NLP for Memorizing and Remembering

Filed Under (NLP life coaching) on 01-09-2015

How does NLP improve memorizing and remembering? Psychologist George A. Miller carried out experiments on how people process information. He discovered that the maximal amount of bits of information that people could handle at once was between 5 and 9. In other words 7 plus / minus 2. A bit of information is the amount that we need to make a decision between two equally likely alternatives. For example, the result of tossing a coin will produce one bit of information.

When people are confused, overwhelmed, or cannot handle any more information without mistakes, they will reach their limit of channel capacity. Try paying attention to the information coming through your five senses, the physical sensations from your body, and any thought about your past or future. You’ll soon feel overload. And you won’t be able to handle all this information at once.

Chunks of information

Miller gives the example of someone learning the Morse code. The learner learns the code for each letter from dots and dashes. He will progress to recognising words, and later whole phrases. This is also true for learning any physical or mental skill. Dancing requires moving from individual steps through sequences to the whole dance. As we learn, we increase the number of bits of information per chunk. And we later organize the information into patterns.

So in order to maximise effective learning, memorizing, and remembering chunk things in ways that work for you. Just as you chunk a phone number into groups of three or four digits. An area code of a phone number may contain two or three digits, but becomes one chunk of information. This allows you to remember more than between 5 and 9 bits of information, because each chunk can contain many bits.

Since it is as easy to remember a lot of information when the items are informationally rich as it is to remember little information when the items are informationally impoverished, it is economical to organize the material into rich chunks. To draw an analogy, it is as if we had to carry all our money in a purse that could only hold seven coins. It doesn’t matter to the purse whether the coins are pennies or silver dollars.