So, how do you get things into long-term memory? This is something you're trying to do right now, if you're trying to study from this course, you're trying to get things into your head so that they stay in your head. We have some answers to this. We know rehearsal is not enough. Repeating it in your head isn't enough. You need something else. One of the ways to get stuff into memory is what's called a depth of processing. What this means is, the deeper you think about something, the more sense you try to add to it, the easier it is to remember. There is a very clever very simple study that illustrates this. You ask people, you give them a string of 48 words, and you ask them different questions about the words. So, I had no idea this is a memory test at all. So, one group might be told, press the button if the word that you see on the screen is written in capitals. A second group is told, press the button, the word is good rhyme with train, and the third group is told, press a button if it would fit into the sentence, the girl placed the blank on the table. So, they do this and then as a surprise, they get a memory test, and it turns out that the sort of way they thought about the word influences their subsequent memory of it. The people who just looked at the word look like remembered at least the sound in between but the meaning they remembered at most. This suggests that, when you try to understand the meaning of a word, maybe you think about it harder or maybe make more connections to it, and this will help you remember it later. A second way related to this as a second way to remember things, is through mnemonics. Through basically, sort of tricks that make a word bigger, that give it more connections. So, you might turn it into a rhyme. You might say if you want to know what the hippocampus does a certain part of the brain, you may say, the way I find my way through campus, is through what I store in my hippocampus. Its not the best rhyme but, now probably for the rest of your life, you'll know that hippocampus helps you remember where things are. Or you might use visual imagery. So, this is something which has been known through the course of history, that by creating vivid images, things become more memorable. So, if you're lucky enough to have to remember the name of somebody named Mr. Fish, if you imagine a fish sticking out of his head, that might really help you remember his name later on, and people like like Joshua Foer, who gave a wonderful Ted Talk on how we can use these memory tricks to store amounts of information in your head have won competitions involving astonishing feats of memory. Like taking 52 playing cards, rifling through them quickly and then remembering each and every one of them in order and so, if you go to the Ted Talk you could see how that all works. Now, to remember anything of any depth though, it's more than tricks. Really it helps a lot to understand the material. I'll give you an example. I'm going to read you a passage and in fact you'll see it on the screen here. A newspaper is better than a magazine. A seashore is a better place than the street. At first it is better to run than to walk. You may have to try several times but it takes some skill, but it's easy to learn, even young children can enjoy it. Once successful complications are minimal. Birds seldom get too close. Rain, however, soaks in very fast. Too many people doing the same thing can also cause problems. One needs lots of room. If there are no complications it can be very peaceful. A rock will serve as an anchor. If things break loose from it however, you will not get a second chance. This is very difficult to remember, because each sentence seems unrelated to the other sentences, and it seems like gibberish. But now, you had exactly the same passage but I tell you this paragraph is about flying a kite. Now look over it again and you'll see it's just a lot easier to remember. It's a lot easier to remember because you understand it. I think there's a general moral here which is to understand things, lead you to remember them. So going through say a course like this, you should struggle to make sense of things. You should actively engage in ideas and then as a byproduct of this, they're going to stick in your head for longer.
