by Cathleene Filmore

Created on: October 11, 2008   Last Updated: August 23, 2010

The brain is an amazing organ; very "accurate and efficient (Matlin, 2005)." It is capable of remembering thousands of thoughts a day and yet we forget so much. We often attribute this forgetting to the amazing brain however; just like the common household computer it is most often the fault of the programmer not the machine. If we learn the proper strategies to programming, or encoding, information we will not only improve our memory capacity but we can speed the time that it takes to retrieve that information as well.

There have been numerous memory strategies developed over the years to help one accomplish the tasks of information encoding and retrieval. Just like a computer has a hard drive and software, a brain has a working memory and a long-term memory. The working memory is the software that gets everything where it needs to go and the long-term memory is the hard drive where the information is stored.

The brain consists of schemas, these schemas are where different concepts of information are stored and when we take information into our working memory, to which we already have a certain schema, the schema is activated; a connection is made and a memory is stored in our long term memory. The more conceptualized our stored information is, the more quickly we can retrieve the information. The best memory strategies are those that file the information efficiently and accurately from the beginning.

George Miller studied the working memory and found that we can hold about seven pieces of information at one time (Matlin, 2005). The topic at hand discusses how to store information in long-term memory, but remember that to get into long-term memory, information must first pass through the working memory. To properly store this information we need to handle and store it properly while it is in the working memory.

1. Chunking

One way to accurately handle information in the working memory is to use a mnemonic technique called chunking (Everson & Hammer, 2005). Chunking takes the studies of Miller and incorporates them into a strategy. When we use chunking we take seven pieces of information and connect each one of those seven pieces of information to seven separate meaningful schemas in our brain so that a connection is formed and the information is filed in an orderly way (Everson & Hammer, 2005).

Making use of episodic memory and procedural memory is another great way to encode information for quick retrieval. Episodic memory refers to our memories of

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