An interesting article that seemed worth a special mention in this week's intro is called
How Actors Remember Their Lines. It's an excerpt from a book called
Memory and Movies: What Films Can Teach Us about Memory.
The main point is summarized early in the article as follows:
"Actors face the demanding task of learning their lines with great precision, but they rarely do so by rote repetition. They did not, they said, sit down with a script and recite their lines until they knew them by heart. Repeating items over and over, called maintenance rehearsal, is not the most effective strategy for remembering. Instead, actors engage in elaborative rehearsal, focusing their attention on the meaning of the material and associating it with information they already know."
This is important to understand for anyone attempting to improve their retention of information, no matter the context. It seems like an obvious solution to improving memory, but it's certainly easier said than done.
For example how do you treat technical info the same way actors look at characters in a play? How do you absorb yourself more deeply in financial information or stuff you normally see in pie charts and graphs?
My wife always gets on me for remembering details of a baseball game that happened 9 years ago but I can't remember which one of our friends just went on vacation to Hawaii! Again, we remember what we absorb ourselves in, which is the overall point of how actors do it.
The article is certainly worth a read and if you want to delve further into the subject, you might want to check out the book as well.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
