone
and you can’t write them down? Not only do you have to
remember the directions themselves, but it’s crucial to remember
them in the proper order.

Test #3B: Delayed Recognition

Now how well can you recognize what you saw when they are mixed
in with other words that you didn’t see before when you engage in
another activity before seeing what you can recognize? Take a
minute to look at the left-hand column of the following first list of
words; then cover up these words with a sheet of paper. But before
you do the recognition test with the second list, do something else
for 20 minutes. Again do whatever you want, such as taking a walk,
reading a newspaper, having a snack, or shooting baskets in your
backyard. Just don’t think about the words on the word list. Then,
for the test, look at the left-hand column of the second list directly
below it and check off which words you just saw on the first list.
When you finish, look at the first list again, score 1 point for each
word you recognized correctly, subtract 1 point for each incorrect
word, and total your score. Then, compare your results with the immediate
recognition test. Generally, you will recognize less accurately
than when you immediately tried to recognize the words. This
will give you a general sense of your ability to retain information in
your working memory and how quickly you forget. At the end of 30
days, repeat the test with the first list of words in the right-hand
column (Set 2) and the words in the second list, directly below it.
DELAYED RECOGNITION TEST
Set 1: To Test Yourself Now Set 2: To Test Yourself in 30 Days
First List First List
Gun Planet
Stairway Rice
Campsite Candy
Log Frog
Branch Stream
Paper Hole
Notebook Bandage
Chair Hammer
Radio Roof
Bank Color
Set 1: To Test Yourself Now Set 2: To Test Yourself in 30 Days
Second List Second List
(Which words from the first list are on this?) (Which words from the first list are on this?)
Rifle Stream
Stairway Planet
Radio Harp
Lantern Card
Donkey Candy
Branch Wind
Briefcase Hammer
Lamp Closet
River Purple
Paper Hole 50

Test #3A: Immediate Recognition

Take a minute to look at the left-hand column (Set 1) of the following
first list of words; then cover up these words with a sheet of
paper, and look at the left-hand column of the second list, directly
below it. Check off which words you just saw on the first list. When
you finish, look at the first list again, score 1 point for each word you
recognized correctly, subtract 1 point for each incorrect word, and
total your score. At the end of 30 days, repeat the test with the words
in the first list in the right-hand column (Set 2) and the words in
the second list, directly below it.
IMMEDIATE RECOGNITION TEST
Set 1: To Test Yourself Now Set 2: To Test Yourself in 30 Days
First List First List
Camel Jury
Cigarette Building
Sword House
Mule Cement
Book Flower
Floor Timer
Garden Pot
Tent Stove
Post Cord
Attic Fireplace
Second List Second List
(Which words from the first list are on this?) (Which words from the first list are on this?)
Cigar Clock
Horse House
Garden Jury
Stick Oven
Floor Fire
Post Cord
Sword Daisy
Wallet Cement
Book Ocean
Film Pot

Recognizing Words with Interference

How well can you recognize words that you saw when they are
mixed in with other words that you didn’t see before?

Test #2B: Delayed Recall

Now see how well you can do when you engage in another activity
before testing your recall. As in the first test, take a minute to look
at the following list of words, then close the book. But before you try
to recall, do something else for 20 minutes. Do whatever you want,
such as taking a walk, reading a newspaper, having a snack, or
shooting baskets in your backyard. Just don’t think about the words
on the word list. Then, see how many words you can write down
correctly from your memory in a minute or two. As before, when you
finish, look in the book and score 1 point for each correct word,
subtract 1 point for each incorrect word, and total your score. Compare
your results with the immediate recall test. Generally, you will
recall less than when you immediately tried to recall the words. This
will give you a general sense of your ability to retain information in
your working memory and how quickly you forget.

DELAYED RECALL TEST
Set 1: To Test Yourself Now Set 2: To Test Yourself in 30 Days
Bathtub Door
Computer Elephant
Printer Cow
Desk Snow
File Cabinet Mirror
Car Tree
Motorcycle Rose
Road River
Sign Fountain
Window Bucket 47

Test #2A: Immediate Recall

Take a minute to look at the following list of words; then close the
book, and see how many you can write down correctly from your
memory in a minute or two. Then, when you finish, look in the book
and score 1 point for each correct word, subtract 1 point for each
incorrect word, and total your score.

IMMEDIATE RECALL TEST
Set 1: To Test Yourself Now Set 2: To Test Yourself in 30 Days
Pencil Animal
Wood Fox
House Court
Book Movie
Television Pen
Box Circle
Lamp Elevator
Couch Farm
Night Factory
Moon Wall

Remembering Random Words

This is a classic test that memory researchers use—you are presented
with a list of random words (or words in a certain category), and
then you have to recall as many as you can, or you have to recognize
whether they are in another list. Here are series of word tests, and
you can easily have a friend or associate come up with additional
word tests for you. See how well you can do under different conditions.
There are two sets—one to test yourself now, the other to test
yourself later. Get a sheet of paper and a pencil to write down your
answers and scores. 46

Objective Tests of Your Different Memory Abilities

The following objective tests are other ways of testing your memory
for different types of information. Some of these tests will also show
how well you can avoid interference from similar types of information.
Again, determine your scores now, and test yourself a second
time in 30 days to see your progress. And if you continue to work on
improving your memory, try testing yourself every 30 days. To avoid
the effect of remembering what you have previously learned from a
test, test yourself with an alternate version of the test (such as new
sets of words and faces). You can use Set 2 for your second test or
work with a friend or associate to create another version of the test
for each other. (For example, ask a friend to come up with a list of
10 random words for you to remember.)

Test #1: Assessing Your Memory Skills

The following test is designed for you to subjectively reflect on your
memory abilities now. Make an extra copy of this test, so you can
answer it again after you have spent a month working on improving
your memory. That way, you can monitor any improvement. The first
time you take the test, answer each question as honestly as you can
and total up your score. This will help you notice the areas where
you especially need to work on memory improvement, such as learning
to pay better attention, increasing your ability to encode information,
and improving your ability to retrieve names, faces, places, and
dates. Rate your memory on a scale of 1 (you forget most or all of
the time) to 5 (you typically remember very well), and then obtain
an average for each category (total up the ratings in that category
and divide by the number in that category).

TEST #1: RATING MY MEMORY

My Overall Memory
My Memory for Everyday People, Places, and Things1
(average of my scores for the categories below)
People’s names
People’s faces
Where I put things (e.g., keys, eyeglasses)
Performing household chores
Directions to places
Personal dates (i.e., birthdays, anniversaries)
My Memory for Numbers
(average of my scores for the categories below)
Phone numbers I have just looked up
Phone numbers I use frequently
Bank account numbers
Computer passwords
Combinations for locks and safes
My Memory for Information
(average of my scores for the categories below)
Words
What someone has told me in a conversation
What I have learned in a classroom lecture
Reading a novel
Reading a nonfiction book
Reading an article
Reading the newspaper
My Memory for Activities
(average of my scores for the categories below)
Appointments
Performing household chores
Shopping for items at a store
Speaking in public
A meeting at work
My Memory for Events
(average of my scores for the categories below)
Earlier today
Yesterday
Last week
Last month
6 months to a year ago
1–5 years ago
6–10 years ago
When I was a child

After you finish rating each particular item, find the average for
remembering that type of information. Then, look at your ratings to
assess how well you are doing in different areas. Commonly, you will
find you remember best those things that are most important to you,
since you naturally pay more attention in those areas. But, where are
you especially weak? Those are areas ripe for improvement.
Use this test as a guide to help you determine where you especially
want to increase your memory. Later, after you have worked
on developing your memory over the next month (or however long
you take to do this), retest yourself without looking at how you rated
yourself before. Afterwards, compare your before-and-after ratings.
Generally, you will find you improve, though your subjective ratings
can be affected by other factors, such as how you are feeling when
you take the test.
In any case, your second set of scores can help you decide what
you want to work on next if you want to continue to improve your
memory. In fact, if you’re into charts and graphs, you can plot your
ratings every month to chart your continued progress.

Self-Assessment

This first test will provide you with a baseline measure of your feelings
about how good your memory skills are right now.

How Good Is Your Memory?

When you learn any kind of new subject or skill, to see how much
you have improved, it’s good to see where you started from. So this
chapter is designed to provide you with a baseline showing how you
feel about your ability to remember now and how you perform on
different types of memory tests. Then, you can repeat the tests after
you finish this book and examine the changes. You should expect to
do better the second time.
These tests will give you a general idea of where you are now,
though they are not scientific tests. The first test depends on your
honest assessment of your memory abilities, and it depends on both
your own candor and how accurately you make your assessment. If
you approach the test with a similar attitude both times you take it
(now and after 30 days), you should be reasonably accurate in assessing
your own feelings and perceptions about your memory.
In the second set of tests, there is a problem with taking exactly
the same test as a before-and-after test, because anything you remember
about the first test will improve how you do on the second
one. I have tried to overcome this problem by giving you similar types
of tests to take before and after you read the book, so you can compare
your score. Using the techniques you have learned, you should
do better after 30 days.
Keeping those cautions in mind, here are the tests. I have drawn

Remembering What You Experienced

Finally, there is one other area of long-term memory that has been
much studied by researchers—an area that cognitive psychologists
call ‘‘autobiographical memory.’’31 It includes not only long-ago personal
experiences, but also your observations when you witness a
major event, such as a crime.
Commonly, this kind of memory includes a narrative or story
about the event that you relate. But it additionally includes all sorts
of elaborations that contribute to the significance of the story, such
as the imagery you associate with the event and your emotional reactions
to it. These memories also contribute to creating your personal
identity, history, and sense of self, because they are all about what
you experienced.
Researchers are especially interested in looking at how well
these autobiographical memories match what really happened. In
other words, is your recall correct? What is especially interesting
about this type of memory is the way errors can creep in, so you have
distorted memories or remember things that didn’t even happen—
even though your memory assures you that you really were there.
You may make such mistakes for various reasons. One reason is you
want to keep your memories consistent with your own current selfimage
or your current perceptions of the person involved. Another
reason is that you may find something about the memory painful,
so you would rather not recall it or want to edit out the painful parts
from the past.
In general, though, as researchers have found, your memory is
accurate in remembering what’s central to the event. By contrast,
you are more likely to make mistakes in correctly recalling less important
details or specific small bits of tangential information. As
Matlin notes, citing a study by R. Sutherland and H. Hayes, ‘‘When
people do make mistakes, they generally concern peripheral details
and specific information about commonplace events, rather than
central information about important events.’’32 In fact, researchers
have found it’s better not to try to remember a lot of small details;
that’s where you are more likely to make mistakes.
Such mistakes can also occur when you have what researchers
call a ‘‘flashbulb memory,’’ which occurs in a situation where you
initially are involved in, learn of, or observe an event that is very
unusual, surprising, or emotionally arousing. It’s called a flashbulb
memory because it may be especially vivid, such as a shocking event
like 9/11, some especially good news, or the accidental death of
someone close to you. Typically, you are likely to recall exactly where
you were, what happened during the event, what you were doing
when you heard the news, who told you, your own feelings about
the event, and what happened afterwards. Yet, while the very vividness
and distinctiveness of the incident may lead you to remember
it in more detail and with more accuracy than everyday events, particularly
when you talk about it more with others, think about it
more, and consider how the event affects you, you may still make
mistakes. One source of confusion may be the comments and reactions
of others, which may shape your own experience and how you
remember that experience. Then, too, many details may fade over
time.
Another type of error that can creep in to any kind of autobiographical
memory is what researchers call ‘‘consistency bias’’—our
tendency to make what happened in the past more consistent with
our current feelings, beliefs, and general knowledge or expectations
about the way things are.33 This overall outlook we have for seeing
the world is what cognitive psychologists call our ‘‘schema’’—our
generalized knowledge or expectation from past experiences with an
event, object, or person that influences our perception and response
now.34 Thus, we may tend to downplay what seems inconsistent
with who we are now—or who we think others to be. For example,
if you really like your Aunt Mildred and think she is a cool person to
be around, you may tend to diminish or forget your feelings that she
used to treat you badly when you were young. Or if you have become
a solid conservative citizen now, you may tend to downplay or forget
many times when you were a spacey liberal activist in the past.
Thus, when you use memory recall techniques to tap into your
personal autobiography, you have to pay careful attention so you can
distinguish what you really do remember and what you might have
added to or subtracted from your memory of that experience later.
This caution is especially applicable when it comes to eyewitness
reports. You may think you have accurately seen something, but you
really haven’t. There’s a classic test that teachers sometimes do with
students where they have one or two people suddenly come into the
class and do something dramatic—like one person chasing another
with a gun or they have a mock fight—and then run out of the room.
The teacher will then ask the students what they recall, and typically
there are mistakes in identifications. The wrong person is seen holding
the gun, the students think the man with the mustache is clean
shaven, and so on. No wonder that researchers have found that in
over half the cases where defendants have been mistakenly convicted
it’s because of faulty eyewitness testimony.35
One reason that eyewitness memories are often faulty is because
of what researchers call the ‘‘misinformation effect,’’ which occurs
when people are given incorrect information about what they have
observed and they later recall the incorrect information rather than
what they actually saw.36 This disruption is due to what cognitive
psychologists call ‘‘retroactive interference,’’ which occurs when recently
learned new material interferes with recalling a previous
memory correctly. For example, you see something very clearly, but
then someone provides misinformation in asking you a question.
Later you can’t remember what you initially observed because you
are recalling the new information, or you are confused about what
you really saw.37
A good example of this retroactive interference is when a lawyer
or cop is interviewing a witness who has seen a crime occur and asks
what happened when he or she saw the person holding a gun.
Maybe the accused person didn’t have a gun at all, but the witness
will now remember him holding a gun. And so a false memory is
born. In fact, there have been cases where individuals have come to
believe that they committed a crime under intensive questioning.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was an explosion of
false memories that occurred when individuals reported early memories
of childhood abuse that they had forgotten or repressed. While
some of these reports were valid, in many cases they were
remembering imagined memories, sometimes suggested by therapists or because
of the influence of recovered memory therapy groups. A
similar situation has occurred in the more recent priest child abuse
cases involving young males, where some accusers have recalled
long-repressed memories while others have remembered events that
never happened.
The reason for these recovered false memories is that sometimes
therapists probing for reasons for a person’s current problem will
make suggestions while asking their questions. Then clients can
come to believe that they do remember something, which memory
becomes elaborated through further therapy, hypnosis, and interactions
with other clients who are recovering their own memories. Indeed,
cognitive psychologists are able to produce false memories in
the lab. For example, they will give the subject a list containing a
family of related words (such as water, stream, lake, boat, swim)
and later the subject comes up with a related word (e.g., river) that
wasn’t on the original list.38 So the subjects are creating their own
false memories through their active imagination.
So what can you do to remember past events in your life more
accurately? How do you avoid the effects of suggestion, retroactive
interference, and misinformation distorting a past memory or creating
a new one that you think occurred in the past? 42

How Do the Experts Do It?

Given all these difficulties in retrieving a memory correctly—from
improper coding and distortion to interference from previous memories—
how do the memory experts do it? What tricks and techniques
do they use to make them so much better?
First of all, if it makes you feel any better, experts are generally
experts in a particular area, where they have studied the subject matter
intensively. In other words, most experts gain their skill through
extensive training and practice. As Matlin notes of the many experts
studied who have great memories for chess, sports, maps, and musical
notations, ‘‘In general, researchers have found a strong positive
correlation between knowledge about an area and memory performance
in that area . . . [and] people who are expert in one area seldom
display outstanding general memory skills.’’27 For example, researchers
have found that chess masters may be experts in remembering
chess positions and some are even able to hold the positions on multiple
boards in their head, but they are similar to nonexperts in their
general cognitive and perceptual abilities. Moreover, memory experts
don’t have exceptionally high scores on intelligence tests. Researchers
even found that one horse racing expert only had an IQ of 92 and
an eighth-grade education.28
Rather, what makes these memory experts so good at what they
do is that they have become especially knowledgeable and practiced
in a particular area—so you can do it, too. In particular, researchers
have found that memory experts have these key traits—and you’ll
find some techniques drawn from these findings in later chapters.
• Memory experts have a well-organized structure of knowledge,
which they have carefully learned in a particular field.29
• The experts generally use more vivid imagery to help them remember.
• The experts are more likely to organize any new material they
have to recall into organized and meaningful chunks of information.
• The experts use special rehearsal techniques when they practice,
such as focusing on particular words or images that are
likely to help them remember the rest of that material; they
don’t try to remember everything.
• The experts more effectively can fill in the blanks when they
have missing information in material they have partially
learned and remembered, such as when they are able to fill in
the rest of a story they are recalling and recounting to others.
These techniques, in turn, work well for anyone, such as professional
speakers and actors, who have to encode and remember a lot
of information in their field—and these are techniques you can use,
too. For example, professional actors use deeper rather than superficial
processing techniques, such as thinking about the meanings and
motivations of the character they are portraying. They also use visualization
to see the person with whom they are talking as they practice
their lines, and they try to put themselves in the appropriate
mood and think about how the story relates to themselves.30 In
short, they don’t just try to remember a lot of lines by rote, but they
create a rich context for encoding and later retrieving the memory of
their lines. 38

Retrieving Your Memories

Once a memory is encoded in long-term memory, there are several
ways to retrieve it—and many of the techniques described in later
chapters will help you do that.
Psychologists distinguish between two ways of looking at how
well you retrieve a memory—either explicitly through recall or recognition,
or implicitly, when your memory enables you to do some activity,
even though you aren’t consciously trying to remember how to
do it.23
Your recall is your ability to call up a particular memory; your
recognition is your ability to recognize whether or not you know
or are familiar with something. As you well know from your own
experience, it’s always more difficult to recall something than to simply
recognize it as being familiar. This is the difference between having
to come up with a definition or identification for something on
a test versus selecting a multiple-choice or true/false answer.
One way that psychologists test for recall ability—an approach
that will be incorporated in some later exercises for memory improvement—
is asking subjects to read a list of words, then take a
break, and later try to write down as many words as they can. Or
they might do this exercise with numbers, nonsense syllables, cities,
animal names, or anything else they choose.
They test for recognition in a very similar way. Subjects are given
a list of words or other items and, after a break, are shown another
list and asked to identify the items on the original list.24 In both
recall and recognition, errors can easily creep in, such as not remembering
an item on a list or thinking that something is on the list that
isn’t.
As for implicit memory, a typical example of testing for this
ability is to give subjects in an experiment a list of items with some
information left out—such as having missing letters in words or having
some missing lines in a drawing.25 Then, the subjects have to fill
in what’s missing. If they have seen the words, drawings, or other
items in the test before, they will be able to complete the items more
quickly and accurately, because they have a memory of seeing those
items before.
Whatever the type of task, if you have previous experience with
the material or skill involved, you will be able to do it better. For
example, even if you haven’t ridden a bike, picked up a tennis racquet,
or spoken a language you learned in college for many years,
you will generally find if you are in a situation where you have to
use that skill again, you will be able to use it even if you are a little
rusty. When you work on learning and remembering that ability
again, you will learn it faster than you did the first time.
Moreover, if your experience is more recent, you will be more
likely to recall, recognize, or use an implicit memory to complete a
task. So it makes sense to refresh your memory closer to the time
when you will need it—otherwise, a good recollection of something
may not be there when you need it. For example, a woman in a
Native American literature class I took thought she would get a leg
up on the course if she read over the material the first night after
the class. But when it came time to take a short quiz on the reading,
she completely blanked out on the stories. However, when the professor
discussed the books later in the course, she found the material
familiar.
That loss of memory is what happens if you learn something too
far away in time from when you need to recall that information and
don’t try to refresh your memory closer to the time you need to know
this material. Your memory of something you have learned gradually
fades if you don’t use that memory. So while you may be able to
recognize that you learned something days later or may be able to
pull up relevant information with a specific trigger word, phrase, or
sentence, a more general recall task will leave you blank. As you’ll
learn in subsequent chapters, there are strategies to use in order to
freshen up selective memories and decide when to learn what you
need to know.
Another complication to storing and retrieving new information
is that when you learn something, what you have previously learned
may interfere with learning something new. Psychologists call this
‘‘proactive interference’’—and there can be even more interference
when the two things you are trying to learn are similar.26 Your previous
memories interfere with what you are learning now. For instance,
you meet a woman named Angie at a party and you already
know an Annie—you might mistakenly call Angie, Annie, and even
if you are corrected, you may continue to make that same mistake.
Or say you are trying to learn about the new regulations affecting
your insurance policy. You may find your memory of the old policy
interfering, so you confuse the two. Improving your memory will
help you deal with this proactive interference problem. Incidentally,
don’t confuse proactive interference, which is a problem when past
learning interferes with future learning, with proactive listening and
observing, which is something you want to do so you more actively
learn something when you listen or look closely.

The Influence of Emotion and Mood

Finally, cognitive psychologists have found that your emotional feelings
and mood can affect what you remember. Not only is there the
same kind of matching effect that there is for context, so you will
remember more if you are in a similar emotional state when you try
to retrieve a memory, but you will remember more if you feel the
memory is a pleasant one.16 Here are three major findings about
memory, emotions, and mood.
• You will recall pleasant information more accurately and more quickly,
which is sometimes called the ‘‘Pollyanna Principle.’’ Whether
you are trying to remember what you have perceived, what
someone has said, a decision you have made, or other types of
information, if it’s more pleasant to remember, you will remember
better. While psychologists have tested this principle
in the laboratory, such as by asking subjects to remember
words that are pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant, or asking them
to remember colors, fruits, vegetables, or other items that are
more or less pleasant,17 the principle makes sense in everyday
life. For example, wouldn’t you rather recall something you
enjoy that gives you good feelings than something you don’t
like and makes you feel bad? In fact, there is a whole body
of research that indicates that people will repress or suppress
memories of experiences that are unpleasant, such as memories
of early childhood abuse.18
• You will more accurately recall neutral information associated with
pleasant information or a pleasant context, or as psychologists
phrase it, you will have ‘‘more accurate recall for neutral stimuli
associated with pleasant stimuli.’’19 Psychologists have
come to this conclusion by making comparisons in the lab,
such as whether subjects better remember commercials or the
brands featured in them when they see them before or after
violent and nonviolent films. Again and again, psychologists
have found significantly better recall when nonviolent, and
presumably more pleasant, films are shown.20 The finding
makes perfect sense and you can see examples of how this
works in everyday life. For example, when you are experiencing
or seeing something pleasant, you will feel more comfortable
and relaxed, which will contribute to your remembering
something you read, hear, or perceive in this relaxed state. By
contrast, if you are experiencing something unpleasant, you
will feel more stress and tension; the experience may even interfere
with your ability to concentrate, such as by distracting
your attention, so you encode and remember less.
• You will retain your pleasant memories longer, while unpleasant memories
will fade faster. It’s a principle some researchers discovered
when they asked subjects to record personal events for about
three months and rate how pleasant they were, and three
months later, asked them to rate the events again. While there
was little change for the neutral and pleasant events, most of
the subjects rated the less pleasant events as more pleasant
when they recalled them again. The one unexpected finding
was that if subjects tended to feel depressed, they were more
likely to better recall the unpleasant memories.21 But this finding
makes sense when you think about it. You are more likely
to focus on and remember the experiences you have found
pleasant in your life, since they will make you feel better. But if
you are unhappy, you will be more likely to recall the negative,
unpleasant experiences you have had, though these will contribute
to keeping you feeling down.
Cognitive psychologists have additionally found that just as
there is improved memory when the context matches, so there is a
match between what you remember and your mood. If you are in a
good mood, you will remember pleasant material better than unpleasant
material, while if you are in a bad mood, you will better
remember unpleasant material. Likewise, if you are a generally upbeat
person, your memory for positive information will be greater
than the memory of someone who tends to be down and depressed.
In turn, these positive memories will help keep someone who is positive
upbeat, while a depressed person could become even more down
in the dumps as they remember more negative memories.22 In other
words, as the old popular song puts it: ‘‘accentuate the positive’’ in
what you think about and remember if you want to feel better. 34

Using the Power of Context and Specificity

Another way to increase your encoding ability is to incorporate the
specific context, and then use that context when you seek to retrieve
that memory.11 A good example of how the power of context works
is when you meet someone at an event and later you run into that
person dressed differently on the street. You may not even recognize
the person or you may only have a vague sense of familiarity—you
think you may have seen that person before but you don’t have the
slightest idea where. But if the other person has a better memory for
your meeting and mentions where you met, the memory of who that
person is may come flooding back. Why? Because you now have the
context for your meeting, which cues you in to who this person is
and what transpired in your meeting.
A similar kind of experience may occur when you go to get something
from another room but once you get there, you don’t have any
idea why you are there. No, you are not suffering the early stages of
Alzheimer’s disease. You have simply moved out of the context in
which you encoded the item and remembered why you need it. In a
different context, you don’t remember what you were looking for.
But once you return to the original room, you will remember.
Psychologists have developed some terms that highlight the importance
of context for remembering. One is the ‘‘encoding specificity
principle,’’ which means that you will better recall something if
you are in a context that’s similar to where you encoded the information—
that is, when you entered it into your long-term memory.12 By
contrast, you are more likely to forget when you experience a different
context. Two other terms that psychologists use to refer to this
phenomenon are that your memory is ‘‘context-dependent’’ or that
‘‘transfer-appropriate processing’’ helps you better remember.13 In
other words, if you are having trouble remembering something, it
can help to go back into the setting where you first encoded it into
memory. Or if you can’t actually go there, you can mentally project
yourself into that setting—one of the techniques I’ll discuss further
in Chapters 24 and 26.
Repeatedly, psychologists have found examples of this encoding
specificity principle in their research, in which memory is dependent
on the context where the original memory is encoded. For example,
they found that people hearing a male or female speak some words
were more likely to remember the word when they heard the words
spoken again by someone of the same sex.14 They have also found
that subjects will recall an earlier experience in extensive detail
when triggered by a present-day stimulus that evokes that experience.
For example, an image of an exotic bird you haven’t seen in
years brings back memories of going on a birding trip to the tropics.
While the physical context can serve as a reminder, so can the
mental context, because it’s not just how the environment looks but
how it feels.15 For example, you may experience an extremely hot
day in one place that brings up memories of how you felt when it
was extremely hot someplace else; a bitter cold day now can bring
up memories of a bitter cold winter long ago.

Using the Self-Referent Effect for a Better Memory

The way the self-referent effect works is that if you can relate the
information to yourself, you will better remember it. Psychologists
have found this association again and again, when they have asked
subjects to decide if a particular word could apply to themselves,
rather than just trying to remember the word based on how it looks
or sounds, or on its meaning.9 One reason is that as you think about
how something relates to you, you make it more distinctive and you
elaborate on what that word means to you. The same process works
when you think about anything, such as how someone you have just
met might be able to help you or how you might be able to use a
new product you are reading about in your own life. As you think
about it, you make that information more distinctive and you elaborate
on it by considering what it means to you. You might also be
more likely to continue to think about it, a process that psychologists
call ‘‘rehearsal,’’ as you repeatedly call up a new idea, name, or any
other sort of new information.
Intriguingly, psychologists have found that this self-reference
approach lights up a particular area of the brain—the right prefrontal
cortex, which researchers suggest may be an area of the brain
associated with the concept of self.10 So as you use these various
techniques—for deep processing—such as finding ways to increase
the way a particular bit of information relates to you—it has a direct
effect on your brain processing, too. No wonder these techniques
work so well. You are not only creating more meanings and associations
for words and relating them to yourself, but your actions are
activating your brain centers involved with language and your sense
of self. 30

Encoding Your Memories

Regardless of which type of memory you are placing in long-term
memory, the transfer process from working to long-term memory
depends on encoding—the action of placing a particular bit of information
there. The process is a little like placing a file folder, in which
you have just placed some documents, into a file cabinet.
The more carefully you place it there and the more clearly you
identify what’s in that file, the better you will be able to retrieve it
later. In fact, psychologists distinguish between two types of encoding:
psychologists call this the ‘‘levels-of-processing’’ or ‘‘depthof-
processing.’’ You can either encode something through a more
shallow type of encoding or a deeper level of processing.5 The difference
affects your ability to retrieve information later.
When you use a more shallow type of processing, you are essentially
using your senses to place the information in long-term memory.
For example, you are focusing on the way a word or image looks
or sounds. In the tests psychologists use for testing memory, this
appearance or sound might be distinguished by whether a word is
typed in capital or small letters, rhymes with another word, or comes
before or after another word in a sequence. In the case of an image,
your focus would be on its appearance, such as its shape, color, or
identity. Or in everyday life, you might do shallow processing when
you remember someone by his or her facial features or what he or
she is wearing.
By contrast, when you use a deep processing approach, you are
looking at the meaning of something. For instance, if it’s a word, you
might think of whether it fits in a sentence or what types of images
and associations it brings to mind. If it’s an image, you would think
about its associations, too. And in everyday life, you would seek to
remember more details about someone beyond his or her superficial
appearance, such as his or her occupation, where and how you met,
and your thoughts about how you might be able to have a mutually
profitable relationship in the future.
As psychologists have found, when you use deep processing to
remember something, you will better recall it later. Why? Because of
two key factors: (1) making the information more distinctive and
(2) elaborating on it.6 For example, you might make the name of
someone you have just met more distinctive by identifying something
unusual about that name or thinking about how that person
is unique, such as if that person has an unusual occupation. Or you
might elaborate on some new information by thinking about how it
connects to something else you already know or about its meaning
and significance, such as when you read a news article and think
about the impact that an event discussed in the article will have.
In addition, psychologists have discovered three other factors
that contribute to deeper encoding and therefore better retrieval: (1)
the self-referent effect, (2) the power of context and specificity, and
(3) the influence of the emotions and mood. Moreover, psychologists
have found that these deeper encoding processes make more of an
impact within the brain itself than shallower processing. For example,
they have found that when subjects in experiments engage in
deep processing, they activate the left prefrontal cortex, which is associated
with verbal and language processing.7 This deep processing
approach has also been found to be especially effective in trying to
remember faces, by paying more attention to the distinctions between
features and consciously trying to recall more facial features.8
You’ll see more about techniques that are based on each of these
factors in subsequent chapters. But for now, here’s how these different
factors contribute to better remembering something.

Procedural Memory

This is your memory for your knowledge about how to do something.
4 Commonly, once this knowledge gets transferred into your
long-term memory it becomes automatic. You don’t have to think
about driving a car, for example, or opening up a word-processing
program and starting to type. But like any skill, if you don’t use it,
you can forget exactly what you are doing, much like any unused
mechanical device might become rusty or a computer program might
become corrupted and stop working properly.

Semantic Memory

This is your memory for what you know about the world. It is like
an organized base of knowledge; it includes any factual or other information
you have learned, including all the words you know in
any language.3 You might think of this semantic memory as your
internal encyclopedia or reference desk, which you are continually
consulting as you speak, read the newspaper, listen to the radio or
TV, or consider the validity of new information from any source. And
just as your episodic memory can be faulty at times, so can your
semantic memory.

Episodic Memory

This is your memory for experiences or events that happened to you
at any time in the past—from many years ago to just a few minutes
ago. When you call up these memories, you travel backwards in time
so you can experience what happened in the past—or at least what
you remember happened, since this recollection is subjective.2 Thus,
someone else might have a different memory of what happened and
a video recording might show a still different reality. So while your
memory may well be accurate, it is also subject to distortion for various
reasons, such as your faulty encoding of this memory in the first
place or a later modification of the memory to conform to your selfperception
of how you are now. Then, too, your memory might be
modified by later suggestions about what you experienced; this
sometimes happens in conversations and interviews, as when a cop
interviews a witness or suspect with leading questions that shape
what the person remembers.

The Three Types of Long-Term Memory

Commonly, psychologists divide long-term memory into three types
of memory, although this may be more of a convenience for thinking
about how we remember than actual distinctions. However,
different techniques will help you improve in each of these areas, so these
distinctions have practical uses.
These three types of memory include episodic, semantic, and
procedural memory, which have the following characteristics discussed
below.

How Your Long-Term MemoryWorks

In the last page, I described how your working short-term memory
takes in new information and then passes some of it on to your
long-term memory. In this chapter, I’ll describe how your long-term
memory works, so you will better understand the techniques used
for putting information into your long-term memory—and later, retrieving
information from there. Again I have drawn on the latest
findings from cognitive psychologists in writing this chapter.
You might think of your long-term memory as akin to a hard
drive on a computer, whereas your working memory is like your
RAM (random access memory), which you use in processing current
tasks and which has only a limited space. Your long-term memory
is very large, and contains everything you’ve ever put into it, from
experiences to images and information. You may have to do some
digging around to find specific information. Sometimes, as when
you’re struggling to recall something you haven’t thought about for
a very long time, you may think certain information has been deleted,
but it may well be there if you know how to retrieve it.

Your Central Executive

4. Your Central Executive. Finally, your central executive pulls together
and integrates the information from these three other systems—
the visuospatial sketchpad, the phonological loop, and the
episodic buffer. In addition, this executive function helps to determine
where you are going to place your attention and suppresses
irrelevant or unimportant information, so you can stay focused on
what’s important and not be distracted by what isn’t. It also helps
you plan strategies and coordinate behavior, so you decide what to
do next and what not to do. Then you don’t get pulled away from
what you most want to do.26
Think of this as the top executive or senior manager in charge of
all of these other systems, which doesn’t store information itself.
Rather, like the executive of a company, it sets the priorities for what
these other sections of your memory should be doing. Or as Matlin
puts it: ‘‘like an executive supervisor in an organization . . . the [central]
executive decides which issues deserve attention and which
should be ignored. The executive also selects strategies, figuring out
how to tackle a problem.’’27
For example, when you decide what task you are going to work
on at work and seek to remember what your boss has instructed you
to do, along with what else you know about how to best perform
the task, that’s your central executive pulling together what is most
relevant from the other sections of your working and long-term
memory, so you can better perform the task.
* * *
So there you have it—the basic structure of how your memory
works, according to the latest research from cognitive psychologists.
In subsequent chapters, I’ll be drawing on this model as I describe
different techniques for optimizing your memory. Accordingly, you’ll
find techniques for strengthening your ability to work with images
(your visuospatial sketchpad), with verbal and audio input (your
phonological loop), with your ability to temporarily coordinate the
input from the other components of your memory (your episodic
buffer), and with your ability to use all of this information in a mindful,
coordinated, and strategic way (your central executive). 26

Your Episodic Buffer

3. Your Episodic Buffer. This section of your working memory is
essentially a temporary storehouse where you can collect and combine
information that you have gotten from your visuospatial sketchpad
and phonological loop, along with your long-term memory.24
Think of this like a notebook or page in a word processing program
where you are working with sentences, graphic images, and then
thinking about what else you would like to add from what you already
know. As Margaret Matlin describes it, the episodic buffer ‘‘actively
manipulates information so that you can interpret an earlier
experience, solve new problems, and plan future activities.’’25
For example, say a co-worker says something to you at work that
offends you. This is where you might consider the words the person
just said, the context in which he said it, and take into consideration
what you remember from how this co-worker has acted toward you
before (which comes from your long-term memory). Then, this episodic
buffer helps you quickly decide what to do in light of how you
have interpreted this offending remark.

Your Phonological Loop

2. Your Phonological Loop. Just as your visuospatial sketchpad
stores images briefly while you are working with them, your phonological
loop stores a small number of sounds for a brief period.21 Generally,
researchers have found that you can hold about as many
words as you can mentally pronounce to yourself in 1.5 seconds, so
you can remember more short words than long ones.22
A good example of how this works is when you are trying to
remember what you or someone else has just said. Without memory
training to put those words in long-term memory, you will normally
only be able to clearly remember back what has been said in the last
1.5 seconds, though you will remember the gist of what you or the
other person has said. Also, because of this 1.5-second limit, you will
be better able to remember more shorter names than longer ones,
such as when you are introduced to a number of people at a business
mixer or cocktail party. It’s simply much easier to remember names
like Brown and Cooper than longer and more unusual ones.
You’ll also find that just as working with different types of visual
imagery can cause interference, so can working with different types
of audio sounds. For example, if you are trying to remember a phone
number and someone says something to you, that can interfere with
your ability to remember that number. But if you are looking at
something while you are trying to remember the number, that won’t
interfere as long as you continue to pay attention to remembering
that number, since your visual observation is processed in your visuospatial
sketchpad.
Then, too, just as similar visual imagery can cause memory errors,
so can hearing similar sounding words or numbers, such as
when you find yourself meeting a Margaret, Maggie, and Mary at a
party. The names can blend together in your mind and you have
trouble remembering who is who. Or say you are trying to remember
a phone number you have gotten from a message so you can write it
down.Well, if you are given two phone numbers to remember—such
as this is my land line and this is my cell phone—the two numbers
can interfere with each other, so you might mix up numbers or just
not remember at all. Or if you are trying to recall and write down a
number that’s close to another phone number you already know,
that could interfere with your ability to remember the new one.
But the reason that visual images won’t interfere with trying to
remember words or other audio sounds, as long as you are attending
to both, is that the audio processing occurs in a different section of
your brain—in the left hemisphere of your brain, which is the side
of your brain that handles language. Plus the auditory information
is stored in the parietal lobe of your brain, though when you practice
working with this information, your frontal lobe section that processes
speech will become active too.

Your Visuospatial Sketchpad

1. Your Visuospatial Sketchpad. Consider this a drawing pad in
which you place visual images as you see something or where you
sketch the images you create in your mind when someone tells you
something.20 For example, as you watch a TV show or movie, the
series of images you see get placed on this sketchpad, and some of
the most memorable will move on to your long-term memory. You
won’t remember every detail, since there are thousands of such images
zipping by in a minute. But your memory for these images will
string them together—and as you improve your memory for visual
details, you will be able to notice and remember more.
This is also the section of your memory that works on turning
what you are hearing or thinking about into visual images. For example,
as you read or hear a story, this is where you create images
for what you are listening to, so it becomes like a movie in your
mind. Or suppose you are trying to work out a math problem in your
mind. This is where you would see the numbers appear, such as if
you are trying to multiply 24 33 and don’t already have a multiplication
table for that problem in your mind. You would see the individual
rows as you multiply and then add them together.
However, while you might be able to see and keep in memory
one image very well, you will have less ability as the number of images
increase, and you may find that one image interferes with another.
For example, if you are driving while trying to think about
and visualize the solution to some kind of problem, your thoughts
could well interfere with your driving. I found this out for myself
when I was trying to multiply some numbers in my mind and took
the wrong turn-off because I was distracted by seeing the problem
in my mind. But if you are only listening to music on the radio or to
someone speaking without forming images, that will not interfere—
or at least to the same degree.
You might think of this process of trying to work with more and
more images at the same time as looking at the windows on a computer
screen. As you add more windows to work with at the same
time, the individual windows get smaller and smaller, as do the images;
you are less able to see what is in each image distinctly, and
your attention to one window may be distracted by what is flashing
by in another.
Intriguingly, brain researchers (also called neuroscientists) have
found that these images you see in your visuospatial sketchpad correspond
to real places in your brain. As neuroscientists have found,
when you work with a visual image, it activates the right hemisphere
of your cortex, the top section of your brain, and in particular they
activate the occipital lobe, at the rear of your cortex. Then, as you
engage in some mental task involving this image, your frontal lobe
will get in on the action, too.
Researchers have been able to tell what part of the brain is associated
with different types of thinking by using PET (positron emission
tomography) scans, where they measure the blood flow to the
brain by injecting a person with a radioactive chemical just before
they perform some kind of mental task. They find that certain
sections of the brain have more blood flow, indicating more activity
there for different types of mental tasks. 23

The Four Components of Your Working Memory

I have been describing the working memory as a single thing—like
a temporary storage box. In fact, cognitive psychologists today think
of the memory as having several components, and you can work on
making improvements for each of these components to improve the
initial processing of items in your memory. You might think of this
process as fine-tuning the different components in a home entertainment
system. For optimal quality and enjoyment, you need to fully
coordinate your big-screen television, VCR, DVD, cable or satellite
hookup, and sound system.
According to this current working memory model, which was
developed by Alan Baddeley in 2000, there are four major components
that together enable you to hold several bits or chunks of information
in your mind at the same time, so your mind can work on
this information and then use it.17 Commonly, these bits of information
will be interrelated, such as when you are reading a sentence
and need to remember the beginning before you get to the end—
though as a sentence gets longer and more complicated, you may
find that you are losing the sense of it, especially if you get distracted
while you are reading. But sometimes you might juggle some disparate
bits of information, such as when you are driving and trying to
remember where to turn off at the same time that you are having a
conversation with a friend. Another example of this juggling is when
you use your working memory to do mental arithmetic, like when
you are balancing a checkbook; thinking about a problem and trying
to figure out how to solve it; or following a discussion at a meeting
and comparing what one person has just argued with what someone
else said before.
The four key working memory components are coordinated by a
kind of manager called the ‘‘central executive,’’ which is in charge
of the other three components: the ‘‘visuospatial sketchpad,’’ the
‘‘episodic buffer,’’ and the ‘‘phonological loop.’’ Since they work independently
of each other, you can handle a series of different memory
tasks at the same time, such as remembering a visual image at
the same time that you remember something you are listening to.
You might think of these separate components as all part of a workbench
that processes any information coming into it, such as the
perceptions from the senses and any long-term memories pulled out
of storage. Then, your working memory variously handles, combines,
or transforms this material and passes some of these materials it has
worked on into your long-term memory.18 So one way to improve
your memory is to improve the ability of each of these elements of
your working memory to process information so that you can more
effectively and efficiently send the information you want into your
long-term memory.
A chart of these four components of your working memory,
which is based on Alan Baddeley’s working memory model, looks
something like this:
So what exactly do these four components do? Here’s the latest
scoop on what modern psychologists are thinking:

Some Barriers to Remembering

Researchers have found that there are some cognitive barriers to a
better memory that will slow you down. One is having longer names
or words, especially when they have odd spellings and many syllables.
Even trying to take a mental picture of the name or word may
not work, because saying it verbally to yourself is an important part
of putting a new name or word into your memory.
For example, I found the long words and names a real stumbling
block when I tried to learn Russian two times—once when I was
still in college, and later when I was taking occasional classes at a
community college in San Francisco. I could even manage seeing the
words in Cyrillic, converting them into their English sound equivalent.
But once the words grew to more than seven or eight letters, I
had to slow down to sound out each syllable and it was a real struggle
to remember. Had I known the principle of chunking back then,
I’m sure I would have caught on much sooner.
Another barrier to memory is interference; if some other name,
word, or idea that you already have in your working memory is similar
to what you are learning, it can interfere with your remembering
something new correctly. And the more similar the two items, the
greater the interference16 and the more likely you are to mix them
up. Again, researchers have come to these conclusions by looking at
words (or even nonsense words) and pictures, and asking subjects
to remember these items after learning a series of similar items. But
you can take steps to keep what you have learned before from interfering
with what you learn in the future. As you’ll discover in Chapter
5 on paying attention, you can stop the interference by intensely
focusing on what you want to remember and turning your attention
away from what is similar and interfering with your memory now.

The Power of Your Working Memory

How much information can you actually hold in your working memory—
what can you deal with on your desktop at one time? Well,
when researchers began studying the working memory, they came
up with some of the findings that are still accepted and incorporated
into models of memory today.
One of these findings is the well-known Magic Number Seven
principle, which was first written about by George Miller in 1956 in
an article titled ‘‘The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two:
Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.’’ He suggested
that we can only hold about seven items, give or take two—or
five to nine items—in our short-term memory (which was the term
originally used for the working memory). However, if you group
items together into what Miller calls ‘‘chunks’’—units of short-term
memory composed of several strongly related components—you can
remember more.13 And in Chapter 12 you’ll learn more about how to
do your own chunking to improve your memory capacity.
You can see examples of how this Number Seven principle and
chunking work if you consider your phone number and social security
number. One reason the phone number was originally seven
numbers and divided into two groups of numbers is because of this
principle—then when the area code was added, the phone number
was split up or chunked into three sections. Similarly, your social
security number is divided into three chunks. And when you look at
your bank account, you’ll see that number is chunked up into several
sections. As for memory experts who can reel off long strings of
numbers, they do their own mental chunking so they can remember.
They don’t have a single, very long string of numbers in their mind.
However you chunk it, though, whatever material comes into
your working or short-term memory is frequently forgotten if you
hold it in your memory for less than a minute14—a finding repeatedly
confirmed by hundreds of studies by cognitive psychologists.
That’s why you normally have to do something to make that memory
memorable if you want to retain it.
Yet, while you want to improve your memory for things you
want to remember, you don’t want to try to improve it for everything.
Otherwise your mind would be so hopelessly cluttered, you
would have trouble retrieving what you want. For example, think of
the many activities and thoughts you experience each day, many of
them part of a regular routine. Well, normally, you don’t want to
remember the minutia of all that, lest you drown in an overwhelming
flood of perceptual data. It would be like having an ocean of
memories, where the small memory fish you want to catch easily
slip away and get lost in the vast watery expanses. But if something
unusual happens—say a robber suddenly appears in the bank where
you are about to a make a deposit—then you do want to remember
the event accurately. So that’s when it’s important to focus and pay
attention in order to capture that particular memory, much like reeling
in a targeted fish.
Memory researchers have also found that your short-term or
working memory is affected by when you get information about
something, which is called the ‘‘serial position effect.’’ In general,
whatever type of information you are trying to memorize, you will
better remember what you first learn (called the ‘‘primacy effect’’) or
what you learn most recently (called the ‘‘recency effect’’).15 When
psychologists have tested these effects by giving numerous subjects
lists of words that vary in word length and the number of words, the
results show a similar pattern. Subjects can generally remember two
to seven items and are most likely to remember the most recent
items first. In turn, you can use that principle when you want to
remember a list of anything, from a grocery list to a list of tasks to
do.

From Perception to Working Memory to Long-Term Memory

Memory starts with an initial perception as you are paying attention
to something, whether your attention is barely registering the perception
or you are really focused on it. So, as described in Chapter 5,
one of the keys to improving your memory is paying more attention
in the first place.
The next stop is your working memory, which is your brief, initial
memory of whatever you are currently processing. A part of this
working memory acts as a central processor or coordinator to organize
your current mental activities.11 You might think of the process
as having a screen on your computer that has the information you
are currently reading or writing. As psychologist Margaret Matlin
explains it, your ‘‘working memory lets you keep information active
and accessible, so that you can use it in a wide variety of cognitive
tasks.’’12 Your working memory decides what type of information is
useful to you now, drawing this out from the very large amount of
information you have—in your long-term memory or from the input
you have recently received. Think of yourself sitting in front of a
desk with expansive drawers representing what’s in your long-term
memory and a cluttered top of your desk representing what’s in your
working memory. Then, you as the central executive (the working
memory) decide what information you want to deal with now and
what to do with it. 17

Current Thinking on Memory

While the Atkinson-Shiffrin model was extremely popular at the
time, today psychologists think of sensory memory as a part of perception,
held only so briefly in consciousness, and they think of
short-term and long-term memory as more part of a continuum,
with no clear distinction between them.10 Still, psychologists usually
distinguish between these two types of memory, and I will too, in
discussing ways you can improve both types of memory. In fact, with
the development of neuroscience and the recognition that we are
engaging in multiple forms of mental processing at the same
time—a process called ‘‘parallel distributed processing’’—psychologists
have recognized that memory is much more complex than earlier
scientists might have thought. Currently, the commonly accepted
model views memory in a more dynamic way, in which a central
processing system coordinates different types of memory input,
which may be visual or auditory or both. After taking into consideration
personal knowledge and experience, this central processor
passes selected bits of memory from the working memory into the
long-term memory. It’s a model that I’ll be using as a backdrop to
different types of memory techniques that are designed to make improvements
in each area of processing. In the next section, I’ll explain
in a little more detail how this works.

Modern Research on Memory

According to psychologists, building on the work of these early precursors,
cognitive psychology—the study of mental processes, including
memory—really begins in 1956. So the foundations of
modern memory research only go back 50 years. As Margaret W.
Matlin writes in Cognition, an introduction to cognitive psychology,
initially published in 1983 and now in its sixth edition, ‘‘research
in human memory began to blossom at the end of the 1950s. . . .
Psychologists examined the organization of memory, and they proposed
memory models.’’7 They found that the information held in
memory was frequently changed by what people previously knew or
experienced—a principle that can also be applied in improving your
memory. For example, if you can tie a current memory into something
you already know or an experience you have previously had,
you can remember more.
For a time, psychologists studying memory used an informationprocessing
model developed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin
in 1968 that came to be known as the Atkinson-Shiffrin model.
While some early memory improvement programs were based on
this model, it has since been replaced by a new model that is discussed
in the next section.
In the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, memory is viewed as a series of
distinct steps, in which information is transferred from one memory
storage area to another.8 As this model suggests, the external input
comes into the sensory memory from all of the senses—mostly visual
and auditory, but also from the touch, taste, and smell—where it is
stored for up to two seconds and then quickly disappears unless it is
transferred to the next level. This next level is the short-term memory
(now usually referred to as ‘‘working memory’’), which stores
information we are currently using actively for up to about 30 seconds.
Finally, if you rehearse this material, such as by saying the
information over and over in your mind, it goes on into the longterm
memory storage area, where it becomes fairly permanent.9
Thus, if you want to improve your own memory, it is critical to
rehearse any information you want to transfer into your long-term
memory and thereby retain. Such rehearsal can take the form of selftalk,
where you say the ideas to remember over and over again in
your mind to implant them in your long-term memory. Graphically,
this process of moving memory from sensory to short-term to longterm
memory looks something like this:
Sensory Memory Short-Term Memory Long-Term Memory

The Beginnings of Studying Memory

Even before philosophers and other theorists began to study human
thought processes, including memory, memory played an extremely
important part in the development of human society. It was critical
for teaching new skills, customs, and traditions. Before the development
of printing, people had to remember many things that now are
recorded on the printed page or can be shared through audio and
video recordings. For example, consider all of the rituals, songs, and
stories that people had to learn and then pass on to others. This
might be like learning the contents of dozens of books. Anthropologists
have estimated the extensive scope of such learning by speaking
with the culture bearers of once nonliterate cultures and
speculating as to what kind of learning might have been passed on
by distant cultures.
Then, to skip ahead to about 2,300 years ago, the Greek philosopher
Aristotle was one of the first to systematically study learning
and memory. Besides proposing laws for how memory works, he also
described the importance of using mental imagery, along with experience
and observation—all of which are key aids for remembering
anything.
However, the formal study of memory by psychologists didn’t
begin until the late 19th century, when Wilhelm Wundt set up a
laboratory in Leipzig, Germany, and launched the discipline of psychology,
based on studying mental processes through introspection
or experimental studies.1 There, along with studying other mental
processes, he began the first studies of human memory.
Many of these memory studies used assorted clinical trials,
which may seem a far cry from the practical tips on memory that are
described in this book. But the work of these researchers helped to
discover the principles of how we remember that provide the theoretical
foundation for what works in effective memory training
today. For example, back in 1894, one of the first memory researchers—
and the first woman president of the American Psychological
Association, Mary Whiton Calkins—discovered the recency effect,
the principle that we more accurately recall the last items we learn.2
These early researchers generally used nonsense syllables to determine
what words a person would best remember after a series of
tests of seeing words and trying to recall them, but the recency principle
still applies when you try to remember something in day-to-day
life. Want to better remember something? Then, learn it or review it
last when you are learning a series of things at the same time.
The well-known psychologist William James was also interested
in memory, discussing it in his 1890 textbook Principles of Psychology,
along with many of the cognitive functions that contribute to memory,
such as perception and attention. He even noted the ‘‘tip-of-the-
tongue’’ experience that we have all had: trying to recall a name that
seems so close—but not quite able to grasp it.3
During the first half of the 20th century the behaviorists, with
their focus on outward, observable behaviors and the stimuli contributing
to different behaviors, dominated psychological research in
the United States. They weren’t interested in mental processes or in
introspection about them, though their methods of measurement
were later adopted by memory researchers.4
But in Europe, in the early 1900s, Gestalt psychology got its start.
It brought a new perspective of looking at meaning and at the way
humans organize what they see into patterns and wholes. They
pointed up the importance of the overall context for learning and
problem solving, too.5 It’s an approach that is very relevant for understanding
ways to improve memory; their work helped us understand
that by creating patterns and providing a meaningful context
to stimulate better encoding of a memory in the first place, that
memory could more easily be retrieved later. For example, Frederick
C. Bartlett, a British psychologist, who published Remembering: An
Experimental and Social Study in 1932, who used ‘‘meaningful material’’
such as long stories (rather than random words or nonsense
syllables), found that people made certain types of errors in trying to
recall these stories for the researchers. Significantly, these were errors
that often made the material more consistent with the subject’s
personal experience, showing the way meaning shapes memory.6
Like the recency findings discussed above, these findings—that you
will remember something better if you can relate it to your own experience—
are the basis for some of the techniques described later in
the book.

How Your Memory Works

To know how to improve your memory, it helps to have a general
understanding of how your memory works. I have created specific
exercises based on this knowledge, exercises that will help you improve
in each of the areas of your memory.
The roots for the way we think about memory today actually
have a long history, dating at least back to the time of the Greeks,
and perhaps earlier. Accordingly, I have included a little history
about the way psychologists have thought about memory that has
developed into the model of memory that psychologists commonly
hold today and that I use in this book.