Many memory trainers suggest that “Action” is an important part of visualization. Sometimes they suggest “zany”, “violent”, “sexual”, “cartoon”, “funny”, “exaggerated”, etc. I’ve also seen “morphing”, “fusing” suggested. My question is, are there particular classes of action that are better for our memory wiring than others?
Examples: Barbara Oakley, in her newest book Mindshift, says in her chapter on how to produce a MOOC that “looming” action, where things get larger, taller, and closer, tends to capture our attention. She was talking in particular about video editing to make things memorable but I’m going to try it with my embryonic efforts at card memorization. Makes sense. Looming things are more of a threat, incite fear, and therefore attention than things moving back and forth, receding, etc.
In a series of articles dealing with senior citizens (I’m 63; when will I become a “senior citizen?”) Jennifer Ryan PhD in Canada has been testing what she calls “unitization.” This is turning two images into one. As I understand the article, she tried fusion, motion, and action/consequence sequences and found that if your action includes consequences it’s more sticky than if it’s just moving or fusing. (It also sounds a lot like “chunking” by the way, something Barbara hits hard in her book and course on Learning How to Learn.)
Has anyone found any particular classes of actions to work better than others?
So you are saying that memory is associated with the part of the brain that controls both fear and pleasure - like the amygdala which is associated with the region that stores spatial memory? I would think so that emotional states especially those associated with safety, risk, and reproduction would be involved.
The issue I see here is, as another comment suggested, these associations can associate recursively, and have levels of subjectivity, cultural inter-subjectivity as well as just pure biological sensation.
I’m a slow beginning card memorizer but have been doing my own experiment with “looming” figures and with trying to incorporate some kind of action with consequence into them. I’m using Anthony Metivier’s car palaces and his simple Major based card encoding. I kind of like the combination of things enlarging, getting closer, then doing something to the cars when they hit. I’ve also tried putting fusion into the action. So far it’s not exactly game-changing but I think it does help some.
Here’s another interesting take on “stickiness”, Lynne Kelly’s post on characters that make things more memorable. She mentions the Kachina’s from the American Southwest and has been developing her own “Rapscallions” for memory work in Australia. Of course we have a lot of playful characters in cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, just to name a couple.
Good question. I’m not very familiar with the definitions of fusion and consequence, however, I have tested many different types of actions over the years in my mnemonics and have come up with some personal rules when creating images. Actions that interact with loci or other images in other loci are always more memorable for myself. Trying to remember and image of Donald trump sitting on my couch and Steve Carrol jumping on my coffee table next to it is next to impossible. Trying to remember an image of Donald Trump getting red in the face and Steve Carrol jumping higher and higher on a trampoline may be a bit better, but is still very hard. Trying to remember an image of Donald trump throwing a grenade at Steve Carrol from the couch and having Steve jump out of the way as it explodes is VERY memorable. I tend to focus less on what the action IS and more on how the action INTERACTS and AFFECTS the surrounding people and loci. The more interactions, the better. Hope that helps a bit.