I think of the concepts from psychology that I will definitely remember and use often is chunking. Chunking is organizing information into meaningful groupings, allowing us to extend the span of short-term memory. It a concept that we use in our everyday, lives with out realizing it. It will be a great to tool to use while studying or even trying to remember a phone number. It is amazing the unique and exciting tricks we can use to "fool" our brains. The magic number is the span of short-term memory, according to George Miller: seven plus or minus two pieces of information. Chunking allows us to extend this number. The people who are able to do crazy things like memorize large amounts of number in for instance phi. On of the most famous people for doing this was a runner and was able to use chunking to see the groups of numbers as running times. Chest masters also use chunking to remember tricky moves. I am glad I learned this method because I will definitely recall it when I am studying large amounts of material. The whole topic of memory in psychology is fascinating. Especially about the people who can recall exact memories from years ago just like it was yesterday.
Chunkinggg
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I also found chunking to be an interesting technique. It's cool how we automatically do things to help us remember even though we aren't always very aware of it. When we did the memorization experiment in discussion when we tried recalling words we heard and putting them down, I found it very odd when I could only remember a couple of words even though as she was saying the words I felt like I had gotten all of them. I also thought it was funny when I had almost every word on my list that was never said because I automatically put it in to my brain because it seemed to fit. Very cool topic.
I also agree that this was a very interesting topic. Again, even before having taken psych I was aware that if you chunk information together it will be easier to remember. It was really fun to learn, though, why phone numbers are grouped the way they are as well as how other things are formatted so that people can remember them better!
I agree that chunking and other memory tricks are things that I will remember 5 years down the road. I use chunking all the time in class to help me remember information. I think it is something that people naturally do in order to help them remember. I also think it is one of the most effective ways to remember items in a list.
Sometimes I feel like psych is just putting names to common sense terms. Chunking almost seems to be a natural thing for humans. I had never heard of the term before this semester but I had always used it as a memorization tool.
Chunking is definitely a useful memorization tool, but its possible you are slightly confused. You say that you will use chunking to help memorize phone numbers; however the reason phone numbers are 3 sets of data in the first place is to allow chunking to happen naturally. Additional chunking is not necessary.