We remember by association. We can associate facts or events (that by themselves may be difficult to remember) to simpler facts, or words, or numbers, or places. Memory, as a resource in argument, isn't always reliable. We must seek other forms of evidence to confirm a memory -- an "expert witness" is one such example, in that the expert's own memory is often considered a confirmation in itself.

• If we try to reconstruct a memory after the fact, we may depend on others to help us fill in the gaps. If we try to identify a criminal first through a photograph and then through a lineup, we can't be sure whether we "remember" the actual person or the photo.
• We may also be "absolutely certain" about a memory and still be inaccurate.
• We can create false memories in others' minds by suggestion.

What we remember

• What is personally relevant to us; what impacts us.
• What we've studied; what we've practiced. (Note: what we think of as "muscle memory" is picked up the same way.)
• What we've experienced the most often or most frequently. (This is called the "Law of Frequency.")
• We are more likely to remember things that happened recently than those that happened a long time ago. You can probably remember what you had for dinner yesterday, but not what you ate for dinner two weeks ago today. (This is shown pointedly in "Twelve Angry Men." It's called the "Law of Recency.")
• We tend to remember the most spectacular or striking impressions rather than those that are more ordinary. (I remember where I was when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, but not the day before or the day after. This is called the "Law of Vividness.")
• We remember (or remember more easily) when we're drunk what we experienced another time when we were drunk. (Or you can substitute some other emotional state for "drunk." This is called "State-Dependent Memory.")
• We remember in the short-term the most recent words spoken to us. (This is called "Echoic Memory.")

Research has shown that people forget things for one of three reasons...

1. They don't get it in the first place. (acquisition)
2. They had it, but they lost it. (storage)
3. They have it, but they can't find it. (retrieval)

These mistakes reflect a failure in one of the three mental processes necessary for memory: acquisition, storage, and retrieval.

How we forget

• We may remember certain aspects of an event, but misrecall details.
• We may purposely suppress events we don't want to remember.
• We will lose information content in our memories as time passes. After a while, if we don't actively preserve memories, only the most vivid events and the most used or studied facts remain.
• Memory storage is as subject to interference as memory recall.
• As we learn more, older information is sometimes blocked out by newer information.
• We may have "source amnesia": attributing something we "remember" to the wrong source.

Repetition is a tool for memorizing suitable concepts:

• numbers
• brief, hard facts (e.g. equations)
• sequences (e.g. tunes, poetry, jokes)
• quotes
• catching larger concepts (e.g. song lyrics, symbols, movie lines, photos, patterns, and milestones)

We use note-taking as a substitute for or enhancer of memory. Notes can make up for what we forget, *provided we can retrieve information from our notes*. This is especially important for free-form memorization -- then you REALLY need a retrieval system.

How we (try to) remember

• rehearsal/meditation
• mnemonic devices, acronyms, or acrostics (well-suited for lists); milestones (well-suited for traveling)
• poetry/limericks (well-suited for individual facts)
• special placement (i.e. "method of loci") - associating objects in a sequence or along a path, or physical locations, with information to be remembered (e.g. "stations of the cross")
• indexing (e.g. color-coding)

If we really want to remember something, it's not enough to hear it. Our ability to retain a fact increases if we

• hear it more than once
• write it down
• write it down again
• DO IT
• TEACH OTHERS TO DO IT

By the time we reach the bottom of the list, we have pretty much secured a memory. :-)