A Method To Memory :: essays research papers

A Method to Memory     The some other night I was sitting at home in my room watching the Rocketsgame, and my phone begins to ring. I answer "Hello", and I hear this franticvoice that I recognize as my friend Mandys. Mandy is a nervous wreck, she hasa big bio-chem test in the morning and cant seem to remember a thing. I askher what kind of info she has, and she tells me she has notes and herbook. Now being the nice guy I am, and having just completed learning aboutmemory in my Intro to Psych class, I turned forth the T.V. and told her Id helpher learn to memorize things.     The first thing I told her about was a method c alled rehearsal. Iexplained that rehearsal involved repeating the information clock after time tokeep it from fading from her short term memory, or STM. She was a bit confusedso I simplified it for her. I reminded her of the other night when she waslooking for the number to Pizza Hut in the phone book, and when sh e found it shestarted repeating over and over until she got to the phone and could dial it.She was astounded that she was doing this all along and didnt even know it. Ithen explained another short term memory method known as chunking. She cringedand thought I was lecture about the keg party the other night, but I explainedthat chunking involves taking a large number or word and breaking it follow up intosmaller pieces that could be remembered easier. I also told her that she couldchunk together the first letters of a phrase to make it more than accessible to hermemory retrieval system. I gave her the example of the New York Stock Exchange,or N.Y.S.E. That helped her a lot, but she was concerned whether or not shewould remember it all for the final, so I told her the more rehearsing she did,the deeper she would commit the information to memory.