English Rewind - Weekender: Improving your memory

Hello!

This is a programme from the BBC Learning English archive.

It was first broadcast in January 2007 on the BBC Learning English website.

We do hope you enjoy it!

BBC Learning English dot com.

Hello, welcome to Weekender! My name's...

Um, oh, my name's...

Oh, dear, what was it again?

Oh, yes! Jackie Dalton.

Today's topic is memory

and the programme will hopefully provide you with some helpful study tips

when it comes to memorising information.

We'll do this with the help of Andrew Mayes.

He's a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Manchester in the UK.

What's his tip for how to learn things that you need to remember?

The best way to learn it is to space your learning.

So you don't say "I've got to learn this", so sit down and spend about ten hours

trying to put it in your head in a sort of mass practice fashion.

Andrew's tip for effective learning is to "space it out"

don't try and learn a lot in one go.

Why is this?

What you do is you process certain parts of it on one day

and then you come back to it the following day or a few days later

and learn it again and then you do that again and again.

And this is much more efficient.

With much less time spent on the learning,

you can get up to very high levels of memory performance

and, furthermore, it survives over long periods of time

much better than if you learn it all in one go.

Andrew talks about 'processing' information,

which means organising it,

taking the information in and putting it in the right place,

'processing' information.

He says you process what you learn much better

if you just do a little at a time and leave a gap before you try to learn more.

This, he says, is a 'more efficient' way of learning.

'More efficient' — it's a better way of using your time.

BBC Learning English dot com.

Another tip for you —

I always thought the best time to study for exams was the morning,

because that's when I felt most focused and awake.

But, according to Andrew,

we tend to remember things better if we learn them at night.

Why is this? Listen to Andrew to find out.

If you learn something last thing at night and then go to sleep

and compare that with learning something during the day

and you then have eight active hours after that in which you're learning new things,

what you find after a few days

is that you remember the information that you learnt last thing at night —

immediately before you went to sleep — you remember that best.

If you learn something during the day

and then carry on learning other things for about eight hours or so,

you remember that stuff much less efficiently.

So, according to Andrew, if you memorise things before you go to sleep,

you remember them better,

because your brain can process the information overnight.

It's harder to memorise things in the morning,

because your brain still has to cope with all the other information

it receives over the rest of the day.

Let's listen to Andrew again.

We'll look at some of the language he uses afterwards.

And the evidence is growing that that's because if we learn new things,

the parts of the brain that store this new information

are busy storing these new memories

and that interrupts the memories that went in immediately before,

it prevents them being consolidated very efficiently.

So if your brain is trying to store things you've just learnt,

then you start trying to learn something else,

that gets in the way of the processing.

What expression did Andrew use to say

that it's become more and more clear that this is what happens?

And the evidence is growing that that's because...

'The evidence is growing that...'

'Evidence' is facts or signs that show that something is true.

Andrew said 'evidence is growing' —

so there are more and more facts that show that trying to learn a lot in one go

is less efficient than just learning a little at a time.

He also used the word 'consolidated'.

Do you know what that means? If not, try to work it out from the context.

And the evidence is growing that that's because if we learn new things,

the parts of the brain that store this new information

are busy storing these new memories

and that interrupts the memories that went in immediately before,

it prevents them being consolidated very efficiently.

To 'consolidate' means to bring things together

in order to make them more easy to deal with.

Well, I hope you've managed to consolidate all the information you've just received.

And, if you want to make sure you remember what you learnt today,

have a rest, go to sleep, come back another day and go through it all again.

Happy learning!

BBC Learning English dot com.