Filed under: in the news, tips | Tags: memory, neurophysiology, reading, tricks, working memory
You’re reading through your textbook, and all seems to be going well. Every sentence makes perfect sense. Definitions, mechanisms, and relationships are all crystal-clear. Then a minute after you get to the end of the paragraph, you try to summarize what you’ve read. Nothing happens. What made perfect sense a minute ago now seems as lost a dream. What happened?
Try this experiment. Stand in a crowd and watch for someone to look at her watch. Wait a few seconds, approach, and ask what time it is. She’ll almost certainly have to look at her watch again before telling you, even though the time won’t have changed much since the first time she looked.
When we look at a watch, the information goes into what psychologists call working memory, where we use it to figure out what we’re really interested in: how much time there is until the meeting or train or dinner reservation. Similarly, when we read a textbook or article — especially when we’re just reading it passively instead of interrogating it — frequently the information just goes into working memory. The definitions and whatnot just go to making everything make sense. Then after our brains confirm that it all makes sense, they dispose of the information.
Working memory is different from short-term memory (which I’ll write about some other time): it’s not so much information storage as it is the active manipulation and use of information. It doesn’t hold much (maybe seven separate things), it lasts just several seconds, and it seems to disappear in a flash.
How do you put what you read into real, instead of working, memory? Don’t simply read. When you read, ask more of your reading than simply for it to make sense. Ask your text questions, and read to answer those questions. Set up a blank worksheet for definitions, structures, and functions, and read to fill in that worksheet. Read a paragraph at a time, and summarize each paragraph immediately after reading it. Do whatever you need to do to avoid reading entire chapters at a time, spending enormous blocks of time bouncing words off your eyeballs. Read deliberately, dare I say mindfully.
