I watched this TedTalk on working memory. Peter Doolittle
had interesting points on how our working memories work. Working memory is
always on while you’re awake, and it’s what enables you to make sense of
everything around and also in you. It gives us aspect of time; it’s difficult
to imagine world without sensation of time. Without saving that moment a second
ago we wouldn’t get feeling of time passing. So working memory is very
essential to how we conceive the world. As mentioned in the TedTalk, it’s also
crucial to our learning. Doolittle encourages to process new information right
away the moment we hear it for the first time in order to remember it longer.
Processing can be done by imagining the new thing in pictures, or as I prefer
to process information, place it in a narrative. Technically remembering something
is lighting up neurons, and processing information increases the act of neurons
lighting, and that way the memory is strengthened.
I was in this test in which my working memory was tested. On
the computer screen I was shown words one after other with a time delay of two
seconds or so. It started with just four words and when the words had flashed
in front of me one by one, I had to remember the words and write them down in
the order they appeared. In the end of the test there were 16 words to remember.
First I hadn’t used any mnemonics, but when it began to be harder and harder to
remember the words and they started to slip away, I came up with this idea of
placing the words in a kind of story. There was no time to reason a logical
story, so I just connected the words with the first conjunctions that I could
think of. The connections between the words were sometimes irrational and in
addition to relative words, I mentally pictured the story I was inventing.
Let’s say the words to remember were: banana, tree, motorway, mirror, water
tap, knife, and chair. The story could
sound something like this: “A banana tree fell on the motorway. On the motorway
there was a mirror in which a water tap could be seen. From the water tap it’s
pouring knives that fall on a chair.”
Placing the words in a ridiculous little story I was able to remember
the words and their appearance still a week after the test. In the second part
of the test simple calculations were added between the appearances of the words
to make things even more difficult. But for me the second part of the test went
actually better than the first because I had more time on coming up with my
silly mnemonics. I also had time to repeat the whole “story” from the beginning
every time a new word occurred. So the words in the beginning were repeated
many times in my head by the end which helped in memorizing them.
As mentioned in the beginning, narratives are not present
only in remembering stuff but also in understanding concepts, even complicated
ones. Or should I say, especially when trying to understand difficult ideas
like meaning of life or the beginning of the universe. Narratives are the way
how small children get the introduction to the concepts of the world. Those
narratives are also known as fairy tales. In fairy tales we learn
incrementally, in small steps, to understand feelings like love or braveness or
to deal with fear and death. In addition to the external narratives composed by
other beings in books, television, internet or radio, we listen all the time
the internal narrative, train of thought so to say. I would say that narratives
are deeply tied to the evolution of language itself. When human beings started
to communicate feelings and thoughts via language, they started making sense of
their surroundings and internal conditions in the form of speak, and by
structuring the speak with a beginning and an ending it became a story.
In my opinion, making up narratives is an in-built mechanism
us humans have for a purpose of structuring information, and it has developed
for thousands of years of evolution. So it’s something you would want to take
into consideration if you wanted to understand how your learning could be
improved and to actually understand why you think the way you do. It’s starting
sound like I’m proposing the reader a philosophical quest to participate in but
hold your horses. What it comes to internal narratives, this trick usually
works. While listening your daily thoughts, take a moment to consider what they
are about. Regard them as story someone else is telling you, and regard
yourself as a listener, not someone who is thinking. Now you can consciously
valuate your thoughts and consider them. You can then approve or disapprove
with them, but there is a twist, there always is. If not focusing, the
considering of the thoughts can turn into listening your thoughts again. It’s
easier to take distance to an external story, like giving thoughts on a sub
text of a news story.
To conclude, narratives can not only be utilized in improving
working memory as I mentioned in the beginning of this article, but they can
also be a method to understand the working the conscious mind. I’m certain that
not everybody has this kind of verbal line of thought that I do, and not everybody
would be able to improve their working memory via stories, but I think many
people get influenced by TV-series, commercials and news without really
understanding the mechanisms of how our minds work.
Text: Otto Koskinen, a student of Independent Study in English course
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