Construct Vivid Imagery to Concretize Abstract Concepts

We can utilize our brain’s tendency to prefer what might generally be called outlier information in another way that we glazed over: constructing vivid imagery.

Along with emotional and outlier information, a large body of research indicates that visual cues help us better retrieve and remember information. The research outcomes on visual learning make complete sense when you consider that our brain is mainly an image processor (much of our sensory cortex is devoted to vision), not a word processor. In fact, the part of the brain used to process words is quite small in comparison to the part that processes visual images.

Words are abstract and rather difficult for the brain to retain, whereas visuals are concrete and, as such, more easily remembered.

There are countless studies that have confirmed the power of visual imagery in learning. For instance, one study asked students to remember many groups of three words each, such as “dog,” “bike,” and “street.” Students who tried to remember the words by repeating them over and over again did poorly on recall. In comparison, students who made the effort to make visual associations with the three words, such as imagining a dog riding a bike down the street, had significantly better recall.

Based upon research outcomes, the effective use of vivid visuals can decrease learning time, improve comprehension, enhance retrieval, and increase retention. Memory is largely visual, so we should take advantage of that.

Take a list of objects you want to memorize: rabbit, coffee, blanket, hair, cactus, running, mountain, tea. There are eight items.

This would seem to be incredibly difficult to memorize because everything is unrelated. However, you can give yourself a better chance by creating a vivid and striking mental image for each item. It doesn’t have to be a literal representation of the word or even be related to it.

For instance, what images can you create for “rabbit”? You could use a mental image of a normal, cute rabbit, but that’s not likely to be distinctive in your memory. You could conjure up an image of what the word “rabbit” makes you think of, a symbol, what the word sounds like to you, or how the word is written. The more outrageous and unusual, the better for you to memorize, because we tend to easily forget normal things.

When you put this same amount of thought into the eight items of that list, you will be able to memorize them more effectively. It’s not just taking advantage of how your brain works; it’s the attention and time to choosing an appropriate mental image.

When you can get into the habit of not taking information at face value and going deeper, thinking about it, and constructing vivid imagery to make it stand out in your mind, you’ll remember things far better. It might even be the simple act of taking the time and picking out vivid imagery that makes things stick in your brain, but whatever the case, it works.

The next thing we can take to memorize better is to create a vivid story, one that will stand out and make it difficult to forget.

When you can create meaningful connections between items instead of trying to memorize dry facts, you stand a better chance. A story ends up being one large piece of information rather than eight distinct pieces; this is similar to what happens when you attempt to chunk information from earlier in this lesson.

By creating a story for those same eight words, you’ll be able to memorize all of them in the correct order far more easily. What kind of story might you construct with the list we have? As with the previous method, the more unusual and outrageous, the better and more memorable it will be.

As a reminder: rabbit, coffee, blanket, hair, cactus, running, mountain, tea.

It could start with a rabbit who went to jail for selling drugs hidden with coffee. He has now tried to attack his cellmates in jail by making weapons with his blanket and hair tied together. However, one day, he found a cactus while running outside in the prison yard. By trading this cactus for three kilograms of tea, he was able to escape to the mountains above the jail and was never seen again.

One item is a brain trigger that helps you remember the next item. It’s similar to hearing a song and each verse brings you to remember the next verse and you can remember all the words to a song.

The main principles of this technique are to make each item distinctive (imagination) and link it to the next one (association). The crazier you can make the story, the better. The more distinctive, the more it will stick in your mind. When you make up your story, visualize it in your head with as much color and movement as possible. Practice the story two or three times. Then test yourself to see how many you can remember. Like I've said before, these techniques to improve memory are so effective because they’re a reflection of how memory works.

Creating a story is another way to pay close attention to your information and then have it make sense to you in a way that lets you recall it easily. The main idea is to create meaning from meaningless and unrelated facts or information, which of course makes it easier to remember.

Active, Not Passive

models related to learning in: 2013

Dunlosky’s team rated each technique according to how well it was suited for the goal of learning and retention. As might be expected, the five models the team thought were poor for learning proved to be, arguably, the most commonly used and recognized.

Summarization. In this model, students are asked to write their own summaries of text to be learned. The point of summarization is to “identify the main points of a text and capture the gist of it while excluding unimportant or repetitive material.” Dunlosky’s team claimed summarization is a skill that only works if the student was already trained in how to do it. For the majority of students without that training, the technique couldn’t be executed and wouldn’t be effective. In other words, this might be effective, and in theory it is, but you are probably doing it wrong.

Highlighting. This long-standing, universally popular technique simply consists of marking pertinent text with a brightly colored ink marker or by underlining. The researchers found that highlighting might help a little if students were using it on an extraordinarily difficult text, but overall, they saw highlighting as a detraction from learning, as it doesn’t help students draw additional meaning or inference from the study material.

Mnemonics. A practically ancient practice, mnemonics is the invocation of mental callbacks or shorthand—images, songs, phrases, or acronyms—to recall facts or information already learned—for example, using the phrase “Super Man Helps Every One” to identify the Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, Ontario) or using pictures of objects in learning a foreign language. Researchers found that while it may help us quickly access memory of keywords, the potential of achieving “durable learning” from mnemonics was quite low. This might be connected to what we discussed with the relationship between rote memorization and concept learning.

Imagery use for text learning. A more abstract use of mental invocation than mnemonics, this device encourages students to conjure an image—mentally or on paper—to represent paragraphs or blocks of text they read. The researchers found this use of imagery “promising,” although more study on the topic was needed. Overall, they found that the benefits of imagery use were limited to memory tests and text that already lent itself to image creation or memory recall. Note that this is quite different from the vivid, emotional, and story-based imagery we just talked about in the previous section.

Rereading. Dunlosky’s team found that although rereading and reviewing text was extremely common and easy to execute, it was only somewhat effective and mainly when rereadings of the text were spaced apart. They also maintained there wasn’t compelling evidence that rereading had any effect on students’ knowledge, abilities, or deep comprehension of the topic.

While these five techniques weren’t without certain advantages—either their ease of use or their effectiveness when students knew how to use them properly—Dunlosky found their efficacy in retaining deep understanding, thoroughness, and applicability somewhat narrow and frequently subject to certain conditions. They held some value in superficial meaning or memorization, but far less in comprehension.

What these ineffective methods have in common in fact is the degree of passivity they use. When you attempt to learn something passively, this is tantamount to wishing learning could occur through osmosis: low-effort exposure. You’re welcome to try it, but you may quickly realize that nothing was really retained if you’re not willing to learn actively, which necessarily involves a degree of struggle and discomfort. Just like the pain of working out and exercising for our physical bodies, this is how our brains advance and progress.

So then, you ask, what did Dunlosky and his team find to be particularly active and effective in learning? There are two methods in particular, and they come next.