Understanding Memory: Strategies for Improvement and Challenges

Memory improvement requires understanding the active process of forgetting and employing unique cues for effective recall.

### Understanding Memory: Strategies for Improvement and the Role of Mental Health
* 🧠 "Forgetting is actually its own very **active process**" that can be influenced by various factors, making it essential to **understand how we forget** in order to improve our memory.
* 📚 The distinction between **memorization and forgetting** is crucial, as both are separate **active processes** that impact how we **store and retrieve information**.
* 🔍 Cues and tags play a significant role in memory retrieval; however, "**Q overload**" can lead to **transient forgetting**, making it difficult to **access information when needed**.
* 💡 To combat this, introducing **novelty and unique cues** during study sessions can enhance memory retention, as seen through the author's personal experiences with various learning methods.
* ⚠ Proactive inhibition occurs when new learning interferes with previously acquired knowledge, highlighting the importance of **strategic cramming and revision techniques**.
* 💖 Mental health significantly affects memory performance, with the author's journey emphasizing that **confidence and emotional well-being** can **enhance cognitive function**.
* 🧩 Conceptual memory, which connects related ideas, allows for **more efficient storage and recall**, suggesting that learning should be approached **horizontally rather than vertically** for better retention.
* 💬 Lastly, the narrative we tell ourselves about our abilities can either **empower or disempower us**, reinforcing the idea that **self-perception plays a vital role** in overcoming memory challenges.

I think you were taught to memorize things wrong. Since we first started to speak, we begin to get tested on our memory. I've sat hundreds of exams, memorized tens of pages of scripts for theater, learned thousands of new concepts in four years of medical school, and while this all looks effortlessly impressive, the truth is beneath the tools. This girl actually has a terrible memory. A friend of mine actually made me summarize a full novel to them because they could not believe I'd read it, as I couldn't tell them the name of a single character or a pace. I'd say the main girl, her dad, the first guy she liked, even a medical report of mine from a few years ago, noticed and described my clear problem with short-term memory. So, needless to say, no natural talent in this department, but I've never accepted this problem. I've always tried to find ways to perform and memorize the way I was expected to in school or university; otherwise, I wouldn't be able to become a doctor. In this process, I've read, experimented, and

memorized so much when it comes to the way that our brains store, recall, and forget information. Today, I'm going to share all of that with you. Let's get straight into it. Firstly, we cannot improve our memory without first understanding how forgetting works. We like to focus on ways to be able to remember and recall things better while completely ignoring the sorts of things that encourage us to forget and therefore end up not really improving overall. And we can't be excused for this. For the longest time, we used to think that forgetting was this passive process, that we either were able to memorize something fully, and if this memorization failed, we were left with the default, which was forgetting. This is absolutely no longer the case. In his book Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering, Professor Scott at Columbia discusses studies with zebrafish to describe how forgetting is actually its own very active process. It has its own neurotransmitters, its whole own pathways, and there are things that can actively encourage it to become activated and to

work, and this is amazing because it means we can discover and try to avoid those things. Memorization and forgetting are two separate active processes. Let's see what progressing norms have you ever been on an exam, looked as oppression, and gone, Oh yeah, I know what this is about. I remember being taught this, but you cannot for the life of you remember the actual answer. So, this highlights a very important way about how we store, retrieve, and delete information. So, the way that memories work in our brain is that they are just not stored in these individual packets. Almost everything has a cue or a tag attached to it, subconsciously or consciously. When we're looking for information in our brain, we actually go to the queue first, and we look at the tag, and then we find the memory that's connected to it. In this case, for example, we might go, Oh, it was our history teacher, but then there's so many things she taught us, so we can't find it there. And then we go, Oh, it was the bottom right-hand side of my textbook.

but there are so many things that are on those pages, and then we're like, Oh, it was on Christmas, but we learned so many things then. So, all of these cues do not help for us to tag and find the information that we need the answer to this question. What has happened here is Q overload. Each of these cues has too much memory attached to them, and they do not like this when it happens. They start to delete the information connected to them, and this leads to the case that we just saw, the technical term for which is transient forgetting. Now, there is a very good solution for this, which also activates our attentional control system, which was described by the daddy of memory, Alan Baddeley, which is basically the thing that grabs things from our short-term memory into our long-term storage, where we want to keep them, and therefore increases our motivation to do this. This is novelty, new, unique, strong cues means memories you dirt practically. What does this mean for your studying? When I used to be in school and I was struggling with a topic,

that I found either too difficult or too dense because it had lots of things to memorize. I would drop my textbook, which already has too many oversaturated cues, and I would go straight to YouTube and watch MIT or Yale open courses, which, God bless them, they've taken me through so much. It's amazing. But because this is such a different context, audio watching university lectures on one small aspect of that lesson that I found challenging, and therefore this is such a difficult context to my normal classroom teacher teaching, that it would create a new cue in my mind. If it was a particularly important subject to me, I would also read extra books or watch extra documentaries. So for this one challenging memory, I actually would have so many unique new cues attached to it that became almost impossible for me not to memorize that thing because I had six new cues popped to mind every time I thought of it. In an exam, I would absolutely smash these topics. I still remember so much about the chemistry of cloning because of these lectures. I

would definitely recommend this next very frustratingly a huge promoter of forgetting is learning itself. The analogy here is that our brain is not like a hard drive but like a cassette tape. When we are putting new information in it, we are very often overriding information that was previously there. I was semi-fluent in Turkish when I stopped studying it and started French, and now I've almost completely lost my Turkish. Whenever I think of a Turkish word, the French one comes to mind. This was also replicated much more reliably in a study where mice were made to learn new mazes, and the mice that were the quickest and the best at learning new mazes were also the ones that were more likely to forget the old ones. The technical term for this is proactive inhibition, where there's an interference from previous learning that leads to progressing. You might have experienced this if you've crammed for an exam and learned new material last minute, and can actually find on your exam day that you've forgotten or messed up what you previously knew actually quite well, and

therefore, you perform worse overall in your exam. Now, how we avoid this proactive inhibition is not to avoid learning new things altogether, but to be strategic about our cramming. If we are cramming last minute, very last minute for an exam, I would recommend that we never learn new things that we have not learned before because this is where we are overriding what we knew in the past. What we can do instead is cram, revise, which is learn only the things that you knew previously, revise those as fast as you want, that's absolutely fine, and pray that they're the ones that are going to come in the exam. And on the other hand, if we have a longer time to cram or learn information, or if we are learning things that are in a similar field, it's really essential to do a mini memorization and comparison with what we knew before. If when I learned French, I also revised the Turkish equivalent word, I'm giving a signal to my brain that I actually need both of these and can store them separately. It's much more

likely that I remember both rather than overriding and forgetting things from the past. Before I progress onto the ways to address memorizing specifically, I have to say that actually the thing that has had the biggest impact on my memory, learning, and performance is unsurprisingly the state of my brain itself. As I mentioned earlier, I should have always known I didn't have an actual talent for memorization because as a girl in class, I would refer to people as the second row on the right and someone would tell them their name and I'd be like, Yeah, that's the person, because I couldn't memorize names at all. And yet, because I was compensating so much and trying all of these strategies, I don't think I even realized how bad my memory was. And everyone saw my e-pluses and my theater and all the things that I did and assumed that I had an excellent memory when it came to facts. This progressed all the way into my university years, and it was only recently when I was told by a medical

professional that I genuinely have a poor memory, that my memory became so much worse now that I found out I was labeled this way. There's a study that shows that young girls that are told that they're bad at STEM subjects perform a lot worse than those that are told that they are good at them. And I truly believe this is what happened to me, and I'm still slowly rebuilding and focusing on improving my memory and overcoming this year or so of having just really bad memory performance in general. When you tell yourself that you're stupid or you're less capable than other people or that you're just going to struggle with something, you genuinely do end up performing a lot worse. My confidence, mood, and happiness determine so much more about my memory and performance than any other specific technique. As much as I love everything I'll be mentioning today, I probably refer a bit more to that doctor's lesson, diagnosis, and effect in the end of this video. But for now, I do want to say the

Eugene charity and peace in order to study things properly, and the biggest difference you can make in academic performance is sorting out your mental health. Almost half of the videos on this channel are in some form related to therapy. I've been in therapy for years now, both online and in person, and I truly believe it is the only reason I am able to cope with making these videos alongside studying quite an intense degree and dealing with all of the problems, both internal and external, of my brain. This video is a paid partnership with BetterHelp, and I'm so excited to finally have links to give that are related in some form to therapy. I'm sure everyone already knows that BetterHelp is a platform that connects us to credentialed therapists for online remote therapy. The beauty of it in particular is that you are matched with a therapist based on your preferences from the get-go. If you know what you like, I'm a particular fan of family systems and Bowler Theory, so I can look for that, but

if you don't know what you don't know. They will ask you questions that can get you matched in the best way. It's almost expected that you shop around and you find the best therapist for you. And because there are so many available, it makes switching the easiest that I've seen anywhere before. I could genuinely go on for days about how much therapy has changed my life and how much I encourage it. So because of that, I've made another separate mini video, which is unlisted on my channel and links below. So if you want to see the reasons that I think people should go to therapy that I do not hear mentioned a lot elsewhere, and also my top tips for either starting as a complete novice, or if you've been out of the game for a while, kind of what advice I would give myself if I was starting again, that's listed in that video below. There's also a Notion template for free, which will have all of the top tips summarized together. So if you're thinking about this, that might hopefully be slightly

helpful. I also have a link in my description, which is betterhelp.com for Phillips, that will give you 10 off your first month. So, if you are interested in starting or thoughts about this before the sooner, honestly, the better because of the sure size and reach of the platform. Better help can remain one of the cheaper options of therapy out there, and I've had an amazing personal experience trying them out for a few months actually before making this video. So, I want to thank them so much for supporting this channel, but also for making therapy more accessible, which is something that I am incredibly passionate about. So, back to memorizing now, an important reason memorizing a sword is because our brains were never meant to do it the way that we are expected to. Professor Justin at the University of Toronto describes that our memories are not there for us to go, Oh, she remembers that time, but they're there to help us make decisions. We're supposed to store what we understand or what helps us understand things to make better decisions. This is called conceptual.

memory, but it is not what we commonly think it is. Conceptual memory can be so powerful because when done properly, it also means that ideas connect so well to one another that they end up kind of collapsing and taking less space in our brain, therefore making it easier for us to store larger amounts and volumes of data. So, how do we actually do this? I always think of learning as either being horizontal or vertical. The way that we are often taught to learn or taught things is in a vertical way. What this means is that we are given a topic, and then we are given details about this topic that come underneath. This is a vertical form of things to learn, and this is terrible because it remains one discreet thing, and we just have to learn about it. It might even be turned into a mind map, but still, it will have one main topic and everything underneath it, and this is just very hard to memorize all of these details. It's super likely that I'll forget one or a lot more of these

points here, and sometimes I'll forget that the whole condition exists, and it will be gone in the sea of endless vertical conditions I have to learn. Instead, I learn things in a horizontal way. So, let's say you have to learn about retinal artery occlusion. I'm not going to learn this topic. I'm going to go and look at one of the symptoms that stands out to me, which is painless loss of vision, because I know that there's at least one more type of painless loss of vision. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take one of the characteristics in this vertical list and try to find all of the conditions that have this characteristic. And this now creates a whole group of eye conditions related to painless loss of vision, all of them connected by this one fact already. This is much more logical and much more likely to remember that these conditions exist. And when I see them, I know at least one important thing about them, which is that they are painless loss of vision. Next, as I start

vertically slightly expanding with one of them when I see things that they have in common, either tests that need to be done, either cures that need to be done. I create another horizontal layer that connects them with one another, and in this way, I haven't just studied retinal artery occlusion. I studied a whole bunch of things which are all connected to this very strong visual cue of this whole group. This is 360-degree memorizing because when we memorize things in a book or when we take notes, usually it's very vertical, it's top to bottom, it's never a bottom to top. That would be very confusing, but all these conditions exist in this horizontal plane, and there's no beginning or end, up or down, left or right. They're all there together, and therefore I can kind of rotate it in my brain and connect it with other medical conditions. So it's compressed, it's flippable, it's expandable. Everything is really well connected and much more likely to remember a lot more about these conditions than if I was creating

separate mind maps with them or learning them completely as vertical lists. The next way to improve your memory has to do with the immense power of intuition. I used to play piano when I was younger, and sometimes I would take a piece of new sheet music to my teacher and ask them if they would let me learn it with them. And they might have never seen this before, and they just sit down and learned to memorize the piece so easily, even though this was a song they'd never seen it before. So, I think it's very non-controversial that experts in the field are a lot better and a lot quicker at memorizing information in that field than someone who is a complete novice. And you don't need to spend 20 years to become an expert in a subject to benefit massively from this intuition, because this is what I realized I used so much when I was younger in school. Now, there's something I have to admit. When I was in school and I was younger, I would really be a lot quicker at learning and

memorizing things than other people, and everyone would think, Oh my gosh, like she's so smart. So, this is not true. This is not the reason. This is not the reason I was memorizing things as well. The reason I was memorizing things well was because I had less to remember. People who were seeing things for the very first time had no intuition, no concept of what was happening in their brain as I do for a lot of things. Had to learn a whole bunch of information. Me, I'd done prep. If I have to learn something, I need to learn a tiny bit of it because I know what became before, what came after. I say, Oh yeah, that's probably where it happened. So, me learning it is a lot easier, which is why I can learn more, memorize more, and do things in a way that appears to be so smart to other people. So, let me explain how to do this. Let's say you have to learn the wars in France in the 1800s. If I had to do this now, do not have a clue.

if I would see a yard plus minus 60 70 years 200 years I don't know when that happened. So before even approaching this, if you want to memorize it well in a logical way, because you can use visual mnemonics, but that's a separate topic. If you want to learn it well, what you can do is you divide the whole 1800s into like 10-year brackets, and for every 10 years, you write the main thing that happened, the main person that was in charge, or the main political context, and you just learned this. And so when you're in an exam and you have a multiple choice question, for example, you don't have to approach every new date as though it's just a bunch of scrambled numbers and go like, Oh, is it this one? and try to remember what the number looked like in the textbook. But you can use this intuitive logic when you approach it where you go, Well, it can't be then because then that was resolved, and they can't be here because that was way too

Soon they were fighting about something else. So, that's the correct date, and this is helpful for exams. This is helpful for learning the information because you already have this thing built, which does not take that long. You can then memorize things a lot earlier because you have this skeleton on which to link things. The same thing can be said for languages. Before learning a language, it's great to just hear it a whole lot because you build intuition. And when you're studying it or trying to speak, you can sense that you're saying something wrong because intuition is like, I've never heard that. That sounds wrong, even though you don't know the grammatical rules. The way we all speak our native languages fluently, even though we might not necessarily be able to tell you why to use that tense or form of a word, these things would also be stacked with one another to create crazy efficient memorization and learning. When you're creating dates, that's a horizontal timeline. And instead of learning things about one war, what happened in one day.

vertically. You now put it in the space where it can be really flexible and moved around because you have a timeline. This is a visual representation. It's a really strong cue because you have to find this information potentially outside of your textbook to build the timeline. This is where you're researching and adding external cues, the uniqueness to a methods of study, the intuition you build, make it so much easier to memorize this in a way that you potentially will not forget for the next 30 Years. Very lastly, I earned an odd so much in this video about adding that little doctor's note and about talking about the negative effects that some things that doctors say have to us as someone who in a few months hopefully will be a doctor themselves rifles in the end. It's really important to mention just how empowering or disempowering the story that we tell ourselves can be and how easy easy it can be to overcome challenges when you don't think of them as challenges. And I was struggling with this realistically. I should have

realized a long time ago that I was struggling with this. I have a terrible memory, and I never knew it because of the fact that I was compensating, working hard at it, and believing that I could do this and I wanted to do this. And in this last year, it's just been really hard, and I feel like I've forgotten more than ever because I just accepted the fact that I'm worse than other people at this thing. This is a huge topic I'd potentially want to do a whole other video on. But if you do want a bit more information about how therapy specifically has helped you with this, that extra video I've made below should help and clarify things. And also, if you're cautious about therapy, I know it's really scary. It takes a while to get into it, especially when it's online. So, if you made it so far, thank you so much for watching me and I hate to the end of this video. I hope you have a wonderful recipe day. Be kind to yourself and others, and don't believe

You're Not Forgetful: My System for Memorising Everything

Elizabeth Filips

Overcoming a Poor Memory: Insights and Strategies

The speaker has struggled with a terrible memory despite academic success and has actively sought ways to improve memorization.

Forgetting is an active process with its own neurotransmitters and pathways, and understanding it is key to improving memory.

Cue overload can lead to transient forgetting, but using novelty and strong cues can help transfer information from short-term to long-term memory.

Strategies for Overcoming Memory Challenges

The speaker struggled with dense material and found success in using multiple cues from different sources, like YouTube lectures and extra readings, to memorize challenging topics.

They experienced proactive inhibition, where learning new information interfered with recalling previous knowledge, leading to frustration.

To avoid this, the speaker recommends being strategic with cramming, revising previously learned material, and creating associations between new and old information to enhance memory retention.

Overcoming Poor Memory and the Impact of Mental Health

The speaker has experienced a decline in memory performance after being labeled as having a poor memory, believing it to be linked to a common psychological effect.

They emphasize the importance of mental health in academic performance and share their positive experience with therapy.

The video is a paid partnership with BetterHelp, offering online therapy and personalized therapist matching, while also providing additional resources and tips for those interested in starting therapy.

Conceptual memory helps us store larger amounts of data by connecting ideas, making them easier to recall.

Learning horizontally, by grouping related concepts, is more effective than the traditional vertical approach.

Intuition plays a crucial role in memorization, with experts in a field being quicker to learn and remember information.

The speaker's ability to memorize information well is due to having less to remember and a clear understanding of the context.

Dividing information into smaller, logical brackets, such as 10-year periods, can help in memorizing historical events more effectively.

Building intuition through exposure, like hearing a language before learning it, also aids in efficient memorization and learning.

The Power of Visual Learning and Self-Compassion

Using a flexible timeline for study can enhance memory retention and make information easier to recall.

The story we tell ourselves can be empowering or disempowering, and overcoming challenges becomes easier with a positive mindset.

The speaker reflects on their own struggles with memory and the importance of self-compassion, while also offering resources for those considering therapy.