Q. What is mental images and how can we use it to improve our memory?
A mental image is a way or organising our thinking by simply creating a picture in our mind, which can help us organise our thought and remember them. This tends to work best if the image we form is large colourful and bizarre as we tend to remember distinctive items more than everyday items. In the course book there is a bin which has turned into a bell and has an very unpleasant smell, this is used to remind us of the French word “poubelle” which means “bin” in English. This can help when trying to learn a foreign language.
There was an experiment carried out by Michael Raugh and Richard Atkinson (1975) where some people were given extra help with remembering the words by the experimenters using an variable which was giving them other words to prompt their memory (this is very similar to the ‘poobelle’ example above) and the others were not. The people given the extra help remembered more words than the others. This was called a key word technique and proves that using mental images can help you remember things better. We can also use mental images to remember a shopping list by making mental images which contains all the items from the list. This technique which was invented in ancient Greece has also been proved useful in other ways such as students revising for an exam.
Mental Images is not for everyone as every on mind works differently and what works for one person may not work for another therefore is up to the individual to fins a technique that works best for them when trying to improve memory or organise there thinking.
Q. What is concept and how can we use ir to improve our memory?
What is concepts? Concepts is a way of grouping thinks together such as “cars”, “animals” but within concepts there are sub-concepts (I remember it like groups in a group) for example…