Smarts

How to become smarter and more effective

Tad Waddington, Ph.D. is the author of Lasting Contribution: How to Think, Plan, and Act to Accomplish Meaningful Work, a book that has won five prestigious awards. See full bio

April 27, 2009, Memory

Comments on "Smarts: It's not how much you learn that matters. It's how much you remember."

Smarts: It's not how much you learn that matters. It's how much you remember.

By Tad Waddington, Ph.D. on April 27, 2009 in Smarts

Six steps to making memories stick. Read More

Do you have evidence of these

Submitted by Anonymous on April 28, 2009 - 3:15am.

Do you have evidence of these two statements in your article or are they only your own theoeries?

"Third, most forgetting happens because our heads are already full of information and have trouble packing more in"

"Don't go beyond seven. The average short-term memory capacity is 7 plus or minus 2 pieces of information. That is 5 to 9 pieces. This is why phone numbers are seven digits long."

References

Submitted by Tad Waddington, Ph.D. on April 28, 2009 - 4:53am.

The reference for forgetting due to a full head, called proactive interference, was first documented by Underwood, B.J. (1957). 'Interference and forgetting' in Psychological Review.

The initial research of the seven plus or minus two rule is Miller, G. (1956): "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information", Psychological Review, vol. 63 pp. 81–97.

An easier entry point for the all of this material is Sternberg, Robert J. (2006). Cognitive psychology. Thomson Wadsworth, which is now in its fifth edition.

My own rules for writing are to never say anything that I don't have evidence for. The reason I'm not a scholar, however, is that I am terrible at recording my references. I write down the finding, but not where I found it. For example, to me the most irritating few sentences in my book are: "Most birds time the hatching of their eggs for when food is most abundant. Since most birds follow this strategy, competition for food is also most ﬁerce at that time. A few bird species hatch early, when there is less food but also much less competition for the available food. By factoring in more than one variable, these birds end up with more food for their young."

Before the book was published I looked everywhere for which specific birds hatch early, because I believe lack of specificity is the hallmark of bad writing. I e-mailed bird experts and called birders I know. No luck. Until this morning I was sure I'd heard it in Attenborough's Life of Birds so I've been watching them again. The diction is pure Attenborough: Most X are Y, but some X are Z. I've finished the documentary and it's not there. I'm hoping that either you know something about early-hatchers or that it is in Life in the Undergrowth.