Modern Science « Aaron Hollman's Blog

Cognition

Jun 20
2009

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When I was a pyschology minor, I took a class called Memory and Cognition. To be blunt, the class sucked; it was probably the hardest class I had ever taken, but it was very interesting stuff. One of my favorite topics in the class was about how we remember and recall information. That is what this post is about.

Suppose you have a sequence of numbers (1 0 6 6 1 4 9 2 1 7 7 6 1 8 6 5 1 9 4 1 1 9 4 5 2 0 0 1) and were told that you have to memorize them in a few minutes. When asked to repeat the numbers back, you might start by recalling the first five or six digits (1 0 6 6 1 4) and maybe the last five (5 2 0 0 1), but the middle dozen or so are going to be hazy. This is due to how our brains take in and store information; your going to be focused on remembering during the first few digits and memory decay will be less during the last few.

Now, suppose the numbers were grouped together into pairs (10 66 14 92 17 76 18 65 19 41 19 45 20 01) and your task was to memorize them again. You may have a little more success this time if you associated them as pairs instead of single digits. This time, you may remember four or five at the beginning and another four or so at the end but the middle pairs may still seem hazy and difficult to recall.

Now, lets take it a couple of steps further. Lets combine the pairs into quads and associate them as years (1066 1492 1776 1865 1941 1945 2001). There, that’s a lot more manageable to remember and I’d be willing to bet that most people will be able to recall all the numbers now due phenomena called ‘chunking’ and ‘association’. See, I told you it was interesting stuff.

I use this in real life when I have to remember passwords or ip addresses or other number sequences, hopefully, someone else will be able to find this information useful as well.

FYI: The dates are as follows:

1066 – Battle of Hastings – Norman conquest of England
1492 – Christopher Columbus lands in the Americas
1776 – The United States declares its independence from England
1865 – The end of the American Civil War
1941 – The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese Empire.
1945 – The end of World War II
2001 – The terrorist attacks of September 11th.

Comments and corrections welcome.

aaron

Cognition – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind, 1st ed. 1997, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Written by Aaron Hollman in: Modern Science | Tags: Motivation, Psychology

NASA Is Returning to the Moon

Jun 19
2009

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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter - From jpl.nasa.gov

NASA is returning to the moon. Great! We should have never left.

Yesterday, NASA launched an Atlas V rocket carrying a series of scientific instruments. These instruments help prepare NASA for a human return to the moon in about ten years. One of the instruments is the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter). This is a satellite that will create a 3-D map of the moon’s surface similar to what the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter did for Mars. We should get some fantastic images from it.

The second instrument on the rocket is a satellite called LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite). Its goal is to observe as spent parts of the satellite are crashed into craters and probe for evidence of water on the moon.

In a few days or weeks, we should be getting images from the LRO. They should be much better than any images of the moon we have seen in the past. For those of us who are interested in space exploration, this is very exciting stuff. Over time, there will be more launches of lunar satellites and rovers before we send men (and women) back to the moon. Stay tuned.

aaron

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