MEMORIZATION TRICKS OF THE TRADE, AND BEYOND THEATRE I, FALL 2015

How Did You Memorize?

And how well did your techniques work?

Classic Techniques Typical advice Practice, practice, practice! Recall speed / Number of errors Time spent practicing

Classic Techniques Typical advice Practice, practice, practice! More advice from Mr. Byron Try it alone Act it out Know your cues

Classic Techniques What actors actually do (according to researchers) Figure out character’s intention Text analysis Mnemonics (selectively) Most difficult material only Interact authentically to experience character’s actions Recall due to emotional involvement and movement

Classic Techniques What actors actually do (according to researchers) Figure out character’s intention Text analysis Mnemonics (selectively) Most difficult material only Interact authentically to experience character’s actions Recall due to emotional involvement and movement Mind-Body Connections Facial expressions / body position that match specific emotions influence your physiology (e.g., heart rate, breathing). Imagining that you are experiencing an emotion even changes your blood chemistry!

Modern Tools Line Learner Scene Study Dialog Partner

Questions?

The Power of Psychology Deliberate practice Focus on fixing errors

The Power of Psychology Spaced practice

The Power of Psychology Spaced practice Test yourself just before expected time of forgetting Learning comes first! Testing is for maintenance Know your remembering deadline Farther off = use longer intervals (but shorter percent) One week = review what you learned 3 days ago End of semester test = review what you learned 1–2 weeks ago

A Spaced Practice Tool Anki

The Power of Psychology Listen to music … maybe Learning context should be similar to recall context

The Power of Psychology Listen to music … maybe Learning context should be similar to recall context Mood similarity is OK Music, especially tempo, affects mood Encoding Specificity

The Power of Psychology Listen to music … maybe Learning context should be similar to recall context Mood similarity is OK Music, especially tempo, affects mood Use cues to overcome dissimilar encoding Know the line ahead of yours Encoding Specificity

The Power of Psychology Listen to music … maybe Learning context should be similar to recall context Mood similarity is OK Music, especially tempo, affects mood Use cues to overcome dissimilar encoding Know the line ahead of yours Avoid learning interference Encoding Specificity

Classic Techniques What actors actually do Extract the character’s intentions through text analysis Based on identifying beats “actors remembered 59% of a six-page dramatic scene by using their natural learning strategy compared to 19% recall by novices using a rote repetition strategy” “this [actor-specific] beat division process resulted in significantly more recall of the scene by actors (M5 46%) compared to novices (M5 25%).” [goal as abstraction] “in experiments with actors, they would often be told not to memorize, just to analyze, yet they still recalled more material than controls who deliberately memorized the same text” “a general student population usually recalled only the gist of the material. Why would a strategy that generally produces retention of just the main ideas of a text result in verbatim learning when employed by actors? The protocols suggested that the actors attended closely to the exact wording of the script for the purpose of gaining clues to interpretation.” Use mnemonics selectively for most difficult material Actively experience character’s actions through authentic interaction with other actors [say / act it like you mean it] Works due to personal emotional involvement Movement with dialogue enhances recall at a later time (Yes, but… what about the memorization?)

The Power of Psychology Focus on fixing errors (“Deliberate Practice”) Test yourself just before expected time of forgetting (“Spaced Practice”) “Reviewing material when it is fresh provides minimal benefit; however, waiting until material has been forgotten is also costly because the earlier study provides little benefit.” Goal is to ~maximize retention at a given time~ To remember longer, start with a longer review interval (in particular, to remember past the end of a semester, review after two weeks) “if you want to know the optimal distribution of your study time, you need to decide how long you wish to remember something.” For a semester, go back and review material introduced 1-2 weeks ago Must actually be learned first (it’s a maintenance strategy) Listen to music … maybe For learning linguistic content, music may be OK, but recall best if that music is present (so perhaps set up other aspects of context similarly) Encoding specificity, but cues can overcome encoding (knowing the line before your line) Mood is part of encoding specificity (and music, esp. tempo, affects mood)

The optimal gap increased as test delay increased. However, when measured as a proportion of test delay, the optimal gap declined from about 20 to 40% of a 1-week test delay to about 5 to 10% of a 1-year test delay. The interaction of gap and test delay implies that many educational practices are highly inefficient. For the RIs of 7, 35, 70, and 350 days, the optimal gaps (of those included in the study) were 1, 11, 21, and 21 days, respectively, for recall and 1, 7, 7, and 21 days, respectively, for recognition. We were able to obtain more precise estimates of the optimal gaps by interpolating our data with cubic splines (see Fig. 3); for recall, these interpolated gaps were approximately 3, 8, 12, and 27 days (corresponding to 43%, 23%, 17%, and 8% of the RIs, respectively), and for recognition, the interpolated gaps were approximately 1.6, 7, 10, and 25 days (24%, 19%, 14%, and 7% of the RIs). For remembering with test less than 5 days out, spaced practice is not necessary

The Mind–Body Connection Facial expressions / body position that match specific emotions influence your physiology (e.g., heart rate, breathing) Imagining that you are experiencing an emotion even changes your blood chemistry!

Is that enough for today?