Memory

by Ian M.L. Hunter

2-1

Genres: Psychology

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

Reviews

[Liam Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a concise, dense primer for the study of the psychology of memory. It is appropriate for the casual reader interested in how the everyday concept "memory" can be intelligently broken down and how different approaches to memorization have fared by experimentation. Comparing this with modern psychology books I have read which touch upon the subject, little of great significance seems to have happened in the field since this book was published.

The first important distinction that the book introduces is that of the difference between recognition and recall. Hunter illustrates it with the old chestnut "I'm better with faces than names":

Instances of the greater ease of recognition as compared with recall abound in everyday life. In the early stages of acquiring language, the young child can understand (recognize) phrases before being able to use (recall) them, and this inability to recall recognizable words occurs even where the child is obviously trying to produce them and has sufficient muscular control to do so. Adults have a similar experience with a not too familiar foreign language. They can give the English equivalent of French word more readily than the reverse. They can understand the gist of a page of German yet be unable to construct a single German sentence correctly. There is, too, the common belief that people's names are more difficult to remember than their faces. We must all have heard the complaining statement: "I've got a good memory for faces but I'm poor at remembering names." As a general statement, it is, at best, a half truth. It owes what validity it has to an ambiguous use of the word "remembering." Normally we are required to remember a face when its owner is actually in front of us, walking towards us in the street or sitting near us in the concert hall. And what we do is to recognise the face, that is, react to as being familiar. When, on the other hand, we try to remember a name, it is not usually in front of us at the time. We rarely have the task of recognizing faces and recalling names; we are most often required to recall it. In so far then as the statement refers to reconizing faces and recalling names, it is true. But if it refers to the recognition (or the recall) of both names and faces, it is undoubtedly not applicable to the majority of people. p.19

And introduces the common measure of "nonsense syllables" as a purified method of investigating native memory skills. The technique is here contrasted with more "meaningful" material for memorization, which comes to importance later in the book:

It is obvious from our everyday lives that the ease with which something is learned depends greatly on what is to be learned and how much of it there is. [...] Consider the following three lists of material. (1) TS-YAL-DOP-SIW-MEL-YOS-HIW-LON-MAF-GIW-NAL-WOH . (2) WAS-TIN-LAY-WHY-OLD-WOE-NIL-LOW-HAM-FIG-MOP-ASS . (3) WE-ALL-SAW-A-TINY-GOLD-FISH-WHO-SWAM-IN-MY-POOL. No experimental investigation is required to tell us that these lists would not be equally easy to learn. We would have to read through the first list several times before we could recall it. The second list would be recalled after a smaller number of readings. And the third list would be repreoduced after no more than two readings. If we ask our subject why he found one list easier to learn than another, he would reply that the lists varied in meaningfulness. [...] they "make sense." This exemplifies, in an obvious way, the rule that ease of learning is directly dependent on the meaningfulness of the material for the subject. p.43

The old techniques of learning via recital, which are today badly tainted under the umbrella term "rote learning" are here vindicated. This accords with my own experience and I really think that it's a shame that we have dismissed such an obviously effective method of internalisation (that has worked after all for so long), even in face of quite conclusive studies like Hunters, here described:

In memorizing any sort of material which is later to be reproduced, the effectiveness of repeated reading, listening or looking is enhanced by recitation [...] This point can be illustrated by another experiment conducted by the writer [...] Those using non-recitation were instructed as follows. "Begin at the first line and read through the material to the end. Then read the material through repeatedly from beginning to end. Keep your eyes on the printed material at all times and make no attempt to recite or anticipate what comes next. Work as quickly as possible." The other half of the students were instructed in recitation: "For the first minute, read the material through from beginning to end as in the non-recitation method. Then, when I give you the signal, begin recitation. Read a line, then close your eyes and try to repeat it silently to yourself. If you cannot repeat it, read it again and, if necessary, again. Then read the next line, close your eyes, try to recall it, check if necessary, and go on to the next line again. Work as quickly as possible and don't waste time trying to recall lines which you obviously haven't yet mastered." After these instructions were given, each student spent five minutes in memorizing and then spent a further five minutes trying to write out as much as he could recall. [...] 150 students acted as subjects in this experiment [...] Those using recitation recalled, on the average, forty-six words while those not using recitation had an average recall score of only thirty-three words. Thus, the best learning was obtain by those who devoted a large share of their time to recitation. Other investigations show that, as expected, the superiority of the recitation group is still present when remembering is tested for, not immediately after learning but some considerable time later. p.54-5

In the same chapter, Hunter recounts a similar experiment which compared piecemeal learning with holistic learning. The first group divided material into sections (say, a poem into stanzas) to be memorized piecemeal, and the other memorized the the material holistically (this is called the "whole method"). Hunter reports that the latter is the superior method. "In the case of the twelve line poem, there may be a meaningful unity about the whole which is lacking in the parts." Then he quoted an early work of psychology which convincingly extolls the "whole method" and gave me pause to re-think about how I currently go about learning a foreign language:

This effect of attitude is well expressed by a quotation from the bookThe Nature and Conditions of Learning by H. L. Kingsley:

Children often prefer the part method, and unpractised afults are often skeptical of the advantages of the whole method. With the whole method much more time and work is required before any results of learning are manifest. One may read a long poem through a dozen times without being able to recite a single line, while with the same amount of work by the part method the learner would probably be able to recite several stanzas. For this reason a learner gets the feeling of success sooner with the part method. The reciptation of parts become sub-goals, which provide a series of steps towards the main goal, the ability to recite the whole. These intermediate goals and the satisfactions derived from reaching them no doubt favour the part method, particularly with children and with adults unaccustomed to rote memory work. The whole method is likely to be discouraging because the learner has to work so long before he can see any returns for his effort. He may feel that he is not making any progress or he is wasting his time with this "new fangled method." This attitude operates against the success of the method. The experienced and informed learn knows that the readings in the whole method are not a waste of time. He knows, as Ebbinghaus demonstrated, that every reading yields an increment of learning, which is spread over the whole, and that if he continues, he will eventually find the whole selection rising above the threshold of recall. He knows that while he must work longer before the results are manifest, the final returns fully justify his patience and endurance. p.56-7

And something else that made me reconsider my own learning habits (though I was previously aware of it) was the following section on the advantages of time-spaced repition of material rather than intensely revisiting the same.

When sessions were spaced at one-hour intervals (in the daytime only), forty-three readings were required involving a study time of 140 minutes. When sessions were spacved at one-day intervals, the number of readings required was only nineteen with an actual study time of sixty minutes. With eight-day spacing, the readings dropped to thirteen and the study time to forty-six minutes. Now, these rather typical results reveal that the greater the spacing, the smaller is the amount of time spent in actual study, while, of course, the total time increases. This means that spacing can only be profitably used where there is a lengthy time available for study, and the problem is how best to distibute this time among a number of learning activities. p.58

In the chapter on forgetting, Hunter touches upon the unsettling types of compensation we unconsciously apply to our considerable gaps in recall:

One of the commonest techniques for overcoming the appearance of forgetfulness is that of rationalization, of fabricating a plausible sequence of events to replace that which cannot be recalled. In senile dementia such rationalizing occurs to an abnormal degree. It is possible to elicit every few minutes a different account of the way in which an acute patient came into hospital. In the space of an hour, he may say that he has been in hospital for a long time, that he walked into hospital yesterday, that he came by bus, and that he was driven to hospital in the car of a friend who may, in fact, have been dead for some years. p.68

After chapters on the limits of usefulness for the Freudian concept of repressing traumatic memories, and another on the special skills of "imaging" (synesthesia, number forms and other unconscious memory aids), Hunter describes some ways in which we are able to improve our memories. He concludes that we are born with a native ability for a kind of pure recall which is not improveable (as proved through experiments with nonsense syllables), yet we have a lot of freedom to improve the way we organize meaningful units: with symbolism, with visualization and sound relationships. Also, he stresses a second time that planning to revise material over a large stretch of time is always preferable to cramming. He recounts some interesting historical facts about the evolution of mnemonic systems:

According to Cicero, the outline of this system occurred to Simonides under dramatic circumstances. A certain Greek had won a wrestling victory at the Olympic Games and was giving a banquet at his house by way of celebration. [...]After delivering his eulogy, Simonides was called away to speak with two men who were waiting outside and scarcely had he left than the floor of the banquet room collapsed, killing the host and all his guests. Naturally, relatives wished to sort out the bodies, but these were so mutilated as to be unrecognizable. However, Simonides, had observed, during his recital, the positions occupied by the guests in the room and by searching in the appropriate places, he was able to identify the bodies. [...] Simonides found that a technique of this sort was, indeed, of considerable assistance in memorizing. He reduced his technique to a system and appears to have taught it to others since both Quintilian and Cicero confess themslves indebted to it. These orators ued to prepare their speeches by thinking of each division in connexion with a specific, visualized locality. Since the order of these localities was well known, the spekaer only had to imagine each in turn to recall or reintergrate the divisions in their correct sequence. For obvious reasons, this type of system was called the "locality" or "topical" system. (The word "topical" comes from the Greek word for "a place." It is of interest that we still speak of "topics" in connexion with discourses and that Simonides' system is believed by some to have furnished the original of such expressions as "in the first place.") p.164-5

[Isaac Lambert · Rating 3 out of 5]

a fun (albeit dated) book. I'm certainly interested in memory in the qualitative/ quantitative sense - numbers / datum and anecdotes are fun to read and think through. some snippets in here are really interesting, but I feel a lot is repetitive (and hence easier to memorize 😅). I don't really care about improving my memory, and for those that do probably not enough there.

[Eg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite comprehensive work. The language rather complicated thus in some places lost the interest in different tests related to memory capabilities and problems.