Page 106 - Mind Games The Aging Brain and How to Keep it Healthy

90 • Chapter 4

If you do not have a deck of cards, you might use domi-
nos or 3-by–5—inch cards and write facts on them that you
are trying to master.

INFORMATION-STORING PREFERENCES

Many people have developed clever strategies to help them
learn new information. The following sections are structured
so that you can discover new strategies. You may recognize
some of them as ones you use already. In each of the sections,
you will be told what skill you are exercising and how the ac-
tivity will improve your ability to process information.
Researchers found that when the presentation of infor-
mation and testing format match, performance increases.
This means that if you are going to have to write something,
practice writing; if you are going to have to say it, practice
talking; if you are going to have to do something, practice
doing it.

Rehearsal
The information-storing technique of rehearsal borrows its
name from the theater. Actors and actresses use the repeti-
tion of material when learning their lines, aloud or silently,
until they commit those lines to memory. Some people copy
and then recopy the lines. The entire cast rehearses the play
often so that everyone will remember what to do when they
are performing the show.
You may have used rehearsal to remember a phone num-
ber by repeating it from the time you looked it up in the tele-
phone book until you dialed it. This moved it from your
sensory store—reading it in the phone book—to your short-
term memory. The memory persisted long enough to let you
dial the number. However, because it had no special meaning
attached to it, the phone number didn’t make it to long-term
memory (LTM). If the phone number is an important number
(your mother’s new telephone number, for example), you
may want to take steps to promote its move to LTM. Re-