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Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how humans (and animals and, in some cases, computers) process information. Traditionally, cognitive psychologists have made a distinction among different areas of study: memory, attention, categorization, language acquisition and use, decision-making, and one or two other topics. Many believe that attention and memory are closely related, that you can't remember things that you didn't pay attention to in the first place. There has been relatively less attention paid to the important interrelationship among categorization, attention, and memory.

The fact that you can't remember an agreement you made with yourself doesn't mean that you're not holding yourself liable for it. Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. That means that as soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it only in your short-term memory, that part of you thinks you should be doing it all the time. And that means that as soon as you've given yourself two things to do, and filed them only in your head, you've created instant and automatic stress and failure, because you can't do them both at once, and that (apparently significant) part of your psyche will continue to hold you accountable.

Cognitive psychologists have provided mountains of evidence over the last twenty years that memory is unreliable. And to make matters worse, we show staggering overconfidence in many recollections that are false. It's not just that we remember things wrongly (which would be bad enough), but we don't even know we're remembering them wrongly, doggedly insisting that the inaccuracies are in fact true.

"We know today that, just like when you open a Microsoft Word file on your computer, when you retrieve a memory from where it is stored in the brain, you automatically open it to 'edit.' You may not be aware that your current mood and environment can influence the emotional tone of your recall, your interpretation of events, and even your beliefs about which events actually took place. But when you 'save' the memory again and place it back into storage, you can inadvertently modify it. ... [This] can bias how and what you recall the next time you pull up that 'file.'

Perhaps the biggest problem with human memory is that we don't always know when we're recalling things inaccurately. Many times, we have a strong feeling of certainty that accompanies an incorrect, distorted memory. This faulty confidence is widespread, and difficult to extinguish. The relevance to organizational systems is that the more we can externalize memory through physical records out-there-in-the-world, the less we must rely on our overconfident, underprecise memory.

When we encounter new information and want to learn from it, we should force ourselves to do something with the data. It's not enough for your bathroom scale to send daily updates to an app on your phone. If you want to lose weight, force yourself to plot those measurements on graph paper and you'll be more likely to choose a salad over a hamburger at lunch. If you read a book filled with new ideas, force yourself to put it down and explain the concepts to someone sitting next to you and you'll be more likely to apply them in your life. When you find a new piece of information, force yourself to engage with it, to use it in an experiment or describe it to a friend--and then you will start building the mental folders that are at the core of learning.

Unfortunately, the existence of such emotional tags, while making memory retrieval quicker and easier, does not guarantee that the memory retrieval will be more accurate. Here is an example. If you are like most Americans, you remember right where you were when you first learned that the World Trade Center Twin Towers in New York City had been attacked on September 11, 2001. You probably remember the room you were in, roughly the time of day (morning, afternoon, evening), and perhaps even who you were with or who you spoke to that day. You probably also remember watching the horrifying television images of an airplane crashing into the first tower (the North Tower), and then, about twenty minutes later, the image of a second plane crashing into the second tower (the South Tower). Indeed, according to a recent survey, 80% of Americans share this memory. But it turns out this memory is completely false. The television networks broadcasted real-time video of the South Tower collision on September 11, but video of the North Tower collision wasn't available and didn't appear on broadcast television until the following day, on September 12.

the faintest pencil is better than the strongest memory.

Learning would be not so much about saving information, like on a hard disk, but about building connections and bridges between pieces of information to circumvent the inhibition mechanism in the right moment. It is about making sure that the right "cues" trigger the right memory, about how we can think strategically to remember the most useful information when we need it.

For more science on the topic of how intentional "mistakes" can aid in memory retention, I recommend the book Impossible to Ignore, by Dr. Carmen Simon. The gist of it is that you need to surprise the brain or make it work a little extra to form memories. Our brains automatically delete our routine memories fairly quickly. Most of us don't know what we were doing on this day a year ago. But we easily remember things that violate our expectations.

The second principle of memory concerns emotions. If something made us incredibly frightened, elated, sad, or angry--four of the primary human emotions--we're more likely to remember it. This is because the brain creates neurochemical tags, or markers, that accompany the experience and cause it to become labeled as important. It's as though the brain took a yellow fluorescent highlighter to the text of our day, and selectively marked up the important parts of the day's experiences. This makes evolutionary sense--the emotionally important events are probably the ones that we need to remember in order to survive, things like the growl of a predator, the location of a new freshwater spring, the smell of rancid food, the friend who broke a promise.

You can use an analogy to give the listener a memory structure that you then embellish with details.

Only the actual attempt to retrieve information will clearly show us if we have learned something or not.

We learn something not only when we connect it to prior knowledge and try to understand its broader implications (elaboration), but also when we try to retrieve it at different times (spacing) in different contexts (variation), ideally with the help of chance (contextual interference) and with a deliberate effort (retrieval).

The first humans who figured out how to write things down around 5,000 years ago were in essence trying to increase the capacity of their hippocampus, part of the brain's memory system. They effectively extended the natural limits of human memory by preserving some of their memories on clay tablets and cave walls, and later, papyrus and parchment.

The nonlinear associative nature of our brains makes it impossible for us to consciously search our memories in an orderly way. A memory only pops directly into consciousness if it is cued by some other thought or perception--some other node in the nearly limitless interconnected web. So when a memory goes missing or a name gets caught on the tip of the tongue, hunting it down can be frustrating and often futile. We have to stumble in the dark with a flashlight for cues that might lead us back to the piece of information we're looking for--Her name begins with an L ... She's a painter ... I met her at that party a couple years ago--until one of those other memories calls to mind the one we're looking for. Ah yes, her name was Lisa! Because our memories don't follow any kind of linear logic, we can neither sequentially search them nor browse them.

The brain also doesn't store information neurally and objectively. We reinvent and rewrite our memory every time we try to retrieve information. The brain works with rules of thumb and makes things look as if they fit, even if they don't. It remembers events that never happened, connects unrelated episodes to convincing narratives and completes incomplete images. It cannot help but see patterns and meaning everywhere, even in the most random things (cf. Byrne, 2008). The brain, as Kahneman writes, is "a machine for jumping to conclusions"

Use stories to stay ahead of the forgetting curve. Share stories. Do you remember the time we

among memory's idiosyncrasies is its obsession with final scenes.8 Whether we hear a series of sounds, read a series of letters, see a series of pictures, smell a series of odours, or meet a series of people, we show a pronounced tendency to recall the items at the end of the series far better than the items at the beginning or in the middle.

TO ABSORB DATA BETTER: When we encounter new information, we should force ourselves to do something with it. Write yourself a note explaining what you just learned, or figure out a small way to test an idea, or graph a series of data points onto a piece of paper, or force yourself to explain an idea to a friend. Every choice we make in life is an experiment--the trick is getting ourselves to see the data embedded in those decisions, and then to use it somehow so we learn from it.

Newly acquired memories are initially unstable and require a process of neural strengthening or consolidation to become resistant to interference, and to become accessible to us for retrieval. For a memory to be accessible means that we can retrieve it using a variety of different cues.

the more connected information we already have, the easier it is to learn, because new information can dock to that information. Yes, our ability to learn isolated facts is indeed limited and probably decreases with age. But if facts are not kept isolated nor learned in an isolated fashion, but hang together in a network of ideas, or "latticework of mental models" (Munger, 1994), it becomes easier to make sense of new information.

The act of retrieving learning from memory has two profound benefits. One, it tells you what you know and don't know, and therefore where to focus further study to improve the areas where you're weak. Two, recalling what you have learned causes your brain to reconsolidate the memory, which strengthens its connections to what you already know and makes it easier for you to recall in the future. In effect, retrieval--testing--interrupts forgetting.

The memory in your brain works very differently from computer memory, not only in terms of how it's built, but also in terms of how it's used. Whereas you retrieve memories from a computer or hard drive by specifying where it's stored, you retrieve memories from your brain by specifying something about what is stored.

many of our experiences share similarities with one another, and so when trying to re-create them in memory, the brain can get fooled by competing items. Thus, our memory tends to be poor most of the time, not because of the limited capacity of our brains to store the information but because of the nature of memory retrieval, which can easily become distracted or confounded by other, similar items.

two strategies for remembering routine activities. One is to try to reclaim that sense of newness in everything we do. Easier said than done of course. But if we can acquire a Zen-like mental clarity and pay attention to what we're doing, letting go of thoughts of the future and past, we will remember each moment because each moment will be special. ... The second, more mundane way to remember these little moments is much less romantic, and perhaps less spiritually satisfying, but no less effective (you've heard it before): Off-load the memory functions into the physical world rather than into your crowded mental world. In other words, write it down on a piece of paper, or if you prefer, get a system.

Even if his short-term memory was limited, he'd figured out a way to store information directly in long-term memory. It involved a technique called chunking. Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by increasing the size of each item. Chunking is the reason that phone numbers are broken into two parts plus an area code and that credit card numbers are split into groups of four. And chunking is extremely relevant to the question of why experts so often have such exceptional memories.

Older adults (fifty-five to eighty) who walked for forty minutes three days a week showed significant increases in the size of their hippocampus, enhancing memory. Exercise has also been shown to prevent age-related cognitive decline by increasing blood flow to the brain, causing increases in the size of the prefrontal cortex and improvements in executive control, memory, and critical thinking

the elaborate system of externalized memory we've created is a way of fending off mortality.

Memory is fiction. It may present itself to us as fact, but it is highly susceptible to distortion. Memory is not just a replaying, but a rewriting.

"The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you've seen before that you can't possibly forget it,"

As Patrick Jane of The Mentalist described it, rather eloquently, "Memory is unreliable because the untrained brain has a crappy filing system. It takes everything that happens to you and throws it all willy-nilly into a big dark closet--when you go in there looking for something, all you can find are the big obvious things, like when your mom died, or stuff that you don't really need. Stuff that you're not looking for, like the words to 'Copacabana.' You can't find what you need, but don't panic, because it's still there."

Semantic memory is the ability to remember that the capital of France is Paris. Episodic memory is your ability to remember your trip to Paris.

Memory is fallible, of course, but not because of storage limitations so much as retrieval limitations. Some neuroscientists believe that nearly every conscious experience is stored somewhere in your brain; the hard part is finding it and pulling it out again. Sometimes the information that comes out is incomplete, distorted, or misleading.

Eighty-five percent of people write down rest. Rest is the first word you saw, and this is consistent with the primacy effect of memory: We tend to remember best the first entry on a list. Seventy percent of people remember the word night. It was the last word you saw, and is consistent with the recency effect: We tend to remember the most recent items we encountered on a list, but not as well as the first item. For lists of items, scientists have documented a serial position curve, a graph showing how likely it is that an item will be remembered as a function of its position in a list.

Invest attention. Treat your happy moments like you would your date. Pay attention to them!

sleep plays a vital role in the consolidation of events of the previous few days, and therefore in the formation and protection of memories.

Use the emotional highlighter pen. Get the blood flowing.

S kept his memories rigidly organized by mapping them onto structures and places he already knew well. "When S read through a long series of words, each word would elicit a graphic image. And since the series was fairly long, he had to find some way of distributing these images of his in a mental row or sequence," wrote Luria. "Most often ... he would 'distribute' them along some roadway or street he visualized in his mind."

People were remembering experiences that were novel, meaningful, emotional and engaged the senses.

After I read Audrey's letter, the past shifted. It started with my memories of her. They transformed. When I recalled any part of our childhood together, moments of tenderness or humor, of the little girl who had been me with the little girl who had been her, the memory was immediately changed, blemished, turned to rot. The past became as ghastly as the present.

Perhaps the most important principle of memory is that we tend to remember best those things we care about the most. At a biological level, neurochemical tags are created and attached to experiences that are emotionally important; and those appear to be the ones that our dreams grab hold of.

Just about anything that could be imagined, he reckoned, could be imprinted upon one's memory, and kept in good order, simply by engaging one's spatial memory in the act of remembering.

Harness the power of firsts. Seek out novel experiences and make days extraordinary.

A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts.

To understand why this sort of mnemonic trick works, you need to know something about a strange kind of forgetfulness that psychologists have dubbed the "Baker/baker paradox." The paradox goes like this: A researcher shows two people the same photograph of a face and tells one of them that the guy is a baker and the other that his last name is Baker. A couple days later, the researcher shows the same two guys the same photograph and asks for the accompanying word. The person who was told the man's profession is much more likely to remember it than the person who was given his surname. Why should that be? Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering.

The Ad Herennium advises readers at length about creating the images for one's memory palace: the funnier, lewder, and more bizarre, the better. "When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time."

When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex--and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

Where practical, use frequent quizzing to help students consolidate learning and interrupt the process of forgetting. Make the ground rules acceptable to your students and yourself. Students find quizzing more acceptable when it is predictable and the stakes for any individual quiz are low. Teachers find quizzing more acceptable when it is simple, quick, and does not lead to negotiating makeup quizzes.

Make it multisensory. Go beyond sight. Memories can also have sounds, scents, touch and tastes.

In 2010 the New York Times reported on a scientific study that showed that students who read a passage of text and then took a test asking them to recall what they had read retained an astonishing 50 percent more of the information a week later than students who had not been tested.

Novelty ensures durability when it comes to memory.

Episodic memory covers the personal, unique and concrete experiences we can retrieve from our own past. Semantic memory is timeless knowledge that we share with the world about the world.

The techniques of the memory palace--also known as the journey method or the method of loci,

technique he promised I could use to remember people's names at parties and meetings. "The trick is actually deceptively simple," he said. "It is always to associate the sound of a person's name with something you can clearly imagine. It's all about creating a vivid image in your mind that anchors your visual memory of the person's face to a visual memory connected to the person's name.

The thing all mental representations have in common is that they make it possible to process large amounts of information quickly, despite the limitations of short-term memory. Indeed, one could define a mental representation as a conceptual structure designed to sidestep the usual restrictions that short-term memory places on mental processing.

We can hold a maximum of seven things in our head at the same time, plus/minus two (Miller 1956).