Transcript Document
Meet the master Dr. Focus Unit Six Strategies Welcome back! So, you heard that you have a free gym pass? Before you can enter the gym, I want to teach you about memory strategies. There are four main types: rehearsal, organization, association, and elaboration. Each can be used separately or in combination to help us remember things better. Rehearsal is exactly what you think it is. When want to remember lists of words, the best strategy is to repeat them many times. Remember However, when you have more items than you can remember, even when repeated, organization is a better choice. These situations call for sorting the items by some similar quality or organized by category. Categorizing is called clustering. When we remember information in chunks, it is easier to recall many of the items at once rather than individually. This With That When you read the word “pizza”, what immediately comes to mind? What about “teenager”? So, now you are probably hungry and shaking your head (if you have your own teens in the house). Why? How is it that simply reading words can elicit these responses? Let’s say that you want to learn about how thinking works in the brain. This is a more complicated task that requires much more than simple memorization. In fact, you need to understand how the specific parts of the brain function to help you to create a new memory, for example. In this case, we use association. We associate the parts of the brain with specific memory functions. For example, we have learned that sensory information is processed together in the parietal lobe. In this example, we associate the creating a sensory impression with the parietal lobe. What other types of information do we associate together? To remember information, our brain tries to associate packets of memories together. A great way to study is to consciously create connections between what you know and what you are learning. Then Elaborate Tell us your favorite story about you. If you were to do this, you would recall all of the details that create a feeling or invite us to laugh. There is much more remembered than just the facts of the memory. This is an example of elaboration. Of course, when we have to learn something that is very complicated or that has many parts, we use a different strategy altogether. In this case, creating a story or detailed explanation that contains all of the pertinent information will seem more interesting to us. We remember the facts as a part of a greater context.