Page 94 - Hard Goals

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that writing things down helps you remember them better.
However, if, like most folks, you’ve never been told why it’s so
important to write things down, your attitude is probably some-
thing along the lines of “why bother.” And who can blame you?
It’s a lot of extra work to write something down when you can
just as easily store it in your brain. Isn’t it?
The answer to that is no. Writing things down works on two
levels: external storage and encoding. External storage is easy to
explain: you’re storing the information contained in your goal in
a location (such as a piece of paper) that is very easy to access
and review at any time. You could post that paper in your offi ce,
on your refrigerator, or elsewhere. It doesn’t take a neuroscientist
to know you will remember something much better if you’re star-
ing at a visual cue that serves as a reminder every single day.
But there’s another deeper phenomenon happening: encod-
ing. Encoding is the biological process by which the things we
perceive travel to our brain’s hippocampus, where they’re ana-
lyzed. From there decisions are made about what gets stored in
our long-term memory and, in turn, what gets discarded. Writ-
ing improves that encoding process. In other words, when you
write something down it has a much greater chance of being
remembered.
Neuropsychologists have identifi ed the “generation effect,”
which basically says individuals demonstrate better memory for
material they’ve generated themselves than for material they’ve
merely read. It’s a nice edge to have, and when you write down
your picture, you get to access the generation effect twice: fi rst,
when you generate the goal and create a picture in your mind,
and second, when you write it down, because you’re essentially
reprocessing or regenerating that image. You have to rethink
your mental picture, put it on the paper, place objects, scale
them, think about their spatial relations, draw facial expres-