Running head: ENHANCING MEMORY CAPABILITIES

Enhancing Memory Capabilities

Sarah Peoples
Concorde Career College

ENHANCING MEMORY CAPABILITIES

Enhancing Memory Capabilities

Memory is another aspect of the central nervous system that illustrates the brain's
variance and complexity. Memory serves as a mechanism in the brain that encodes, stores, and
retrieves information (Wood, Wood, Boyd, 2014). Themselves and the environment that they
live constantly mold a person's memory. As enhanced as the brain is for creating a space for an
enormous amount of memory, our brain still has faults that prevent us from being able to retrieve
information quickly and reliably. One aspect of my memory that I would like to improve is my
ability to recall information for nursing school examinations.
The capacity to remember information for nursing school exams occurs as declarative
memory. The recall of factual information such as time, language, faces, and historical
occurrences has been defined as declarative memory (Wood, et.al., 2014). Memories occur in
three processes: encoding information, storage of encoded information, and retrieval of stored
information. The completions of these activities determine what a person is able to remember.
Encoding is the act of processing information into memory. The successful conclusion of this
aspect of memory allows us to remember what a person ate for dinner without much thought.
After the information is encoded, the information is then stored ones mind. Memory stores using
three primary methods: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sensory
memory stores sensory information in great detail, however, this memory typically last only for a
minute (Wood, et.al., 2014). Comparatively, sensory memory transitions to short-term memory,
but it lasts a little longer than sensory memory at twenty seconds. Rehearsing information over
multiple times enhances short-term memory. Information is often a continuation transference of
information from short-term memory to long-term memory and from long-term memory back to
short-term memory. According to Mastering the World of Psychology, long-term memory has an

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almost limitless capacity. Thus, information in long-term memory typically stays there for the
duration of a person's life (p. 183, 2014). Despite this fact, this doesn't mean that one will
always be able to remember what is in their long-term memory. Some people have a problem
retrieving the information that is stored. Retrieval is the process of getting information out of
memory (Wood, et.al., 2014).
Psychologists measure forgetting and retention in three different ways: recall,
recognition, and relearning. Recall defines one's ability to remember without external cues. The
opposite of recall is one's ability to identify learned information using external cues, which is
called recognition. This type of forgetting is evident on exams that have multiple-choice
questions, which uses previously learned information with other options available. There are
many causes of a person's inability to remember things. In the case of exam performance,
ineffective encoding is the cause of forgetting.
The way information is encoded has a tremendous effect on one's capacity to remember
the information stored. For example, processing information in more detail often makes it harder
to forget. As a student, I try to think critically about the concepts in my nursing material rather
than just reading them. However, as there is often a limited amount of time, that information is
presented most information is improperly encoded, causing information to be forgotten.
Enhancing memory happens in a multitude of ways such as overlearning, distributed practice,
minimizing interference, deep processing, and mnemonic devices among other means.
I have implemented overlearning as a way to retain information for my upcoming
Medical Surgical Nursing I exam. Overlearning is a method that a student can use by continually
practicing the material even after it is learned, which also increases retention (Wood, et.al.,
2014). The exam tested knowledge gained on arterial blood gas analysis. I spent an additional

ENHANCING MEMORY CAPABILITIES

six hours practicing practice exam questions for this material. Upon taking the test on
Wednesday, April 20, 2016, I was able to recall much more information than I have on the
previous exam. My score exceeded my last exam score by an additional five percentage points.
Overlearning served as an efficient method for enhancing my memory in regards to reviewing
information.
Memory is a mechanism controlled by the brain that allows one to store, encode, and
retrieve information. Despite faults in memory that causes one to forget information, there are
methods to enhance the ways in which a person memory works. After utilizing one such method,
overlearning, I was able to improve my memory in regards to learned nursing lecture
information. I was able to assess the effectiveness through improved test scores.

ENHANCING MEMORY CAPABILITIES

References
Wood, S., Wood, E., & Boyd, D. (2014). Mastering the world of psychology (5th ed.). Boston:
Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.