Medical students in Victoria have shown that an Australian Aboriginal memory technique performs better than traditional European memory aids in retaining the long lists of medical facts needed in medal school.
A groups of 76 graduate entry students at Monash Rural Health Churchill assessed the effectiveness of different memory training techniques in the acquisition and recall of a typical medical school curriculum subject – the main reactions and intermediate metabolites of the tricarboxylic acid cycle.
Before the learning exercise one group of students received 20 minutes training in the ‘memory palace technique’ which dates back to the early Greeks and which instructs students to memorise facts by “placing” them into a memory blueprint of the childhood home, allowing them to revisit certain rooms to recapture that data
Another group of students were taught a technique developed by Australian Aboriginal people, which also uses the idea of attaching facts to the landscape, but with added stories that describe the facts and the placement to facilitate recall.
An Australian Aboriginal educator explained to students how Elders instruct young people, and the elements of place-based narrative, image, and metaphor. The instructor walked students around a rock garden located on campus which contained multiple rocks, plants and concrete slabs arranged in the shape of a large, stylised footprint. Each item on the word list was incorporated into a narrative related to elements in the rock garden. The narrative was practiced as students physically walked through the garden with the instructor, and participants were encouraged to visualise walking through the garden during recall. As the participants mentally “walked” the path in the narrative, they were encouraged to approach each feature in the garden and identify the place and its associated name.
The researchers found that the students who used the Aboriginal technique for remembering were almost three times more likely to correctly remember the entire word list than they were prior to training (odds ratio – 2.8).
The students using the memory palace technique were about twice as likely to get a perfect score after training (2.1), while a control group improved by about 50% (1.5) over their pre-training performance.
The study investigators said their findings backed growing evidence that the use of physical location could act as a memory aid via so-called spacial learning.
“It is well established that numerous species of animals engage in food caching behaviours and structural imaging studies of a group of highly trained spatial learners (London taxi drivers) has demonstrated enlargement of specific hippocampal regions corresponding to spatial memory, reflecting the importance of this area of the brain for spatial navigation in humans,” they wrote.
“Consistent with the notion that exploitation of spatial memory is among the most effective memorisation techniques, an early MRI study of competitors in the World Memory Championships showed that 90% of the memory athletes employed some variation of the method of loci for rapid learning and accurate recall of information,” they added.
This sort of immersive spatial memory is also familiar to computer gamers, who often must navigate complex game environments to achieve goals, they noted.
Importantly a qualitative survey found that the students using the Aboriginal technique found it more enjoyable, “both as a way to remember facts but also as a way to learn more about Aboriginal culture,” said course leader Dr David Reser.
“Student responses to learning the Australian Aboriginal memory technique in the context of biomedical science education were overwhelmingly favourable, and students found both the training and the technique enjoyable, interesting, and more useful than rote memorisation,” the study authors said.
The findings “indicate that this method has genuine utility and efficacy for study of biomedical sciences and in the foundation years of medical training,” they added.
“Last year non essential teaching was put on hold, but this year we hope to offer this to students as a way to not only to facilitate their learning but to reduce the stress associated with a course that requires a lot of rote learning,” said Dr Reser.
The study, published in PLoS One, was led by Dr Reser and Dr Tyson Yunkaporta, from Deakin University’s NIKERI Institute.