Find out about the pegword mnemonic
To celebrate Māori Language Week here in Aotearoa (New Zealand), I've put together a pegword set in te reo:
Although I’m a cognitive psychologist and consequently think that memory and cognition is mostly about your mastery of effective strategies, when it comes to age-related cognitive decline, I’m a big believer in the importance of diet and exercise. But while we know these things can play an important role in why some people develop cognitive impairment and even dementia as they age, and others don’t, we don’t yet know with any great certainty exactly what exercise programs would be the best use of our time, and what diet would have the most benefit.
A lot of theories have been thrown up over the years as to what we need sleep for (to keep us wandering out of our caves and being eaten by sabertooth tigers, is one of the more entertaining possibilities), but noone has yet been able to point to a specific function of the sleep state that would explain why we have it and why we need so much of it.
In a recent news report, I talked about how walking through doorways creates event boundaries, requiring us to update our awareness of current events and making information about the previous location less available. I commented that we should be aware of the consequences of event boundaries for our memory, and how these contextual factors are important elements of our filing system. I want to talk a bit more about that.
Forget the persistent myth that everything is remembered; that our brains are video cameras whirring away recording everything, and that such 'hidden' knowledge can be brought to light by a hypnotist or alien artefact. Such things are the stuff of fantasy. Of course, there is a nugget of truth there: we can, and do, remember things we've paid no conscious attention to. Sometimes the right question can elicit memories we didn't know we had, in more detail than we imagined we could have. But for the most part, what's not noticed is not remembered. Attention is crucial to memory.
Frances Yates described the memory strategy valued by the ancient Greeks and Romans as the "Art of Memory" in her widely quoted and seminal book The Art of Memory. Today we know it as the method of loci. But the Art of Memory, as those of the ancient world and those of the medieval world practiced it, is far richer than is implied by that title.
Our society gives a lot of weight to intelligence. Academics may have been arguing for a hundred years over what, exactly, intelligence is, but ‘everyone knows’ what it means to be smart, and who is smart and who is not — right?
Of course, it’s not that simple, and the ins and outs of academic research have much to teach us about the nature of intelligence and its importance, even if they still haven’t got it all totally sorted yet. Today I want to talk about one particular aspect: how important intelligence is in academic success.
You may have heard of “g”. It’s the closest we’ve come to that elusive attribute known as “intelligence”, but it is in fact a psychometric construct, that is, we surmise its presence from the way in which scores on various cognitive tests positively correlate.
In other words, we don’t really know what it is (hence the fact it is called “g”, rather than something more intelligible), and in fact, it is wrong to think of it as a thing. What it is, is a manifestation of some property or properties of the brain — and we don’t know what these are.
Find out about the pegword mnemonic
Here are pegwords I've thought up in the Italian language.
As with the original example, let's try it out with our cranial nerves.
In italiano, sono i nervi cranici:
The other day I was sitting in the sunshine in my living room going through some journal articles I'd photocopied. I realized I needed to staple the pages together and went down to my study to get the stapler. Approaching my desk, I decided to check my email while I was there. And then, I decided to check my library account online to see whether a book I had requested had turned up. When I'd done that, I went back upstairs to my papers. Where I realized, of course, that I'd forgotten the stapler.