Metamemory: What It Is And How It Helps Us Access Our Memories
Memory is the ability to store and retrieve information in our brain, but there are processes that go beyond that.
That’s where it comes into play. metamemory, unique capabilities of the human being that allow us to push our memory skills to the limit Let’s discover what it is and how we can use this valuable skill.
We all, to a greater or lesser extent, have an idea of the processes that our memory carries out, distinguishing the capacities we have to generate memories, relive them, or simply retain some data in short-term memory. This perception of our own memory capacities, as well as the limits it has, would be what is known as metamemory.
The concept is not current, since everything related to metacognition (and metamemory undoubtedly belongs to this field) has already been studied in philosophy, although with other terms, since the time of Descartes. However, it was already in the 20th century when everything related to memory and metamemory processes was studied in depth and under scientific criteria.
A good metamemory is useful because it allows us to make the most of our abilities, since we can become aware of which processes we are best at For example, what way of studying makes us retain concepts better, how long it takes us to memorize more or less quality or what is the amount of data that we can retain in a given time.
In this sense, age is a fundamental factor, since it has been shown that during childhood, children believe that they have much more powerful memory abilities than they really are, so their metamemory would be overrated. Due to this error in their self-perception, they always tend to claim that they are capable of memorizing many more elements than they really can, a conclusion that is evidenced in the results of the studies.
Components of this skill set
Within metamemory we can make a distinction between two very different components. The first would be procedural knowledge, which would refer to the capabilities set out in the previous point, referring to our perception of our own memory skills, which make us able to establish the strategies that best suit us to optimize the ability to memorize. data.
Here another important concept comes into play, which would be the learning judgment This is the assessment that we make before facing a task that involves the use of memory, and by which we estimate the amount of time necessary to carry it out as well as the quality that we anticipate said memorization will have.
The most obvious example would be that of the student who takes all the notes for a subject and automatically knows the time he has to dedicate to studying them if he wants to obtain a good grade on the exam, and even what is the minimum time he would have to study to obtain just a pass (although sometimes those estimates can be overly optimistic, as many people will know).
On the other hand there would be declarative knowledge And metamemory is also useful for us to be aware of the quality and reliability of a memory about a past event, allowing us to realize at a certain moment that the representation that we are remembering in our mind may not be so close to reality. as we had originally thought or, on the contrary, we are reasonably sure that the memory faithfully represents the event that we experienced in the past.
Declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge would complement each other to form, therefore, metamemory. None of these components is more relevant or important than the other, but each one refers to one of the skills that make up memory, so it is important to take both into account if you want to study and enhance metamemory in all its forms. .
What we don’t know
The former US Secretary of Defense once left a phrase for history: “There are two things we don’t know: what we know we don’t know and what we don’t know we don’t know.” Behind this kind of tongue twister there is a much more important issue than it may seem to fully understand the implications of metamemory.
And another of the abilities that allows us to carry out metamemory is precisely instantly recognizing if we know or ignore a certain piece of information Depending on how familiar the topic is to us, we can make a quick inference and anticipate whether it is possible that the answer is buried somewhere in our brain or, on the contrary, it is impossible for us to be able to give a reasonable answer.
This mechanism is called the signal familiarity hypothesis, and it works exactly as its nomenclature dictates. If our brain detects whether the data we are looking for can be found in our area of knowledge, and if so, it will proceed to try to search for the answer in memory (which may or may not be there).
But another phenomenon can occur when we are asked about a specific question: that we do not remember the exact information but that we have the feeling that, indeed, it is something we know (“I have it on the tip of my tongue!”). Here the accessibility hypothesis comes into play, a brain mechanism that tells us that, When we have that feeling, it is very possible that we have the knowledge stored in our memory and the more clues we have about it, the easier it will be to access that data.
feeling of knowing
We mentioned before the sensation of having something on the tip of your tongue, and that topic deserves a separate point, since it is another of the processes that characterize metamemory. This mechanism comes into play when we are not able to access a piece of information from our memory, but we are sure that it is there (although sometimes this is not the case and our metamemory has played tricks on us).
In these cases, obtain peripheral information (related to the data itself) can facilitate activating the neural circuits where the information we seek is housed and in this way it becomes accessible again. Another method that works is identification. We may not be able to remember the correct answer to a question, but if we are presented with a list with several options, we will instantly recognize the one we were looking for.
The feeling of knowing and its relationship with different physiological conditions have been investigated in the laboratory. For example, it has been shown that alcohol consumption affects memory itself, and not the subject’s judgment about whether or not he knows a given question. However, the altitude factor we are at produces the opposite effect: It does not change memory, but it does attenuate the person’s perception of whether they know a piece of information
How to improve metamemory
Once we are perfectly clear about the question of what metamemory is and what its characteristics are, one can ask whether there is a possibility of improving this capacity. And the answer is yes.
For this, there are what are called mnemonics or mnemonic rules, strategies used to improve our memory, and therefore further develop our metamemory, since We will have a wider range of strategies to choose from
The key to being able to learn and use these mnemonics is to understand how the brain establishes associations when we are immersed in a learning process, and then take advantage of these shortcuts and maximize them, optimizing our memory resources.
There are many types of mnemonic rules that can be learned depending on the type of data we want to memorize Some are very simple, like building a word with the initials of the list of words we want to remember, but others are tremendously complex and require a lot of training in mnemonics to be able to use them with any skill.
This is where mnemonists appear, who are those individuals whose abilities at the level of memory and metamemory make those of the rest of us blush, partly innate but above all thanks to an impressive dedication and effort to enhance each of these abilities at will. through the study of mnemonics, sometimes achieving feats that seem more typical of a computer than a human being, such as reciting from memory more than 70,000 decimals of the number pi.
