P RINCIPLE 1 : M AKE M EMORIES M ORE M EMORABLE

To learn to remember, we must learn about the nature and location of memory. Scientists working in the 1940s and ’50s began their search for memory in the most obvious place: within the cells of our brains—our neurons. They cut out parts of rats’ brains, trying to make them forget a maze, and found that it didn't matter what part of the brain they chose; the rats never forgot. In 1950, the researchers gave up, concluding that they had most definitely searched everywhere, and that memory must be somewhere else.

Researchers eventually turned their search for memories to the wiring between neurons rather than within the cells themselves. Each of the hundred billion neurons in our brains are, on average, connected to seven thousand other neurons, in a dense web of more than 150,000 kilometers of nerve fibers. ³ These interconnected webs are intricately involved in our memories, which is why scientists could never find the mazes in their rats. Each rat's maze was spread throughout its brain. Whenever the scientists cut out a piece, they damaged only a small portion of the involved connections. The more they removed, the longer it took the rats to remember, but they never forgot their mazes completely. The only way to remove the maze entirely was to remove the rat entirely.

These patterns of connections form in an elegantly simple, mechanical process: neurons that fire together wire together . Known as Hebb's Law, this principle helps explain how we remember anything . Take my first memory of cookies. I spent ten minutes waiting in front of the oven, bathed in radiating heat and the scent of butter, flour, and sugar. I waited until they came out of the oven and watched the steam rise up off of them as they cooled. When I could bear no more, my father gave me a glass of milk, I grabbed a cookie, and I learned empathy for my poor blue friend from Sesame Street . My neural network for cookies involves sight, smell, and taste. There are audio components—the sound of the word cookie and the sound of milk pouring into a glass. I remember my dad's face smiling as he bit into his own delicious cookie. This first cookie experience was a parade of sensations, which wired together into a tight web of neural connections. These connections enable me to return to my past whenever I encounter a new cookie. Faced with a familiar buttery scent, that old web of neurons reactivates; my brain plays back the same sights, sounds, emotions, and tastes, and I relive my childhood experience.

Compare this experience to a new one: your currently-forming memory of the word mjöður . There's not much of a parade here. It's not obvious how to pronounce it, and in a particularly obnoxious move, I'm not even telling you what it means. As a result, you're stuck looking at the structure of the word—it has two foreign letters sandwiched between four familiar ones—and not much else. Without Herculean efforts, you will forget mjöður by the end of this chapter, if not sooner.

Levels of Processing: The Great Mnemonic Filter

The divide that separates your new mjöður from my cookie is known as levels of processing, and it separates the memorable from the forgettable. My cookie is memorable because it contains so many connections. I can access cookie in a thousand different ways. I will remember cookies if I read about them, hear about them, see them, smell them, or taste them. The word is unforgettable.

We need to make your mjöður just as unforgettable, and we will do it by adding four types of connections: structure, sound, concept, and personal connection. These are the four levels of processing. They were identified in the 1970s by psychologists who created a curious questionnaire with four types of questions and gave it to college students:

• Structure: How many capital letters are in the word BEAR?
• Sound: Does APPLE rhyme with Snapple?
• Concept: Is TOOL another word for“instrument”?
• Personal Connection: Do you like PIZZA?

After the questionnaire, they gave the students a surprise memory test, asking which words from the test they still remembered. Their memories were dramatically influenced by the question types: students remembered six PIZZAs for every BEAR. The magic of these questions lies in a peculiar mental trick. To count the capital letters in BEAR, you don't need to think about brown furry animals, and so you don't. You've activated the shallowest level of processing—structure—and moved on. On the other hand, you activate regions throughout your brain to determine whether you like PIZZA. You automatically utilize structure to figure out what word you're looking at. At the same time, you'll tend to hear the word pizza echoing within your skull as you imagine a hot disk of cheesy goodness. Finally, you'll access memories of pizzas past to determine whether you enjoy pizza or just haven't met the right one yet. In a fraction of a second, a simple question–– Do you like PIZZA? ––can simultaneously activate all four levels of processing. These four levels will fire together, wire together, and form a robust memory that is six times easier to remember than that BEAR you've already forgotten.

The four levels of processing are more than a biological quirk; they act as a filter, protecting us from information overload. We live in a sea of information, surrounded by a dizzying amount of input from TV, the Internet, books, social interactions, and the events of our lives. Your brain uses levels of processing to judge which input is important and which should be thrown out. You don't want to be thinking about the number of letters in the word tiger when one is chasing after you, nor do you want to be assaulted by vivid memories of cows when you buy milk. To keep you sane, your brain consistently works at the shallowest level of processing needed to get the job done. At the grocery store, you are simply looking for the words chocolate milk, or perhaps even Organic Wholesome Happy Cow Chocolate Milk . This is pattern matching, and your brain uses structure to quickly weed through hundreds or thousands of ingredient lists and food labels. Thankfully, you forget nearly every one of these lists and labels by the time you reach your milk. If you didn't, your encyclopedic knowledge of supermarket brand names would make you a terrible bore at parties. In more stimulating circumstances, such as that tiger in hot pursuit, your brain has a vested interest in memory. In such a case, should you survive, you'll likely remember not to climb into the tiger enclosure at the zoo. In this way, levels of processing act as our great mental filter, keeping us alive and tolerable at parties.

This filter is one of the reasons why foreign words are difficult to remember. Your brain is just doing its job; how should it know that you want to remember mjöður but not disodium phosphate (an emulsifier in your chocolate milk)?

How to Remember a Foreign Word Forever

To create a robust memory for a word like mjöður, you'll need all four levels of processing. The shallowest level, structure, allows you to recognize patterns of letters and determine whether a word is long, short, and written in English or in Japanese. Your brain is recognizing structure when you unscramble odctor into doctor . This level is essential for reading, but it involves too little of your brain to contribute much to memory. Almost none of the students in the levels of processing study remembered counting the capital letters in BEAR. Words like mjöður are difficult to remember because you can't get any deeper than structure until you know how to deal with odd letters like ö and ð .

Your first task in language learning is to reach the next level: sound. Sound connects structure to your ears and your mouth and allows you to speak. You'll start by learning the sounds of your language and which letters make those sounds, because if you begin with sound, you'll have a much easier time remembering words. Our college students remembered twice as many APPLEs (which do, in fact, rhyme with Snapple) as they did BEARs (which has four capital letters). Sound is the land of rote memorization. We take a name, like Edward, or a pair of words, like cat–gato, and we repeat them, continuously activating the parts of our brain that connect structure to sound. Our mjöður is very roughly pronounced“MEW-ther,”and the more accurately we learn its pronunciation, the better we'll remember it. ⁴ Eventually, our mjöður will be as memorable as a familiar name like Edward. This is better than structure, but it still isn't good enough for our needs. After all, many of us don't remember names very well, because our brains are filtering them out as quickly as they arrive.

We need a way to get through this filter, and we'll find it at the third level of processing: concepts. Our college students remembered twice as many TOOLs (synonym for instruments ) as APPLEs (Snapples). Concepts can be broken down into two groups: abstract and concrete. We'll begin with the abstract. If I tell you that my birthday is in June, you probably won't immediately see images of birthday cakes and party hats. You don't need to, and as we've discussed, our brains work at the shallowest level required. It's efficient, and it saves us a lot of work and distraction. Still, the date of my birthday is a meaningful, if abstract, concept. This makes it deeper and more memorable than pure sounds, which is why you'll have an easier time remembering that my birthday is in June than you'll have remembering that the Basque word for“birthday”is urtebetetze .

Deeper still than abstract concepts are concrete, multisensory concepts. If I tell you that my upcoming birthday party will take place in a paintball arena, after which we'll eat a cookies-and-cream ice-cream cake and then spend the rest of the evening in a swimming pool, you'll tend to remember those details much better than you'll remember the month of the event. We prioritize and store concrete concepts because they engage more of our brains, not because they're necessarily any more important than other information. In this case, it is less important that you know the details about my birthday than that you know when and where to show up.

Given this phenomenon, how do we make a strange, foreign word like mjöður memorable? The word itself is not the problem. We are not bad at remembering words when they are tied to concrete, multisensory experiences. If I tell you that my email password is mjöður , you probably (hopefully?) won't remember it, because you're processing it on a sound and structural level. But if we're in a bar together, and I hand you a flaming drink with a dead snake in it, and tell you,“This— mjöður ! You—drink!”you won't have any trouble remembering that word. We have no problem naming things; nouns comprise the vast majority of the 450,000 entries in Webster's Third International Dictionary . ⁵ It's when those names aren't tied to concrete concepts that we run into trouble with our memories. Our goal, and one of the core goals of this book, is to make foreign words like mjöður more concrete and meaningful.

Breaking Through the Filter: The Power of Images and Personal Connections

Earlier in this chapter, we encountered a translated word pair: cat–gato . As we discussed, standard study practice involves repeating gato and cat until they form a sound connection. This is too shallow to remember easily, but it's also beside the point; when you read gato, you don't want to think the word cat; you want to think this:

We'll get better results if we skip the English word and use an image instead.

We recall images much better than words, because we automatically think conceptually when we see an image. Image-recall studies have repeatedly demonstrated that our visual memory is phenomenal. Memory researchers in the 1960s subjected college students to one of the most terrifyingly-named memory tests ever invented: the Two-Alternative Forced-Choice Test. In it, college students were shown 612 magazine ads ( possibly tied to chairs with their eyes held open) and then asked to identify the old pictures when shown a new mixture of images. The students correctly picked the old images 98.5 percent of the time . Unsatisfied, the researchers repeated their tests with more images, trying to determine what college students will put up with for low pay and free food. There doesn't seem to be a limit. Students were willing to sit in dark rooms for five consecutive days, watching ten thousand images in a row. After the study, these students accurately identified 83 percent of the images. Our capacity for visual memory is extraordinary; we only need to learn how to take advantage of it.

Since we need to learn words, not pictures, we will use combinations of words and pictures. Such combinations work even better than pictures alone. This effect even applies to totally unrelated images: you will remember an abstract drawing with the sentence“Apples are delicious”better than that drawing alone. Faced with an incomprehensible image and an unrelated word, your brain struggles to find meaning, even if there isn't any. In the process, it automatically moves the word out of the disodium phosphate trash can and into cookie territory. As a result, you'll remember.

We can go one step deeper than pictures by taking advantage of the last level, personal connection . You will remember a concept with a personal connection 50 percent more easily than a concept without one, which is why our college students remembered 50 percent more PIZZAs ( Yes, we like them ) than TOOLs ( Yes, they are synonymous with instruments). This is not to say that concepts alone are ineffective. If you connect gato to a picture of some cute cat, you will have an easy time remembering that word. But if, in addition, you can connect gato with a memory of your own childhood cat, that word will become practically unforgettable.

How do we use this in practice? A new foreign word is like a new friend's name. Our new friend could be a person, a cat, or a drink; the memory burden in each case is the same. Let's make a new friend's name memorable using levels of processing.

Our new friend is named Edward. Simply by thinking“Edward,”we have already reached the second level of processing— sound. If we want to go deeper, into concept territory, we would search for a concrete image for the name Edward, such as the movie character Edward Scissorhands. If we spent a moment imagining our new friend with a pair of scissors for hands, we would have an easy time remembering his name later. This strategy is used by competitive memorizers (yes, there are competitive memorizers) to quickly memorize people's names, and we'll discuss it in depth in Chapters 4 and 5 .

But we're not done yet. We'll do even better if we can find a personal connection with his name. Perhaps you still remember watching Edward Scissorhands in a theater, perhaps your brother is named Edward, or perhaps you too have hands made of scissors. As you imagine your new friend interacting with Edward-related images and Edward-related personal memories, you are activating broader and broader networks in your brain. The next time you see Edward, this parade of images and memories will come rushing back, and you'll be hard pressed to forget his name. This gives you valuable social points, which are sometimes redeemable for wine, cheese, and board game nights.

This thought process can take creativity, but you can learn to do it quickly and easily. For a concrete word like gato, you can find an appropriate image on Google Images ( images.google.com ) within seconds. If you simply ask yourself,“When's the last time I saw a gato ?”you will add a personal connection and cement your memory of the word. Easy.

For an abstract word like economía (economy), our job is still very simple. When we search Google Images, we'll find thousands of pictures of money, piggy banks, stock market charts, and politicians. By choosing any of these images, we'll force ourselves to think concretely and conceptually. As a result, the word will become much easier to remember. If we ask ourselves whether the economía has affected our lives, we'll get the personal connection we need to remember that word forever.

In this book, we're going to learn vocabulary in two main stages: we'll build a foundation of easy, concrete words, and then we'll use that foundation to learn abstract words. Throughout, we'll use levels of processing to make foreign words memorable.