Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 
Module 22 
Forgetting: When Memory Fails 
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Fortunately, most of us have intact memory, and the occasional failures we suffer 
may actually be preferable to having a perfect memory. Consider, for instance, the 
case of a man who had total recall. After reading passages of Dante’s The Divine 
Comedy in Italian—a language he did not speak—he was able to repeat them from 
memory some 15 years later. He could memorize lists of 50 unrelated words and 
recall them at will more than a decade later. He could even repeat the same list of 
words backward, if asked (Luria, 1968). 
Such a skill at fi rst may seem to be enviable, but it actually presented quite a 
problem. The man’s memory became a jumble of lists of words, numbers, and names; 
when he tried to relax, his mind was fi lled with images. Even reading was diffi cult 
since every word evoked a fl ood of thoughts from the past that interfered with his 
ability to understand the meaning of what he was reading. Partially as a consequence 
of the man’s unusual memory, psychologist A. R. Luria, who studied his case, found 
him to be a “disorganized and rather dull-witted person” (Luria, 1968, p. 65). We 
might be grateful, then, that forgetfulness plays a role in our lives.
Apart from the advantages of forgetting, say, a bad date, most 
of us would like to fi nd ways to improve our memories. Among 
the effective strategies for studying and remembering course 
material:
• Use the keyword technique. If you are studying a foreign 
language, try the keyword technique of pairing a foreign 
word with a common English word that has a similar 
sound. This English word is known as the keyword . For example, to learn the 
Spanish word for duck ( pato , pronounced pot-o ), you might choose the keyword 
pot; for the Spanish word for horse ( caballo , pronounced cob-eye-yo ), the keyword 
might be eye . Once you have thought of a keyword, imagine the Spanish word 
“interacting” with the English keyword. You might envision a duck taking a bath 
in a pot to remember the word pato or a horse with a large, bulging eye in the 
center of its head to recall caballo (Carney & Levin, 1998; Wyra, Lawson, & Hungi, 
2007).
• Rely on organization cues . Recall material you read in textbooks by organizing the 
material in memory the fi rst time you read it. Organize your reading on the basis 
of any advance information you have about the content and about its arrange-
ment. You will then be able to make connections and see relationships among the 
various facts and process the material at a deeper level, which in turn will later 
aid recall.
• Take effective notes . “Less is more” is perhaps the best advice for taking lecture 
notes that facilitate recall. Rather than trying to jot down every detail of a lecture, 
it is better to listen and think about the material, and take down the main points. 
In effective note taking, thinking about the material when you fi rst hear it is more 
important than writing it down. This is one reason that borrowing someone else’s 
notes is a bad idea; you will have no framework in memory that you can use to 
understand them (Feldman, 2010).
• Practice and rehearse . Although practice does not necessarily make perfect, it 
helps. By studying and rehearsing material past initial mastery—a process called 
overlearning —people are able to show better long-term recall than they show if 
they stop practicing after their initial learning of the material.
• Don’t believe claims about drugs that improve memory . Advertisements for One-a-
Day vitamins with ginkgo biloba or Quanterra Mental Sharpness Product would 
have you believe that taking a drug or supplement can improve your memory. 
Not so, according to the results of numerous studies. No research has shown that 
commercial memory enhancers are effective (Gold, Cahill, & Wenk, 2002; McDan-
iel, Maier, & Einstein, 2002; Burns, Bryan, & Nettelbeck, 2006).