The Power of Subconscious Links in Learning and Remembering
We only use a small part of our minds’ potential.
OK, neurologists, take it easy. I don’t mean at all that we only use a small percentage of our brains, nor so of our minds.
I’ll rephrase.
Our minds work all the time (as do our brains, on the physical level).
Our minds receive and process information as long as our senses are working.
It’s simple and easy to say that we can only consciously access so little of the information stored in our mind at a given time – still that’s not what I mean by “we only use a small part of our mind’s potential.”
We have a huge amount of information that we may access – just not simultaneously, because of the limited capacity of the conscious mind – nothing new here.
There is even a bigger amount of information that we may have a hard time trying to access, or we may no longer be able to access it at all for several reasons. That’s what forgetting is – nothing new here either.
The thing is, the reason why we can’t access this information is due to the lack of access to relevant “links.”
Let’s take a look at how we store and remember information:
When we receive a piece of information, it is usually associated with other data from the surroundings. We also associate it with other thoughts in our mind, both consciously and unconsciously.
When we are given a part of the associated data, at a certain level of awareness or consciousness, it triggers a link that may connect us to the information that we learned earlier.
Please remember the italic sentence above.
The simplest example of the retrieval of information is how we remember the answer of a question in an exam:
We read the question,
The question has sufficiently-unique keywords or phrases that have been associated with other pieces of information,
The keywords trigger the retrieval of these parts of the environment associated with them, including the answer.
At one question, the professor has picked a question from “in between the lines”, something we are not sufficiently prepared for. Sometimes, we don’t have access to these keywords in our memory, other times, these keywords are not sufficiently connected to the information that we need, so we remember the keywords but not the associated information. That’s when we forget.
The keywords here represent one side of the “links”.
Another example:
You walk into your room and put your hat in the drawer and then look at your phone. As soon as you start looking at your phone, the information of where you’ve put your hat starts sinking deeper in your mind, until it becomes subconscious in a few seconds or less.
Later, if it has gone deep enough, you want to remember where you put your hat, and you simply can’t. You look for it, give up and decide to go out without it. After just a few minutes of driving, you suddenly remember! Something like this happens to every one of us every now and then, right?
Why couldn’t you remember where your hat was the first time?
Why can’t you recall the information that you haven’t focused on enough?!
No, it’s not because the information was not stored well.
It’s because:
Observation#1: We usually can’t access information that have been stored at a lower level of consciousness than that when we try to remember them.
So you want to remember where your hat is? Here are some simple tricks:
- Think of something else, and then try to repeat the procedure that led to losing your hat, or even repeat it (like, walk into your room and think of something else while doing so), i.e., lower your level of “consciousness”, and let your feet lead you.
- Try to think of what you were thinking about at the time you placed your hat (Were you thinking about an appointment? Getting there late? Try to think again about that).
In both examples, you are distracting yourself, or lowering your awareness of the hat to that when you lost it, while at the same time remembering parts of the scene at the same level of awareness. You are replaying the scene, and triggering those links to them.
Other examples of linking the level of awareness of a memory subject to its retrieval are:
- Remembering numbers for a short time: Personally I’ve tested that for a very long time, and it works most of the time. I read or hear a number, and in a few minutes I need to recall it. The best way to remember it is trying not to think about it, I do not validate the numbers that come to my mind, they are just correct, so I say them out loud instantly. Once I try to remember “was it 63 or 36?” the information is distorted. You can try that right now! Tell someone near you to write down a random six digit number that you make up, and move on to the next example. And, please, get a voice recorder running. Start recording now.
- Dreams: That’s really a big story, I’m only touching the part of remembering them. No wonder we dream every night (that is, presuming we sleep every night). The point is, we do not always remember our dreams. Sometimes, later during the day, we may remember we had a dream last night, but more often than not, we totally forget our dreams.
When do we know that we’ve had a dream? You guessed it: Usually when we wake up during it, at least for a second.
It is then linked to other objects at a higher level of consciousness. Even if we fall asleep after this little moment, the memory of the dream has already been connected to a conscious level object. It’s now recallable. This doesn’t mean that we will certainly remember it, but for some reason during the day, we may suddenly remember parts of the story. That happens especially as we wake up, as the conscious objects are still around us and we are not 100% awake yet. In other words: we are taking the dream to the conscious world with us!
Now, quickly without thinking, say out that number we talked about in point one. Just say out loud the digits as they come to your mind.
Before you check, do you think the number was correct?
Think about and say the parts you are suspicious about.
Now check the voice recorder. Please let us know whether your first answer was more correct or your suspicions.
In conclusion, the human mind has an immense potential for information storage, however, we can only access a limited amount of this information at a time due to the limited capacity of our conscious mind. The way to unleash that potential is building the relevant “links” between different pieces of the scene. These links can be triggered by ‘replaying the scene’ or parts of it at a similar level of consciousness. Understanding how we store and retrieve information can help us better remember and recall important information.
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