Improving Your Memory (5 page)

You are listening to the baseball game on the radio, eager to catch the score at the end of the inning. At the same time, you are sorting the mail. It seems reasonable to do these two things at once, but you suddenly realize the inning is over and you missed hearing the score. In the future, focus your attention on the game until the score is announced and then finish sorting the mail.

EXERCISE: DIVIDED ATTENTION

Can you add this column of figures while you recite the names of the months of the year?

4

8

5

7

9

This exercise demonstrates how difficult it is to pay attention to two fairly simple tasks at one time.

ASSIGNMENT

During the next few days, notice if your attention is divided while you are trying to read the evening paper or listen to the news. Perhaps the phone rings or you jump up to stir the soup. Maybe someone asks you a question. Think about whether these distractions affect your ability to remember what you are reading or listening to. Are you having a problem with your memory, or are you trying to attend to too many things at once?

It Takes Greater Effort to Learn Something New.

Too many people believe the myth that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” However, unless there is impairment of the
brain, people can continue to learn and remember throughout life. Researchers have found that older adults do need to exert greater effort to learn new information than they required in the past. The term “greater effort” means different things to different people. You will need to decide whether a task is worth the effort required. Read the following examples and see if you think the tasks are worth the effort.

EXAMPLE

Mariko may want to memorize the phone numbers of her four brothers and sisters and is willing to make the necessary effort. She looks at the numbers for patterns and similarities. Some are easier than others to learn. She spends a total of an hour over the course of a week and learns them well. To keep them in her memory, she reviews them periodically. Suzanne may have the same goal of memorizing several phone numbers. After spending ten minutes trying, she thinks, “This isn’t worth the effort. I can always look them up when I need them.”

(For many people, learning phone numbers is no longer a priority, because they rely on the contacts stored in their cell phones. But, to some of us, knowing phone numbers of close family and friends can be comforting.)

If you decide that it is important for you to remember some new information, you must focus your attention on the task and find some means of encoding the information. As you recall from
chapter 3
, encoding may include paying attention to something, analyzing it, associating it with something already known, and elaborating on the details.

EXAMPLE

Your city council has just enacted new regulations regarding the collection of recycled plastic. They will now accept certain plastic containers at curbside, while others are unacceptable. You regularly use detergent, bleach, milk, cottage cheese, and yogurt containers and would like to recycle them. You decide that you want to easily remember which items to recycle without looking up the regulations or asking your neighbor each time.

The first step in learning this new information is giving your undivided attention to reading the information leaflet from the recycling center. You focus on the portion that describes what to do with plastics. The next step is thinking about how you can remember which of your commonly collected plastic items can go in the recycling bin. You note that the milk, bleach, and detergent containers are acceptable, whereas the cottage cheese and yogurt containers are not. After analyzing the situation, you realize that the three acceptable plastic items all contain liquids, whereas the others contain solids. Grouping these containers into other classifications, such as color, size, or shape, might also produce a solution to your problem.

You could easily have said, “It’s too complicated for me. I can’t remember all these distinctions.” Instead you decided that it was important to learn, and you found a means of encoding the information. (We’ve noticed that the guidelines vary greatly from city to city, making compliance even more difficult!)

EXAMPLE

Yvonne has two coworkers, Ann Smith and Anne (with an “e” at the end) Miller, whose e-mail addresses start with asmith and amiller. When Yvonne wants to use one of their names in the body of an e-mail message, she puzzles over which spelling she should use. “There must be a way to remember who is who.” She looks up the names in the company directory, thinks about each person’s characteristics, and recognizes that Anne Miller has more energy than Ann Smith. She thinks, “E stands for energy! So it’s energetic Anne Miller.”

Yvonne paid attention to the spelling of the names; she figured out a way to create an association between the spellings and the persons; she repeated the association aloud. All of these efforts resulted in deeply encoding the spelling of the names.

EXERCISE: LEARNING NEW INFORMATION

Here is some new information for you to learn and remember. Give it your undivided attention, and see how much effort it requires for you to answer the questions that follow the reading. The challenge is to find a way to remember the material, even if the particular subject does not interest you, and it takes greater effort to remember than you thought it would.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is a brief form of psychotherapy used in the treatment of mood problems, such as depression or anxiety. CBT helps people to

1. Identify and correct inaccurate thoughts associated with depressed or anxious feelings,

2. Engage more often in enjoyable activities, and

3. Improve problem-solving skills.

The first step involves being aware of and correcting errors in thinking that are associated with problems in
mood. For example, people with depression or anxiety often have distorted thoughts about themselves (“I am worthless” or “I can’t do things as well as others”), their environments (“No one cares about me” or “My life is a mess”), or their futures (“I have nothing to look forward to” or “Something bad is going to happen to me”). In addition to thinking inaccurate thoughts, people with mood problems typically cut back on enjoyable activities, because they think that such activities will not be worth the effort. For example, they may stop going to neighborhood gatherings or reading the newspaper. Unfortunately, this withdrawal usually results in a vicious cycle where depressed or anxious mood leads to less activity, which in turn results in further mood problems. The second step of CBT seeks to remedy this downward spiral by increasing rewarding activity.

The third step of CBT provides instruction and guidance in specific strategies for solving problems (for example, breaking problems down into small steps). If a person wanted to meet new people, perhaps the first step might be to look into volunteer opportunities.

Now, can you answer these questions about this new information?

1. Who could benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy?

2. What is an example of a distorted thought?

3. If people are depressed, are they more or less likely to be active?

4. What is one strategy for solving problems?

8
Problems with Recall

A safe but sometimes chilly way of recalling the past is to force open a crammed drawer. If you are searching for anything in particular you don’t find it, but something falls out at the back that is often more interesting.