family
The Mac-and-Cheese Effect
Why family dinner makes working parents (especially moms) feel better.
By Emily Bazelon
Posted Friday, July 11, 2008, at 12:36 PM ET
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The family dinner is ambrosia and nectar and manna, too, researchers have long told us. It helps prevent teenagers from abusing drugs and alcohol or smoking, and it protects them from stress, asthma, and eating disorders. It boosts kids' reading scores and grades. By the time all the virtues of dinner togetherness have been extolled, you can only feel that if you love your kids, you have to get home in time to sauté the stir fry. You might even cut back to working part time to force-feed them falafel, as law professor Cameron Stracher relates in a book he published last year. Or you can resolve to spend Sundays shopping and serving as your own sous-chef, as the New York Times' Leslie Kaufman outlines here.
Actually, the link between family dinner and idyllic child-rearing is a little more complicated than our collective bending of the knee might suggest. It may be that family dinner appears to shine because parents who eat with their kids also stuff them with other forms of enrichment. Or that the benefits come not from dinner per se but from the quality of the conversation that takes place at the table (and, in theory, could happen at any time of day). Are you talking as well as listening, answering queries ("What a good question!"), and telling stories that naturally lead to useful lessons and bits of information? For more on just how the benefits of the family dinner unfold, listen to this NPR piece.
Good, you're back, and now that the kids are out of the way, let's think about some other members of the family: ourselves. What do parents get out of family dinner? Is it all intellectual and emotional milk and honey for them, too? Or is having dinner with your kids a chore, one more sacrifice of peace, quiet, and cabernet for their sake?
Happily, according to a new study, family dinner appears to be good for parents, too. The research by lead author Jenet Jacob of Brigham Young University found that among 1,580 parents who worked at IBM, those who said their jobs interfered less with being home for dinner tended to feel greater personal success, and success in relationships with their spouses and their children. The working parents—both mothers and fathers—had all of these buoyant feelings if they made it home for dinner more regularly, even if they still worked long hours. They also felt more kindly toward their workplace. Parents who missed dinner at home because of work, on the other hand, felt gloomy about their professional futures. "It is noteworthy that although longer work hours predicted significantly greater perception of success in work life, work interference with dinnertime predicted lower perception of success in work life," Jacob and her co-author write.
I revel in this kind of study because it confirms my pet biases. I hate never-ending workdays. Kids or no kids, they are grueling, and I don't really believe that most people get much more work accomplished in 10 or 12 hours than they do in eight. (Or six? Oof, I feel a coffee-break urge coming on.)
Also (warning: smugness alert), I think my family runs smoothly, to the extent that it does, in large part because we share the middle-evening hours. I'm not sure we hit the teachable-moment jackpot a lot. We're more likely to remind our kids endlessly about why they can't put their feet on the table and wipe their mouths on their shirts. But the other night I did notice that a story I told about the Polish foreign minister led Eli and Simon to ask what a foreign minister does, who the secretary of state is, how that job is different from being an ambassador, and, finally, who ambassadors work for—the State Department or the White House. At which point I learned something, too—or, at least, I did five minutes ago when I looked up the answer (the State Department).
To make up for straying so far into smug territory, I'll note that we were eating at a pizza place when this conversation took place. Another new study by Tammy Allen, a psychology professor at the University of Florida, finds that telecommuting is associated with fewer family dinners that consist of fast food. If you can work at home, you can cook. This isn't my excuse, I confess. I just run out of energy at some point in the week. I took heart that even Kaufman, who seems uber-organized and dedicated to a point beyond reach, admits that after making it to Tuesday with her weekend prep cooking, she comes up with a quickie meal on Wednesday and then calls timeout on Thursday for take-out night. Phew.
In my less-impressive homemaking, every week includes a meal of basic bean burritos and even more basic pasta. And maybe that's a good thing, because my family fits the familiar time-use pattern: My husband pulls his weight in many ways, but he doesn't take primary responsibility for shopping and making dinner. He assists. And so I understand the wary skepticism of Wall Street Journal blogger Sue Shellenbarger, who writes in response to Jacob's findings, "As someone who's been in charge of family dinners for many years, I'd argue that dinners hold no magical power to vaccinate mothers against stress. In fact, the opposite may seem true to many women who still shoulder nearly all the work required to get dinner on the table." Excellent reason to keep it simple.
And then, it seems, we should hang in there, not only for our kids but because a hassled family dinner is apparently better for mothers than no family dinner at all. The women Jacob studied reported that family dinner helped them feel less work-family conflict, even if they still worked long hours. Men didn't share in this reaction, on average. It would surely be a good thing if more fathers got a similar lift from walling off the dinner hour from the office. But for now, I'm glad that at least we mothers do.
Periodically my husband and I talk about instituting a weeknight off from family dinner—one in which we put the kids to bed and then cook ourselves something fancier. But we rarely manage it. I'm too addicted to cleaning up the kitchen and moving on with my evening. That may be just as well. Jacob points out that research about other habit-forming behavior shows a noticeable jump in the effect of doing something fewer than three times a week and doing it three or more times. Regularity matters. Maybe the family dinner is all about getting into a rhythm: a steady drumbeat of mess, munching, and musing. Tonight, Simon said, "I don't hate tomatoes. I just don't like them." Then he ate a slice of one. And a piece of cucumber with sea salt. It made my end of day.
Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2195143/
Copyright 2008 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Why the family dinner is good for parents. - By Emily Bazelon - Slate Magazine#page_start
Monday, July 14, 2008
HindustanTimes-Print
November 4, 2006 Jagmohan
New Delhi, February 19, 2007
Published: 15:17 IST (19/2/2007)
Masters of unplanned growthA city is a living organism. Like a human entity, it has both a structure and a soul. Congenial, creative and constructive living requires that while a city’s soul must reflect its inner urges for peace, progress, justice and order, its structure must provide for the physical, social and cultural needs of man — his need for shelter, work, institutions, community living, civic amenities etc.
A good Master Plan for a city is one that elevates its life and attempts to create a healthy structure and a healthy soul. It is a blueprint for the future, a vision document that reflects the longings of a community for a better tomorrow. It rejects what is clumsy and cruel in the past, and preserves and protects what is beautiful and inspiring. It assesses the current trends and corrects them if they are undermining either the ecosystem or the general environment of the city. It ensures that present needs are met without closing the options for an improved future. A holistic approach constitutes its inner core, and sustainable development serves as its guiding star. Its ultimate aim is to attain higher quality of life and build a more prosperous, just, secure and value-oriented city, rooted in honesty, non-acquisitiveness and nobility of mind.
Against these requirements, what does the Delhi Master Plan 2001-2021 do? It treats the city like a lifeless entity, with no soul, no higher sense of purpose and direction. It makes no attempt to collect the dismembered threads and weave them into a coherent pattern. It merely dances to the tune of vested interests. It declares that ‘illegal’ would be ‘legal’, ‘foul’ would be ‘fair’, principles of town planning would be followed in breach and it would not be the ravishers of the city but their victims that would be penalised. Petty politics is its prime motivation and short-term-ism its only goal.
If any law-breaker has constructed five or six storeys where only two or three were permissible, it is stipulated in the new Plan that six storeys would be permissible. Likewise, if residential properties have been converted into commercial establishments, the streets on which illegalities have occurred are designated either commercial or as ones having ‘mixed land-use’.
The imbalances that these changes would cause in the functioning of the city, the overall living environment that they would spoil, and extra burden that they would put on the already chocked infrastructure and civic services are brushed aside by bland statements. Nothing in this respect is said in precise or concrete form. No timeframe for providing additional services and infrastructure, consequent to the creation of constructions of more storeys and increased commercialisation, is indicated. It amounts to hardly anything else than an exercise in deception.
A good example of formulating and implementing sound Master Plans for cities is provided by the manner in which, as a part of the first Master Plan for Delhi (1962-1982), large areas were acquired and a substantial portion of them were developed as huge ‘greens’ around the historical monuments — Hauz Khas (250 hectares); Tughlakabad (325 hectares); Jahanpanah (175 hectares); Chirag Delhi (75 hectares), Siri Fort (100 hectares) etc. The objective was three-fold: (i) to protect the architectural heritage of a historic city; (ii) to create vibrant lungs for the future; and (iii) to provide long walkways and places for enjoyment of nature.
When I proceeded with the acquisition, clearance and development of these areas, I was severely criticised by the vested interests and nicknamed, albeit wrongly, Demolition Man. But I knew that difficulties of the time had to be faced to preserve what constituted the legacy of our past and to provide for what would make our future more pleasant and productive.
Today, when I go out to these areas, I am thrilled to see thousands of people walking around, enjoying themselves and breathing fresh air. And, in the context of what is currently happening, I do feel a gloomy pride of having withstood the pressures and having stuck to the healthy principles of town planning. Of course, I had the good fortune of enjoying the quiet support of Mrs Indira Gandhi.
Unfortunately, during the last few years, Delhi fell prey to the machinations of four distinct groups of racketeers and law breakers: (i) the grabbers of public lands; (ii) the builders of illegal spaces; (iii) the creators of unauthorised colonies; and (iv) convertors of residential units into commercial establishments. Each group crafted its own predatory techniques.
The people who constituted the first group were those who, in connivance with unscrupulous political elements, occupied large chunks of public lands and set-up jhuggi-jhopri colonies to serve as vote-banks. An equally pernicious web was woven by the second group: the builders of illegal spaces. Herein, the land and building mafia, the landowners of the property, the buyers of additional space and the political elements who supported these illegal ventures, all formed a self-serving network.
No less damage was caused by the third group: the creators of illegal colonies. They seized public lands or lands under acquisition and parcelled them into plots without complying with zoning or municipal regulations and without providing any infrastructure or civic amenity worth the name. The plots were sold at high prices by playing the politics of regularisation. And regularisaton was done by the political leaderships on the eve of every municipal, state or central elections. The activities of the fourth group — those who converted their residential properties into commercial establishments — proved to be the easiest way of securing unmerited gains.
The extent of all-round damage that the aforesaid malpractices have caused can be seen from the fact that Delhi today is saddled with about 1,500 unauthorised colonies, 1,300 jhuggi-jhopri clusters and thousands of individual illegal extensions and conversions. They now hang, like dead albatrosses, around the city’s neck. Ironically, behind the smokescreen of Master Planning, these albatrosses are being made a permanent feature of Delhi’s landscape and, if I may say so, of its mindscape as well. Accommodation and rationalisation of all illegalities and cover up of all acts of corruption would further pollute the soul of Delhi and make people more acquisitive and self-centred.
Already, Delhi is reckoned to be one of the noisiest cities in the world and has the highest rate of road accidents per 1,000 vehicles. And this is what the Human Development Report 2006 has to say about Delhi’s sewerage system:
“A large proportion of the city’s 5,600 km feeder sewers are silted and less than 15 per cent of the trunk sewer is functioning”. The city’s water shortage is well known. Today, it is extracting ground water at a rate three times higher than its replenishment capacity. For the disposal of its 7,000 metric tonnes of garbage per day, it would soon be left with no landfill site.
Even now, in most parts of Delhi, it is difficult to find space for parking. The serious situation in this regard is intended to be met in the new Master Plan by a mere statement that for every 100 square metre of commercial area on ‘mixed land-use’ streets, two ‘equivalent car spaces’ would have to be provided. It is a matter of common knowledge that it is virtually impossible to find an area equivalent to two car spaces fronting the shops on the narrow streets.
Nor is it possible to locate a vacant area for providing common parking or building a multi-level parking. The combined effect of commercialisation of additional 2,183 roads and raising of additional storeys in thousands of residential units would be disastrous. Delhi’s overall environment and quality of life would be irreparably damaged.
All in all, the Master Plan (2001-2021) is a plan of its own kind. Its ‘principles’ of town planning would be found nowhere else in the world. It will retain Lutyen’s New Delhi as a showpiece, reduce well-planned colonies to the status of colonies like Daryaganj, add to the congestion of many other choked-up areas and degrade their environment further, and give birth to new slums and semi-slums. It will cause too many maladies the treatment of which, if at all it comes, would involve huge costs and require a long span of time.
(The writer is a former Union Minister of Urban Development.)
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=3b1e6614-cab2-4153-aa79-52888ae58877
© Copyright 2007 Hindustan Times
HindustanTimes-Print
New Delhi, February 19, 2007
Published: 15:17 IST (19/2/2007)
Masters of unplanned growthA city is a living organism. Like a human entity, it has both a structure and a soul. Congenial, creative and constructive living requires that while a city’s soul must reflect its inner urges for peace, progress, justice and order, its structure must provide for the physical, social and cultural needs of man — his need for shelter, work, institutions, community living, civic amenities etc.
A good Master Plan for a city is one that elevates its life and attempts to create a healthy structure and a healthy soul. It is a blueprint for the future, a vision document that reflects the longings of a community for a better tomorrow. It rejects what is clumsy and cruel in the past, and preserves and protects what is beautiful and inspiring. It assesses the current trends and corrects them if they are undermining either the ecosystem or the general environment of the city. It ensures that present needs are met without closing the options for an improved future. A holistic approach constitutes its inner core, and sustainable development serves as its guiding star. Its ultimate aim is to attain higher quality of life and build a more prosperous, just, secure and value-oriented city, rooted in honesty, non-acquisitiveness and nobility of mind.
Against these requirements, what does the Delhi Master Plan 2001-2021 do? It treats the city like a lifeless entity, with no soul, no higher sense of purpose and direction. It makes no attempt to collect the dismembered threads and weave them into a coherent pattern. It merely dances to the tune of vested interests. It declares that ‘illegal’ would be ‘legal’, ‘foul’ would be ‘fair’, principles of town planning would be followed in breach and it would not be the ravishers of the city but their victims that would be penalised. Petty politics is its prime motivation and short-term-ism its only goal.
If any law-breaker has constructed five or six storeys where only two or three were permissible, it is stipulated in the new Plan that six storeys would be permissible. Likewise, if residential properties have been converted into commercial establishments, the streets on which illegalities have occurred are designated either commercial or as ones having ‘mixed land-use’.
The imbalances that these changes would cause in the functioning of the city, the overall living environment that they would spoil, and extra burden that they would put on the already chocked infrastructure and civic services are brushed aside by bland statements. Nothing in this respect is said in precise or concrete form. No timeframe for providing additional services and infrastructure, consequent to the creation of constructions of more storeys and increased commercialisation, is indicated. It amounts to hardly anything else than an exercise in deception.
A good example of formulating and implementing sound Master Plans for cities is provided by the manner in which, as a part of the first Master Plan for Delhi (1962-1982), large areas were acquired and a substantial portion of them were developed as huge ‘greens’ around the historical monuments — Hauz Khas (250 hectares); Tughlakabad (325 hectares); Jahanpanah (175 hectares); Chirag Delhi (75 hectares), Siri Fort (100 hectares) etc. The objective was three-fold: (i) to protect the architectural heritage of a historic city; (ii) to create vibrant lungs for the future; and (iii) to provide long walkways and places for enjoyment of nature.
When I proceeded with the acquisition, clearance and development of these areas, I was severely criticised by the vested interests and nicknamed, albeit wrongly, Demolition Man. But I knew that difficulties of the time had to be faced to preserve what constituted the legacy of our past and to provide for what would make our future more pleasant and productive.
Today, when I go out to these areas, I am thrilled to see thousands of people walking around, enjoying themselves and breathing fresh air. And, in the context of what is currently happening, I do feel a gloomy pride of having withstood the pressures and having stuck to the healthy principles of town planning. Of course, I had the good fortune of enjoying the quiet support of Mrs Indira Gandhi.
Unfortunately, during the last few years, Delhi fell prey to the machinations of four distinct groups of racketeers and law breakers: (i) the grabbers of public lands; (ii) the builders of illegal spaces; (iii) the creators of unauthorised colonies; and (iv) convertors of residential units into commercial establishments. Each group crafted its own predatory techniques.
The people who constituted the first group were those who, in connivance with unscrupulous political elements, occupied large chunks of public lands and set-up jhuggi-jhopri colonies to serve as vote-banks. An equally pernicious web was woven by the second group: the builders of illegal spaces. Herein, the land and building mafia, the landowners of the property, the buyers of additional space and the political elements who supported these illegal ventures, all formed a self-serving network.
No less damage was caused by the third group: the creators of illegal colonies. They seized public lands or lands under acquisition and parcelled them into plots without complying with zoning or municipal regulations and without providing any infrastructure or civic amenity worth the name. The plots were sold at high prices by playing the politics of regularisation. And regularisaton was done by the political leaderships on the eve of every municipal, state or central elections. The activities of the fourth group — those who converted their residential properties into commercial establishments — proved to be the easiest way of securing unmerited gains.
The extent of all-round damage that the aforesaid malpractices have caused can be seen from the fact that Delhi today is saddled with about 1,500 unauthorised colonies, 1,300 jhuggi-jhopri clusters and thousands of individual illegal extensions and conversions. They now hang, like dead albatrosses, around the city’s neck. Ironically, behind the smokescreen of Master Planning, these albatrosses are being made a permanent feature of Delhi’s landscape and, if I may say so, of its mindscape as well. Accommodation and rationalisation of all illegalities and cover up of all acts of corruption would further pollute the soul of Delhi and make people more acquisitive and self-centred.
Already, Delhi is reckoned to be one of the noisiest cities in the world and has the highest rate of road accidents per 1,000 vehicles. And this is what the Human Development Report 2006 has to say about Delhi’s sewerage system:
“A large proportion of the city’s 5,600 km feeder sewers are silted and less than 15 per cent of the trunk sewer is functioning”. The city’s water shortage is well known. Today, it is extracting ground water at a rate three times higher than its replenishment capacity. For the disposal of its 7,000 metric tonnes of garbage per day, it would soon be left with no landfill site.
Even now, in most parts of Delhi, it is difficult to find space for parking. The serious situation in this regard is intended to be met in the new Master Plan by a mere statement that for every 100 square metre of commercial area on ‘mixed land-use’ streets, two ‘equivalent car spaces’ would have to be provided. It is a matter of common knowledge that it is virtually impossible to find an area equivalent to two car spaces fronting the shops on the narrow streets.
Nor is it possible to locate a vacant area for providing common parking or building a multi-level parking. The combined effect of commercialisation of additional 2,183 roads and raising of additional storeys in thousands of residential units would be disastrous. Delhi’s overall environment and quality of life would be irreparably damaged.
All in all, the Master Plan (2001-2021) is a plan of its own kind. Its ‘principles’ of town planning would be found nowhere else in the world. It will retain Lutyen’s New Delhi as a showpiece, reduce well-planned colonies to the status of colonies like Daryaganj, add to the congestion of many other choked-up areas and degrade their environment further, and give birth to new slums and semi-slums. It will cause too many maladies the treatment of which, if at all it comes, would involve huge costs and require a long span of time.
(The writer is a former Union Minister of Urban Development.)
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=3b1e6614-cab2-4153-aa79-52888ae58877
© Copyright 2007 Hindustan Times
HindustanTimes-Print
Saturday, April 26, 2008
12 Memory Tricks - MSN Encarta
12 Memory Tricks - MSN Encarta
Yourfamily.com - finding ancestors and lost relatives
12 Memory Tricks
By Tamim Ansary
Indisputably, we moderns can't match the memory feats of bygone times, those days when people could do things like memorize the "Iliad" in Greek without even knowing Greek. And maybe it's true, as some have speculated (me, for instance), that we've lost this capacity because we now tend to outsource our memory tasks to an exo-brain of technological gadgets. We no longer have to remember Mom's birthday because our cell phone will remind us about it when the time comes.
But it struck me recently what this doesn't mean. It doesn't mean we depend on (organic) memory less than people of the past. A good memory is still a power tool in this world. It's just that our culture imposes different demands on our memories.
Those ancestors of ours who could memorize the "Iliad" and so forth lived in quieter times. They could sit under a tree and devote themselves without distraction to a single, sustained memorization project for days on end. Who has that luxury now?
New ball game
Today, most of us have to cope with an unremitting swarm of info-bits coming at us like wasps. At this moment I have at least a dozen things I should be thinking about, but since a guy can do only one thing at a time, I'm holding all those thoughts in abeyance -- keeping them in memory, that is -- while I write this column.
But even as I write, some of those items will become irrelevant, some will change, others will rise to urgency, new concerns will intrude, e-mails will come in, phone calls -- it's the same for everyone I know. We're constantly revising the map of information we're "holding in memory," just to stay functional. It's like memorizing the "Iliad" while it's still being edited: Every time we look, it's a different "Iliad." No, we can't match what the memory virtuosos of the past achieved, but I bet they couldn't match what we moderns do either.
This is why I take an intense interest in ways to buff up my admittedly shabby memory. I remember that right out of college I worked at the post office for six months and spent three of them in a mnemonics class; can't remember what I learned, though. Since then, I keep asking people to tell me their tricks for remembering, especially if their job requires instant access to tons of data. Unfortunately, few of them are into metacognition: They don't remember their tricks. Once you've solved the problem, I guess you throw away the scratch paper.
Expert testimony
So I decided to look into it myself and talk to the experts -- people who teach memory skills professionally. At the end of this column I'm going to list 12 tips I distilled from their recommendations, but first, to put those tips in context, let me just review how memory works.
Biologically speaking, we actually have two kinds of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Think of them as the front room and the back room.
The front room is what we're actively dealing with at any given moment. Call it consciousness. This room is small: Only seven or eight items fit in there at a given time, and nothing can stay in there for more than a few seconds. The back room is a warehouse. For all practical purposes, it's infinitely large. Incredibly enough, everything we ever learn or experience gets stored in long-term memory, and once it's there, it's there for life.
The question is, once a piece of information goes into that dusty back room where trillions of items are already stored, how do you find it again when you need it? The answer lies in that front room. What happens there is the key, because nothing gets into the back room without passing through the front.
Want More Tamim?
Read other columns by Tamim Ansary.Memory retrieval
All memories are recovered memories, and we recover them through associations: We remember a past event because something currently in our awareness -- something we're looking at, hearing, tasting, thinking about, whatever -- reminds us of something, which reminds us of something else, which reminds us of something else and so on back. That's why recent events are easy to remember: The environment is still loaded with cues and the chain of links is short.
Good memory, then, is all about processing information properly as it goes into storage. Psychologist William James summarized the fundamental principle in a single phrase: "The secret is … forming diverse and multiple associations with every fact we care to retain."
Here, then, are 12 concrete steps you can take to remember particular facts and improve your general capacity to retain what you learn. Note that only the last step is one you can take when you're actually trying to remember. All the rest have to do with how you absorb information and how you convert it into memory.
1. Pay attention. You can't remember what you never knew, so don't be multitasking when you're trying to learn or memorize something: Give it the spotlight of your full attention at least once.
2. Understand. The more completely you get it, the less likely you are to forget it. (If you don't understand football, you're not likely to remember the scores.)
3. Repeat and apply. Directly after learning something, repeat it, preferably out loud. Even better, use it in your own way. If you want to remember a joke, for example, tell it to someone and try to make them laugh.
4. Chunk. Although short-term memory can deal with only about seven items at a time, you can finesse this limit by grouping items together and thinking of each group as a unit. Later, you can unpack those units. Remembering the numbers 5, 4, 6, 1, 9, 8, 6, 5 and 8 is harder than remembering the numbers 546, 198 and 658.
5. Make meaning. Nonsense is hard to remember. Compare this:
disease reported control Chicago mumps the for of center an in outbreak
with this:
The Centers for Disease Control reported an outbreak of mumps in Chicago.
To make meaning where none inherently exists, the experts recommend embedding the information in an invented narrative. The license plate 3PLY981 thus becomes: Three carpenters cut a piece of plywood into nine pieces and ate one. Yes, I know, no one eats plywood; but that's actually a strength of the narrative in this case. (See step 7.)
6. Look for patterns. Stanford researchers have found that forgetting is a key aspect of good remembering, but not because you have to clear out space; rather, it's because forgetting the less relevant details reveals the more meaningful underlying structure.
7. Visualize. Search the information for some element you can turn into an image. If you've just met a Bridget Brooks and want to remember her name, you might picture the Brooklyn Bridge spanning her face from ear to ear. The more striking or ridiculous the image, the more likely it is to stick in your mind.
8. Hook it to something funny. Stalagmites or stalactites -- which ones go up? Well, it's like ants in your pants: The 'mites go up, the 'tites come down.
9. Hook it to a melody, chant, rhyme or rhythmic motion. Remember singing A-B-C-D-E-F-G to the tune of "Baa Baa Black Sheep"? How about: "In fourteen hundred and ninety-two/Columbus sailed the ocean blue"? Or try pacing rhythmically while memorizing a table of data.
10. Associate new with old. Greek and Roman orators had a trick for remembering a speech. They would create a striking image for each topic they meant to cover (see step 7), mentally put these images in the rooms of their home, and then, while giving the speech, picture strolling through their home. Each next room would remind them of their next topic, and in the proper order. Note that they didn't have to remember the order of their rooms, because this knowledge was already imprinted in their brains.
11. Link learning to environment. The memory tends to associate information with the environment in which one learns it. If you're going to be tested on something and you know where the test will occur, study the material in the same sort of place. If you don't know anything about the test site, study in a variety of locations so the memories won't get locked into cues from one environment.
12. Let 'er drift. If a memory is staying out of reach, stop fishing for it, the experts say. Instead, let your mind drift to the general area: to friends you knew then, to the school you went to, the car you drove ... with luck, you'll happen into the end piece of a chain of links leading to the memory you're after.
Do you have tricks for boosting your memory? Share them on the Coffee Break message board!
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