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.
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