I am here, once again, talking about a new form of "meditation" I have been doing the past month. Eventually I will land on one that sticks. Also, this method is probably not meditation at all. Lewandowsky and Oberauer talk in this article about attentional "refreshing" as a more effective method for maintaining information in memory than rehearsal.
Most of us have been told that the best way to memorize information (over short or long periods) is to mentally or verbally rehearse it. I also believed this until reading the linked article. Yet something called attentional "refreshing" might lead to better recall. In the article, Lewandowsky and Oberauer target the "decay" theory of memory failures (I will not go into the decay-vs.-interference debate here, but personally I do lean towards interference theory) by demonstrating how rehearsal, which should eliminate any memory loss due to decay-over-time, works no better than simply directing one's attention to the content in memory.
How is "refreshing" any different from rehearsal? They are defining "rehearsal" as "rote articulatory rehearsal", whereas refreshing is "briefly directing attention to a concept or memory, bringing it into conscious awareness" - the key difference (as I understand it) is that refreshing does not require verbalization.
Getting to my point, I've been practicing 20 minutes of attentional refreshing every day, usually in the afternoon or evening when I've finished all of my daily reading. I just try to recall and attend to the memories I have of anything I've learned, graphs I've looked at, meetings I've been in. Anecdotally (this entire blog is an anecdote!) I am actually remembering content from what I read! Gone are the days of reading endlessly only to forget it all after a few hours... Everybody should be doing this, and I can't believe I just now figured out this learning "hack"!
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