Memory Month, Day 26: Readers’ Feedback

November 26th, 2007 | MemoryMonth

First I want to recommend a truly great radio podcast on this subject:

Memory and Forgetting

Radiolab has a lot of very interesting shows and what they talk about is worth remembering.

Then my questions:
Has anyone studied why different people remember things easiest in different ways. I learn fastest by just looking and reading, my sister learns best when she writes things down, and one of my friends learns best when someone is reading or telling him what he has to remember.

Also, I wonder about when it comes to remembering how to go between places, men usually use “dead reckoning” and women use visual markings as guides. Or to make the question more general; Do men and women form memories differently?

Thanks for an interesting blog!
/C.M - Who once new Pi to 300 decimals too

I suspect that the answer to your questions are heavily related to the 5 keys I wrote about on Day 2. In particular, interest plays a huge role in determining what we focus on and what we filter out as we go about our lives. Your personality and style of learning may be more visual than your friend and that’s why seeing the words and reading them works best for you. Writing things down may reinforce that visual learning process for your sister and also increase concentration and attention on the subject matter where she might otherwise be distracted or disinterested while reading. Your friend could be a more auditory learner.

As far as gender differences go, Research suggests that women perform better than men at certain episodic memory tasks. The sense I get from reading the articles is that women generally have better developed interpersonal skills which allows them to better classify and remember events related to people (and what events don’t relate to people?) Women have also been found to be better at remembering appearances of people, which further supports that notion.

In fact, most of the research I’m reading seems to indicate that men are at a disadvantage to women when it comes to memory. I guess that’s why I have to use all these tricks.