Can you memorize lessons as the teacher is talking?

Can you imagine all the ways you may be able to apply these methods to your study?  

Solomon Shereshevsky, known in popular literature as Mr S, was a Russian journalist in the 1920s. Whilst attending a work meeting he was told off for not taking any notes. To everyone’s astonishment he said he could recall the speech word by word. And he did. To his astonishment no one else was able to do this. For the next thirty years Mr S was studied by the neurophysiologist, Alexander Luria.

Which of us, wouldn’t like to be able to do this with our own school lessons?

In the May/June edition of Scientific Mind, Helen Shen explores the concept of the engram. Engrams are the means by which memories are supposed to be stored physically within the nerves of the brain in response to stimulation. It appears that memory is a highly distributed process, not just relegated to one region of the brain, engaging multiple areas which involve sights, smells, sounds and numerous other sensations. Using BBC’s hit detective drama, Sherlock, Janice Chen spied on what happened inside people’s brains as they watched the first episode and then described it. What she observed was that people had the same scene-viewing patterns within their brains as each person later recounted the episode. The brain has also been demonstrated making connections between prior knowledge and learning new things.

How does this knowledge help us?

Well, if we can copy the process by which Mr S encoded his memories, we could improve our own memories. Luria diagnosed Mr S as having a synaesthesia, in which the stimulation of one of his senses evoked a reaction in his other senses. So, when learning new material, we should be using as many of our senses as possible.

When thinking of numbers, for Mr S each number evoked a vision of a person. Our learning lesson from this? With numbers we should know how to convert numbers into images that we can then use with our imagination to make memories.

Mr S also had an very active imagination, and he used it to generate mnemonics.

By using our imagination, creativity, senses and emotions we are able to create meaningful memories of any fact, from any situation. And with time and effort, trial and error, it is possible to get to the point where we can memorize, and encode, the important facts of any lesson as our teachers are teaching us.

It’s also the skill set that we explore in greater detail in our online course, where we recall and retrieve the facts we have learned for our exams.

And there is a tipping point:

The more we know the easier it is to learn new related material.

Enjoy!