YOUR MEMORIESHow to improve your memory
Psychologists say that anyone can train themselves to have an excep-
tional memory – it just takes practice. Most techniques used by people
taking part in memory competitions involve translating boring material
into graphic images, such as imagining the number 1 as a candle, or the
number 8 as a snowman. And it seems that there’s no intrinsic differ-
ence between memory champions and the rest of us, as psychologist
Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues showed in a 2003 brain imaging
study. But while they found no difference in the brain-structure of
memory champions and normal controls, they did find differences
in the way the brain was activated during memorizing. Specifically,
the memory champions showed extra activation in regions associated
with spatial navigation. This probably reflects their use of an ancient
memorizing technique called the “the method of loci”, which involves
translating material to be learned into meaningful images and then
imagining those images placed in various locations along a well-known
route. When it comes to recall, it’s just a case of walking the route in
your mind and remembering where you put each item.
A good night’s sleep is another useful memory aid, because when
you’re asleep your brain rehearses and consolidates what you’ve
learned in the day. Scientists’ first direct observation of this came
through their study of maze learning in rats (see p.51). But it’s not just
the amount of sleep we get that’s important, the quality matters too.
An experiment conducted by Ysbrand Van Der Werf and his colleagues
used beeping noises to disrupt people’s deep, slow-wave sleep, while
ensuring these participants had as much overall sleep as on a night
when they were left undisturbed. Crucially, the participants remem-
bered more images of doors and landscapes when they’d learned them
before an undisturbed night compared with before a beep-disturbed
night. Moreover, brain scans showed that disturbing deep slow-wave
sleep seemed to have interfered with the usual functioning of the
hippocampus.
Look back at the list of test words on p.76 and imagine being asked
to make a note whenever a word contained the letter “a”. If you were
then given a memory test for the words, you probably wouldn’t do very
well. However, if you had been asked to look through the list and note
whenever a word was related to tennis, you’d probably find that you
performed much better. This is because we’re more likely to remember
things that we’ve processed more deeply. When it comes to real-life