Memory is underrated
Memory is important. It is a non-negligible part of learning, and it is a tool that is constantly required. We use memory a lot more than we realize, because when it works it’s often invisible. You’ll reach for a cup without looking at it, relying on your spatial memory for your hand to find it without ever making any effort to remember.
With how often memory is overlooked when working, and how much modern common educational systems push memorizing above understanding, memory has a misguided negative reputation. While it’s not the point of learning, it’s a primary tool. Whereas it sounds smart to work on patterning your thought so as to improve your deductive logic, another primary tool of thought, it’s rare to see acknowledgement that it’s worth your time to do so with memory. Even though modern education requires memory, they do not put any work towards teaching it, and so they too fail to give it the respect it deserves.
That being said, there are two important ways to improve memory. The first, being improving the skill itself, and is largely a matter of strengthening the skill of imagination. Memory games and the like, however, have been shown to have little effect on cognitive skill. The second, being to have a technique or system surrounding memories, comes with lots of options, and has been shown to be effective when used.
Memory systems
It hasn’t always been the case that people take memory as an unimportant part of learning. In ancient greece, it’s known that orators would use a system devised to improve memory, widely taught at the time called the “Method of Loci”. It involves memorizing (by rote, probably) a pre-arranged route, and imagining on a per-speech basis the placement of objects along the route with the purpose of reminding you of whatever you wish to remember, as you walk the route during the speech.
This takes advantage of the vast amounts of spatial information humans store without realizing it. As much as we lose our keys, there is a huge amount of things we work with every day, and move around, which are not lost on a daily basis. Theories regarding why we are more proficient in memorizing things when they’re associated with locations include that, evolutionary, it’s extremely helpful to survival to be able to know and keep in mind where things are.
Our minds aren’t exactly built to work like a spreadsheet, but we are built to be able to keep in mind where the good sources of food and water are, as well as where the dangerous things are, and to be able to account for when those things change. That’s only one theory, and it may not be true, but the fact that our memory is stronger in these cases has been proven.
Understanding all of memory systems relies, I believe, on that fact (“Memory is better with locations”) along with a couple other important facts about memory:
- Memory is better with sense information A memory will last longer and be recalled more readily the more personal subjective experience you involve in it. Whether this be strong emotions or sense experience. It works to imagine these things. This also explains why there are methods, such as the Major system and the PAO System for turning the insensible(Numbers) into the sensible.
- Memory is better with associated information Whereas personal sense information may make a memory stronger, other kinds of associated information will make it more retrievable. Memory is a sort of spiderweb of informational associations, some of which are bound to falter in a given moment (Even if they come back later). The more associations you can tie to a given thing, the less likely it is to be forgotten. This is why a historian, for instance, may have an easier time learning a new historical fact than a non-historian; they have other things to tie it to. This is why the Linking Method works, and the reason associating people with actions and objects works well for the PAO System.