How To Train Your Little Dragon’s Memory…

Memory is the retention of information over time. Although the word memory may conjure up an image of a singular, “all-or-none” process, it is clear that there are actually many kinds of memory: sensory register, short-term memory, long-term memory, visual memory, auditory memory, and sequential memory, to name but a few. Each of these may be somewhat independent of the others.

When you are trying to recall a telephone number that was heard a few seconds earlier, the name of a person who has just been introduced, or the substance of the remarks just made by a teacher in class, you are calling on short-term memory, or working memory.

“Students who have deficits in the storage and retrieval of information from long-term memory may study for tests, but not be able to recall the information they studied when taking the tests,” says Glenda Thorne, Ph.D., in her article ’10 Strategies to Enhance Students’ Memory.’ “They frequently have difficulty recalling specific factual information such as dates or rules of grammar. They have a poor memory of material learned earlier in the school year or last year. They may also be unable to answer specific questions asked of them in class even when their parents and/or teachers think they really know the information.”

The problem most people face in long-term memory is not storage, but retrieval; that is, how to recall (or remember) information stored in long-term memory. Before one can answer a question in an exam, the stored information must be retrieved from long-term memory and placed back into short-term or working memory (or consciousness).

Sleep improves long-term memory:

There are a number of ways to improve and keep your child’s long-term memory sharp. One simple way is to make sure that they get enough sleep. Children who do not get enough sleep have been shown to perform more poorly on memory and attention tests.

Sleep helps the brain commit new information to memory through a process called memory consolidation. In studies, people who’d slept after learning a task did better on tests later.

In one experiment 26 participants were trained to perform a simple motor task with the left hand; the task involved learning a sequence of 5 key presses. The participants were split into two groups; one group had an afternoon nap lasting between 60-90 minutes after learning the task, while the other remained awake.

The ability of all the participants to perform the task as quickly and as accurately as possible was then tested. In those who had taken a siesta, there was a significant improvement in performance of the task. By contrast, no significant improvement in task performance was observed in the participants who had remained awake.

Memory is not a gift. It’s a skill:

The belief that memory can be trained is not new. The Greeks, and later the Romans, developed some of the most prodigious memories the civilized world has ever seen. Memory was ranked as one of the most important disciplines of oratory, a flourishing art at the time. They lived in an age with no paper, so people couldn’t readily refer to notes. Speeches were committed to memory; lawyers depended on their memory in court; and poets, whose role in society was paramount, regularly drew on their enormous powers of recall to recite long passages of verse.

Today, external aids supplant memory. We rely on calculators, cellphones, smart phones, computers and the Internet to assist memory recall, with the result that people get very little training in developing and improving their memory skills. In children, the result can be underachievement in school.

Train your child’s long-term memory:

Use predetermined sequences to train your child’s long-term memory. They have to learn the sequences by heart. Start with easy ones and gradually make them more and more challenging. Below are three examples.

Easy: 
Nine planets that orbit the sun (in order from the sun):
Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

Intermediate:
NATO phonetic alphabet (International radiotelephony spelling alphabet):
Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.

Difficult:
African countries in alphabetical order:
Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dote d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe.