You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

revision and repetition
L
earning by rote – the repetition of facts over and over until they become
firmly lodged in the mind – has been largely discredited in education. This is
partly because the rote method is purely mechanical – whereas we now believe
that the most memorable facts are those that engage our interest, that involve us
in some way. However, there is no doubt that repetition, in one of its senses, has
a vital part to play in memory work. This is not a matter of chant ing information
like a class of Victorian schoolchildren, so that we recall the sound before we
recall the sense. Rather, it is a matter of rehearsing an act of memory, going over
the process of recall, at regular intervals, to fix the various routes of association
in your mind.
It is difficult to give precise guidelines on how often, and how soon after
the memorization, recall should be practiced in this way. Much depends on the
type of information involved, and the method by which you memorize it.
Obviously, if you commit a phone number to memory, with a view to dialling
that number in ten minutes’ time, your rehearsals need to be squeezed into that
particular time frame. Repetition would in this case be valuable, indeed essential,

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even if you were to use no memory system at all – in other words, if you were to
follow the rote method. However, if someone interrupted you during your
repetition exercise, there would be a strong possibility of you forgetting the
number altogether. So a better approach would be to use some variation of the
DOMINIC system (see pp.
108–9
) or the number-shape system (see pp.
110–11
),
and rehearse not the number itself, but your encoded version – and the
retranslation of that code back into the number.
If you are faced with the challenge of absorbing information in a magazine
article, on the other hand, you might consider following the “rule of five”,
whereby you repeat the key points to yourself after one hour, then a day later,
then a week later, then two weeks later, then a month later. This would be valid
whatever memory system you used for fixing the facts in the first place.
However, you would probably benefit from a handful of rehearsals in the first
five minutes after encoding the data, before applying the rule of five.
Every time we recall a piece of information, the route to it becomes
strengthened, in the way that a path becomes clearer and easier to walk along if
it is well trodden. Repetition does not guarantee recall, but certainly rewards the
time spent with a greater chance of accurate memorization.