Mac Productivity: The Persistence of Memory

This is a continuation of the previous posting, dealing with the issue of memory – where I introduced the QCEP map of memory association (an idea, by the way, that owes something to meditation techniques). There are two reasons I introduced QCEP. I’m going to use this idea in a method for storing data and I need the reader to understand how to reliably create and retain memory.

Specifically I’m interested in teaching people how to memorize shortcuts. Productivity depends on shortcuts – fast ways of doing things and if you cannot remember these they are no use to you. Actually they are are worse than useless – because you’ll decide to do something and you’ll remember that there’s a short cut and if you can’t remember what it is it’ll stop you in your tracks as you decide between finding out what it is and doing it the slow way. This is what I want us to avoid.

There are two important things you needs to know if you want to make a memory stick:

1. The facts about the persistence of memory.
2. A simple method for understanding how to construct associations.

The Persistence of Memory

There’s no point in me rewriting in great depth information that has been articulated very well elsewhere, so let me point you at supermemo.com. There is an extensive amount of useful information about memory on that site – although I’m not recommending the software it sells (I’ve never used it). What is important for you to know in respect of learning to be productive is:

1. It is better to understand something before you try to memorize it. (In QCEP, the Class and Part and Quality associations are ways of becoming familiar with and understanding something – the Event associations can then become about our personal context).
2. Memories don’t persist unless you reinforce them, but there is a rhythm to this. Supermemo maintains that the best time to reinforce an initial attempt to memorize something is between 3 and 7 days after the first attempt. After 7 days the memory starts to degrade. But the point I want to emphasize here is that if you learn a shortcut and then don’t use it for two weeks, you can easily lose what you learned. So initially, there is no point at all in learning shortcuts for anything but your most common activities.

Constructing Associations

You cannot easily remember anything that you are not familiar with. In fact the process of memorizing something is best done by investing in familiarization. Imagine that you have the task if remembering the Latin names of flowers and being able to name them when you walk around a garden or go for a walk in the country. This is a hard task if you just use the technique of rote memorizing. Here’s how to do it in a constructive way.