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