Techniques to Enhance Learning and Memory | Nancy D. Chiaravalloti | TEDxHerndon

how many people would like to improve their memory all of us right memory failures are common we all have memory failures in our daily life and this is perfectly normal whether it be forgetting your car keys not remembering the name of an acquaintance or failing to show up for an appointment on time we all forget things we're not computers and our memories are not perfect but there are things that we can do to improve our memory functioning let's imagine for a minute that you have a medical illness that causes impaired memory substantially impaired memory there

are many illnesses out there like this some have neurological causes like multiple sclerosis traumatic brain injury stroke others have non neurological causes disorders such as cardiac failure diabetes or perhaps major depression there are thousands of people out there that struggle really truly struggle with their memory functioning every single day but we can help them recent research at Kessler foundations has focused on memory rehabilitation and I'm here to tell you today that we are making progress but before I go on to tell you about some of the techniques we've developed I want to talk for just

a minute about the memory process memory is actually a very complicated process but it gets blamed for a lot of things that doesn't necessarily fail at so memory is composed of three stages the first is encoding the second is consolidation and the third is retrieval today I'm focusing on encoding and the reason I'm focusing on encoding is because that is where the vast majority of memory failures occur when I use the term encoding what I'm referring to is learning new information many of us think of learning and we think about students and indeed students do

do a lot of learning and it's actually their full-time jobs to learn information but we learn things every single day of our lives we are constantly relying on our learning and memory system so you may need to remember what to get at the store you may need to remember a series of to-do items throughout your day you're learning the name of a new acquaintance you're learning a new process that you might have to perform at work there are so many memory taxing situations in our daily lives that we can only improve our lives by learning

this new information so how do we do that well a Kessler foundation we've identified several techniques that aid in learning new information and I'm going to tell you about two of those techniques today the first one is imagery imagery is the process by which we attach a mental image or picture to a verbal idea and you can do this with almost anything to take a simple example let's say you need to remember the word house you might picture your house by doing this what you're essentially doing is forcing your brain to duly encode information so

the word house is being processed and remembered by your verbal memory networks in our society that's what we rely on constantly the image of the house is being processed and remembered by your visual spatial memory system which is located more posteriorly in your brain so what you're doing is you're increasing your brain activity and you're helping your your brain to learn new information in more than one manner so many people say well how does this help me I have to remember six or eight things to do and instead of remembering the things to do what

you're simply telling me to do is remember a bunch of pictures I still have to remember a whole bunch of stuff and that's my problem well the secret is to combine unrelated material into one image so you can take five six seven ideas and you can incorporate them into an image and I'm going to show you an example of this let's say that you're leaving for work in the morning rushing out the door you have no paper you can't write anything down you have to remember to call your mother that day you have to remember

to buy butter and apples on your way home you have to remember to pick up coffee for your 9:00 a.m. meeting because you want that meeting to go well coffee always helps and finally you need to remember that last night when you were working you had to change your network password and it's now blossom those are five completely unrelated pieces of information that you're going to need throughout your day you can combine them into one image and I'm going to show you how if you look on the screen in the center of the screen you

see a face a picture of a mother that is best that the best image of the mother that you can use is your own mother because that's the most salient image for you that's the easiest image of a mother for you to call to mind so that would be person specific Jane's mother probably different from Tom's mother next you'll notice that the particular mother on the screen is sitting in a butter churner and this is to demonstrate an example perhaps the person who needs to remember this information is a history buff and the image of

butter churner pops to his mind very simply so that's how he puts his he portrays his mother that is not going to work for most of us but it will work for this one individual so this is how he pictures his mother on the table next to the mother you see an apple here it's pictured as a red apple but perhaps you like green apples or you like gold apples so maybe you picture a different apple on the table if your mother really likes apples do you might picture your mother eating that Apple anything that

makes that image more salient and more specific to your experiences and your memories next to the Apple you have that cup of coffee remember you have to pick up coffee on your way to your 9:00 a.m. meeting I want you to notice something about that cup of coffee that cup of coffee isn't an on-the-go cup and there's a reason for that the reason is that when I have my coffee I never ever sit down at a table and have a cup of coffee I'm always running from one place to another and I have the on-the-go

cup in my hand that's alien to me my husband on the other hands sits down at the kitchen table and has his cup of coffee in his mug every single morning his image would be different his coffee would be in his mug because that's a very easy image for him to call to mind the final thing you had to remember was that last night you had to change your network password to the word blossom that seems like it should be easy to picture blossoms fairly simple you could picture a bouquet of flowers you could picture

a garden you could picture many many different things tulips roses but how do you remember that the word you need to retrieve is blossom not bouquet not tulips not garden it's blossom well this is how I would do it I associate the word blossom most strongly with the cherry blossoms that bloom in Washington DC that's just the most the strongest memory of that word to me so that's what I imagined someone else may be very different so as you can see you could take several very very different pieces of information combined them into one image

and make those items much easier for you to remember so now instead of remembering that you have to do these five things throughout the course of your day you have one image and when you visualize that in your minds it calls to mind these five different things that you must do throughout your day now let's move onto another technique and the reason I present these techniques together is because very often we teach them together we have a treatment protocol where we take we teach patients with MS and patients who have traumatic brain injury to use

these tech in their daily life the second technique is context context refers to what comes before or follows a word so if I need to remember the word house going back to our previous example I might say the old house on the hill was charming I've enriched my memory for that word by providing more semantic meaning to it it's old it's charming and it's up on a hill so much richer memory for me now just like imagery you can do this with extremely unrelated material so now let's use another daily life example let's say that

you're running to the store and you have to pick up string beans hot sauce and a mop three completely unrelated items located in different parts of the store that have very different uses how might you remember this how might you put this into a context what you could create is a mini story where a man walks into a restaurant he orders string beans with hot sauce on it proceeds to get ill and the Busboys had to come over with a mop it's a little bit crazy not likely to see it in your everyday life however

that little bit of eccentricity makes it easier for you to remember it so the true power of context comes when you combine it with the imagery and I'm going to show you how to do that now so you have your little story of the man in the restaurant ordering the string beans in the hot sauce let's create a mental image around that story your image might be a static picture because that's how you think so you have a picture in your mind's of a young man sitting in a restaurant and he's he has string beans

in front of him with hot sauce on top and maybe you have the Busboys off to the right holding the broom with his hand on his hip waiting for that little that man to get sick so that's one image if you'd like to do it in an image format someone else may think more in a movie reel perhaps someone else would envision the man walking into the restaurant sitting down ordering his hot sauce and his string beans and then he sees him get ill he sees the waiter come over and clean up the mess either

way it works but you have to do it in a manner that works best for you so a tesslar foundation we've been doing this research in traumatic brain injury of multiple sclerosis we teach these two techniques in a tenth session treatment protocol it's five sessions per week for two weeks and what we find after treatment is a significant improvement in someone's memory abilities on our paper and pencil tests of memory functioning where we ask patients to remember a list of words they do substantially better after treatment than they do before but more importantly these patients

are reporting that their memories in daily life are better they're able to apply these techniques to their daily life their memory dysfunction is less impactful on their daily life they're able to participate in society they're able to manage their finances they want to pursue meaningful employment which they weren't able to do before hands because these memory difficulties can be so debilitating so that's a tremendous finding finally and perhaps most interestingly depending on your backgrounds we also see that the brain changes how it's learning and remembering information in only 10 sessions across five weeks we're changing

how the brain is working and that's a pretty amazing finding so on the left side of the screen you see brain function when somebody is learning information before treatment just normal learning on the right side of the screen you see the brain of someone learning information after treatment those little red areas indicate areas of brain activation those are areas where the brain is active when it's learning information so what we see is significantly more activity after someone learns how to use these techniques than before and this was a monumental finding that we're actually able to

change brain function in such a short period of time now we've shown that these techniques are helpful for persons who have multiple sclerosis persons who have traumatic brain injury and we have additional research on it ongoing but what's important to everyone in here today is that these techniques are helpful to everyone everyone can use these techniques they're very simple but they require practice a lot of practice you don't necessarily need to go to therapy to learn the techniques you can simply start to visualize things start with one item and then make it two items three

items bounce your ideas off your significant other the way we teach the techniques is we ask people to visualize that's how we start we give them a story and we ask them to visualize they communicate their visual their images to us and we provide feedback we tell them how they might visualize better in a manner that might be more memorable for them and we do the same with context so you can do this at home you can work with somebody else to try to improve your ability to visualize information and therefore remember information the message

I want you to take home with you today is that memory is not static we can improve it with effort but it takes effort and like everything else it takes practice practice practice practice so I'd encourage you to try these techniques and I hope that you like what you say thank