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Remembering 131

requires regular savings or deposits for you to be able to realize your
investment. Regular reinforcement over a period of time has been
shown greatly to increase the capacity to recall things.
By the same token, research has shown that you tend to
remember things in proportion to the amount of time you have
spent learning them, and that, if possible, you should try to spread
out your learning over a number of regular episodes rather than tak-
ing it in one concentrated experience. This is not to say that in-
depth experiences are not valuable or memorable. Indeed, they
often are precisely so because of the emotional engagement they
demand of their participants. Nevertheless, it is important, in these
kinds of situations, that what was learned is regularly reviewed.
You may recognize this from your own experience of reading
a good book on holiday. Often, a vacation gives you the opportu-
nity to read a book right through in a few days. But, how much of
it can you remember a few weeks later? Not very much is retained
unless you have found some way of keeping the experiences alive
in your mind for longer, allowing the patterns of neural connec-
tions to become a little more established. Some adults can still
remember the details of texts they studied as a young student pre-
cisely because their study was spread over a significant period and
regularly reviewed.

YOUR SLEEPING MIND

In science fiction you sometimes read scenes where the villain
attempts to “brainwash” the hero by programming him with audio-
tapes played while he is asleep. The belief, a mistaken one, was that
you could somehow force the brain to remember things if it was
played them while asleep.
This is clearly not possible, but there is no doubt that very
mysterious things go on while we are asleep. Our brains, released
from absorbing data during their waking hours, seem to have time
to process and make sense of it. We even say things like “I’ll sleep
on it” in the hope that inspiration will come to us. And it often
does. Indeed, many of the world’s most famous inventors and