Tag Archives: Short Term Memory

Chunks of Pi

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I remember it all too clearly. Eighth grade. Pi day (3/14). Every year, the teacher who teaches the 8th grade math class I was in had the students do three things. First, we all had to come in sporting some sort of shirt which had its own Pi day reference. Second, each student was assigned to do a poster on the history of pi. Lastly, all students of her class participated in a memory contest to see who could recite the most digits of pi. Was I about to go home and study, hours on end, memorizing the many digits of the endless irrational number known as pi? Heck no. So what did I do? Instead of paying attention in all my classes before math (which was all of my classes besides gym), I managed to memorize over one hundred digits of pi. I am baffled by the thought of it to this day, but how did I do it?

With the help of my hippocampus which allowed me to create a huge pile-up of short-term memories, I used the memorization technique known as chunking to achieve first place in this contest. Chunking is used almost daily in everyone’s lives. If you look at a simple telephone number such as 123-456-7890, the ten digit sequence is split up into three “chunks” in order to make the number easier to remember. If you look at the number without the dashes, 1234567890, it seems a little bit harder to remember (besides the fact that the number IS just 1234567890). Back to the memory contest; throughout the day, I created numerous chunks of pi (still talking about the number pi), each consisting of ten digits. I would study the first chunk of ten, saying them in order in my head multiple times over, then move on to the next chunk. As I continued from chunk to chunk, I would eventually start back at the beginning, but combine each chunk to create my huge string of memorized digits of pi.

By the time I stepped in the door of my math class, this technique had allowed me to memorize just over one hundred digits of pi. To my surprise, I was able to recite them perfectly, as though I had been practicing for this contest for ages. The next day though, when I tried to remember them again to impress the girls sitting at my lunch table (such a skill is so impressive I know), I only made it to about sixty. Before I knew it (meaning within a week), I had absolutely no recollection of pi. I was astonished by how quickly I lost my newfound ability, but the pi contest was over, so whatever. The usefulness of chunking remains great to this day, and I’m sure that for all of you readers, the feeling is mutual.

Study Efficiently

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Sitting in the library, it is not rare to see all kinds of distractions around the students who are studying. As the high technology has developed rapidly these days, people can obtain as many information as they want by simply touching the glass screen, and there is no limit for the location either, such that two of the biggest distractions become internet and phone.

In the library, spotting a student with earphones on is a really common thing and same to the students who are checking out their phone. Personally, I am a fan of studying while listening to music, which leads to my dependency on the phone. After we cover the influence of music on people in the class, I realize that how strongly it could influence my efficiency of studying. Since the sensory memory would automatically encode the lyrics into meaning and interpret it in our minds, it will constantly interrupt our encoding of the materials that we are supposed to learn results the lower efficiently studying process. And while encoding the lyrics, it also could interrupt the understanding of the academic materials. Since generally the best way of learning is to deeply understand, think about the materials, and interpret the materials into your own way of understanding. But constantly of encoding the meaning of the lyrics will be a strong interferes of the understanding of the academic materials. In conclusion, even without internet, phone can be a big distraction.

Internet is one of the greatest invention in the world, but every coin has two side, people begin to found out the crazy influence that internet has on people. Students nowadays just can not help checking the phone out no matter what they are doing even studying. For example, I just used fifteen minutes searching on internet about the summer internship which is totally not as in a hurry as the blog assignment is. And if checking the phone once an hour, it is totally fine, but if it is too frequently, it is definitely going to hold the progress back. Because the short term memory only lasts for 12 to 30 seconds, if you want to transfer the memory into long term memory, you need to either using a better way of studying such as memorize semantically, or rehearsal in a proper amount of time. Using phone frequently results of getting interrupted every, for instance, five minutes, which means a few minutes after encoding the sensory memory into short term memory, the distraction will come in and messed up the right track.

In general, parents always do not like to see children studying with television, or internet near them, when I was young, I could not tell why, but after the principles and theories I learned in the class, I finally got it and know the proper conditions to study efficiently which is that turning off everything related to world outside, and keep yourself into a peaceful place.

Remembah? *Drake Voice*

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Memory is defined, by the words of Mr. Wede, to be the persistence of learning through different mechanisms. Those mechanisms are encoding, storage and retrieval. Encoding is the process of interpreting an event and getting into your memory. This is the first step in a three step memory process. Second comes storage. This is vital because this stowing away the information. Memory is stored using sensory memory, which has a limit of only a few seconds, short term memory, with a limit of about 30 seconds and long term memory which is somewhat permanent. Each of these play a factor in keeping a tab of everything that we see and do during the course of 24 hours. Lastly, there is retrieval. This is probably one of the most important steps in the process because it involves accessing the memories that you have locked away. Think about it, what is the point of being able to hold something if you can’t use it for your benefit later?

Memory is an extremely powerful tool. It is the basis for our thinking, decision making, the way we interpret things, etc. When you think about it, memory plays a role in almost every aspect of your life. Even when doing something as mindless as playing video games or watching television, we are storing bits and pieces to our long term memory and almost instantaneously processing all that we see and relating it to past events or images that are similar(retrieval cues). The thing is that some people have better memory than others. I am in a constant battle with memory when it comes to my involvement with music. I am a singer and so I perform at many different venues around Penn State and around New Jersey, when I head home for breaks. Different performances mean different songs and different songs mean different lyrics and as you can predict, each set of lyrics for every song has to be memorized by the time of each performance. As you can imagine, that is not the simplest task in the world but because I love what I do and as time goes on, it becomes easier and easier.

If I didn’t have a strong long term memory, I wouldn’t be able to have a music “career” because I would forget everything that I studied so hard to remember. It would last as long as sensory memory does and fall out of my head right after. Retrieval plays a large role because I need to be able to quickly access information while I am performing. If this process had a time lapse or if I had a problem with my ability to retrieve memories, again, I wouldn’t really make it too far in the music industry but thank God I do not have to deal with that. Our memories are from our experiences and our experiences shape us. So I am grateful for memory, because I wouldn’t be Paul without them.