Nancy's Notes

For those of you who aren’t research nerds like me, memory science really breaks down into three discernible chunks:

1. Encoding
2. Storage
3. Retrieval

Encoding has to do with when and how the memory is initially made. There are more ways to encode memories than we yet understand, but I think it’s pretty crucial to figure out your own memory tricks—for instance, do you need to say new phone numbers out loud before you dial them so your ears can “hear” them and it’s not just your eyes telling you what to do? I do—this is called “acoustic” memory. I picture it like an audio file playing back after my eyes have moved on to their next task. I also associate this with knowing song lyrics once the song has started playing, even though you might not be able to think of them when the music is not in the background.

If you are someone who is highly visual and need to “see” something in order to be able to store away the picture of it in your memory, you are using your “visual” memory function. We can use this to recognize objects or discern patterns.

If you have to understand a concept thoroughly before you can remember it, you are accessing your “semantic” memory, which is what neuro-scientists call the type of memory that requires understanding before it will authorize storage of new material. Knowing how to drive, use a telephone, open your email, solve a particular type of problem—these are examples of semantic memory. Once upon a time, we did not understand how to do these things, but we eventually broke the tasks down into steps and learned how, thus transferring an episodic memory into long-term semantic memory. Now you’d be hard-pressed to go back and remember a time you did not understand this particular concept.

If you need to physically touch or take something apart and put it back together in order to store that knowledge, you are tapping into your “tactile” memory. I imagine that soldiers use this when they are learning how to deconstruct a weapon and put it back together quickly without having to think about each individual step. Tactile memory, also known as haptic memory, has to do with our senses—if you smell cinnamon, does it evoke a certain memory of baking with your mother? If you catch a whiff of a certain cologne or perfume, does it transport you through time when that was something important to you? If you hear a voice or a sound that is from your past, you may be able to recall that moment more vividly. A silly example of this would be that when I hear the Buffy the Vampire Slayer theme song, I picture myself grading papers, snuggled in with a blanket around my legs, immersed in freshman compositions since I often had Buffy on in the background while I graded to keep me company.

These are the 4 basic methods of encoding memory:

• Acoustic
• Visual
• Semantic
• Tactile

Are you using all of them in your instruction? My French teacher, Mademoiselle Lursen, had us repeating vocabulary after her, standing up and sitting down when she used those verbs in French, touching the window when we learned about fenetres, holding up our pens when we learned the word stylo. The more you can consciously employ all of the types of memory in your teaching practices, the more likely it is that one of them will prove useful for your students. Early childhood teachers get this stuff right—they engage the whole body of their students for learning. When I conduct workshops on giving presentations, I make my participants stand up, stumble through tongue twisters, produce silly sounds to test their breath control, and demonstrate how to do effective adrenalin dumps to get rid of nerves. These activities are the ones they remember when I run into them at sporting events or the grocery store—because their whole body was engaged.

Storage:

Once you have a memory, it is up to you to decide whether you wish to store it in your short-term memory bank or move it over to long-term storage. How you code this memory will determine that. Do you access it often? Have you put it next to related items so you will see it and use it regularly? If not, it may fade away pretty quickly. Have you built it onto existing memories, bridging new information over to the old? This is something we as teachers must consciously help our students do if we want them to leave with this new info. This is yet another reason why it’s important to know our students, to understand their goals, their challenges, so we can build bridges that make sense to them.

Storage is not wholly reliable, by the way. Our memories are as fallible as we are—we can remember something that did not happen the way we think it did. Our brains rewire, rewrite—our psyches change little details or omit them based on so many variables. Were we happy or sad? Hungry? Tired? Emotionally overwrought? Did we replay that experience over in our brains and wish for a different ending? Knowing that storage is imperfect is important for us to keep developing new ways to reach our students.

Retrieval:

OK, so you made the memory, you filed it away in either STM or LTM, and now you need to bring it out of the closet and use it…for a test, for a project, for a relationship, for your life. How do you do that? Again, the neuroscientists give us that scientific answer: it depends.

It depends on how you stored it. Did you store it in the “school info” folder, or did you label it “life skills” or “important for my career goals”—the more associations you have with a piece of information, the more hashtags you put on it (to speak in total social media), the more likely it is you’ll be able to pull that memory out when you need it. Have you revisited the memory a few times so you know it’s there, you know what it looks like, or did you tuck it away and let it gather the brain’s equivalent of dust?