Your Memory is Not all That Good

I was reading through the May 2008 Harvard Business Review and came across a fascinating article called “The Science of Thinking Smarter”–a conversation with brain expert John J. Medina.

Here are two questions and his responses that I thought were insightful especially when he talked about the convergence of memory and learning and the ability to recall information better when it is recalled in a similar environment in which it was learned.

He was asked How reliable is our memory?
He responded:

Brain research is pretty clear on this point. Bona fide recorded memory is a very rare thing on this planet. The reason is that the brain isn’t interested in reality: it’s interested in survival. So it will change the perception of reality to stay in survival mode. Unfortunately, many people still believe that brain is a lot like a recording device–that learning something is like pushing the “record” button and remembering is simply pushing “playback.” in the real world of the brain, however, that metaphor is an anachronism. The fact is that the actual moment of learning–the moment of fixing a memory–is so complex that we have little understanding of what happens in our brains in those first fleeting seconds.

He was then asked Is there any hope for producing reliable long-term memories?
He responded:

Yes, but you will need to consistently reexpose yourself to the information. The phenomenon is called “elaborative rehearsal,” and it’s the type of repetition shown to be the most effective for the most robust retrieval. We do know, for example, that you can improve your chances of remembering something if you reproduce the environment in which you first put it into your brain. If, say, you learn something while you are sad, you will be able to recall it better if at retrieval you are somehow made suddenly sad.

Think of the value of elaborative rehearsal for something like learning in a virtual world which reproduced the environment in which you must recall the knowledge you learned.

John Medina has written several books on the brain and brain-based learning: