Shadowing Practice: Techniques to Enhance Learning and Memory | Nancy D. Chiaravalloti | TEDxHerndon - Learn English Speaking with YouTube
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Reviewer Gopalco How many people would like to improve their memory?
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Reviewer Gopalco How many people would like to improve their memory?
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All of us, right?
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Memory failures are common.
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We all have memory failures in our daily life.
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And this is perfectly normal.
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Whether it be forgetting your car keys, not remembering the name of an acquaintance, or failing to show up for an appointment on time, We all forget things.
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We're not computers, and our memories are not perfect.
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But there are things that we can do to improve our memory functioning.
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Let's imagine for a minute that you have a medical illness that causes impaired memory, substantially impaired memory.
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There are many illnesses out there like this.
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Some have neurological causes, like multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, stroke.
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Others have non-neurological causes, disorders such as cardiac failure, diabetes, or perhaps major depression.
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There are thousands of people out there that struggle, really, truly struggle with their memory functioning every single day.
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But we can help them.
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Recent research at Kessler Foundations has focused on memory rehabilitation, and I'm here to tell you today that we are making progress.
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But before I go on to tell you about some of the techniques we've developed, I want to talk for just a minute about the memory process.
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Memory is actually a very complicated process, but it gets blamed for a lot of things it doesn't necessarily fail at.
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So, memory is composed of three stages.
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The first is encoding, the second is consolidation, and the third is retrieval.
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Today, I'm focusing on encoding, and the reason I'm focusing on encoding is because that is where the vast majority of memory failures occur.
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When I use the term encoding, what I'm referring to is learning new information.
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Many of us think of learning and we think about students, and indeed students do a lot of learning, and it's actually their full-time job is to learn information.
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But we learn things every single day of our lives.
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We are constantly relying on our learning and memory system.
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So you may need to remember what to get at the store.
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You may need to remember a series of to-do items throughout your day.
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You're learning the name of a new acquaintance.
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You're learning a new process that you might have to perform at work.
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there are so many memory taxing situations in our daily lives
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that we can only improve our lives by learning this new information.
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So how do we do that?
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Well, at Kessler Foundation, we've identified several techniques that aid in learning new information, and I'm going to tell you about two of those techniques today.
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The first one is imagery.
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Imagery is the process by which we attach a mental image or picture to a verbal idea.
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You can do this with almost anything.
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To take a simple example, let's say you need to remember the word house.
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You might picture your house.
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By doing this, what you're essentially doing is forcing your brain to dually encode information.
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So the word house is being processed and remembered by your verbal memory networks.
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In our society, that's what we rely on constantly.
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The image of the house is being processed and remembered by your visual spatial memory system, which is located more posteriorly in your brain.
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So what you're doing is you're increasing your brain activity
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and you're helping your brain to learn new information in more than one manner.
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So many people say, well, how does this help me?
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I have to remember six or eight things to do, and instead of remembering the things to do, what you're simply telling me to do is remember a bunch of pictures.
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I still have to remember a whole bunch of stuff, and that's my problem.
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Well, the secret is to combine unrelated material into one image.
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So you can take five, six, seven ideas, and you can incorporate them into one image.
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And I'm going to show you an example of this.
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Let's say that you're leaving for work in the morning, rushing out the door, you have no paper, you can't write anything down, you have to remember to call your mother that day,
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You have to remember to buy butter and apples on your way home.
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You have to remember to pick up coffee for your 9 a.m meeting, because you want that meeting to go well, and coffee always helps.
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And finally, you need to remember that last night, when you were working, you had to change your network password, and it's now Blossom.
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Those are five completely unrelated pieces of information that you're going to need throughout your day.
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you can combine them into one image.
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And I'm going to show you how.
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If you look on the screen, in the center of the screen you see a face, a picture of a mother. That is best.
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The best image of the mother that you can use is your own mother because that's the most salient image for you.
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That's the easiest image of a mother for you to call to mind.
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So that would be person-specific.
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Jane's mother, probably different from Tom's mother.
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Next, you'll notice that the particular mother on the screen is sitting in a Butterchurner.
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And this is to demonstrate an example.
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Perhaps the person who needs to remember this information is a history buff.
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And the image of Butterchurner pops to his mind very simply.
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So that's how he portrays his mother.
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That is not going to work for most of us, but it will work for this one individual, so So this is how he pictures his mother.
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On the table next to the mother, you see an apple.
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Here it's pictured as a red apple, but perhaps you like green apples or you like gold apples.
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So maybe you picture a different apple on the table.
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If your mother really likes apples, you might picture your mother eating that apple.
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Anything that makes that image more salient and more specific to your experiences and your memories.
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the apple you have that cup of coffee.
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Remember you have to pick up coffee on your way to your 9 a.m meeting.
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I want you to notice something about that cup of coffee.
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That cup of coffee is in an on-the-go cup and there's a reason for that.
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The reason is that when I have my coffee I never ever sit down at a table
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and have a cup of coffee.
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I'm always running from one place to another and I have the on-the-go cup in my hand.
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That's salient to me.
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My husband on the other hands, sits down at the kitchen table and has his cup of coffee in his mug every single morning.
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His image would be different.
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His coffee would be in his mug because that's a very easy image for him to call to mind.
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The final thing you had to remember was that last night you had to change your network password to the word blossom.
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That seems like it should be easy to picture.
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Blossoms, fairly It's really simple.
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You could picture a bouquet of flowers.
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You could picture a garden.
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You could picture many, many different things, tulips, roses.
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But how do you remember that the word you need to retrieve is blossom?
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Not bouquet, not tulips, not garden.
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It's blossom.
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Well, this is how I would do it.
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I associate the word blossom most strongly with the cherry blossoms that bloom in Washington, D.C.
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That's just the strongest memory of that word to me.
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So that's what I imagine.
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Someone else may be very different.
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So, as you can see, you can take several very, very different pieces of information, combine them into one image,
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and make those items much easier for you to remember.
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So now, instead of remembering that you have to do these five things throughout the course of your day, you have one image.
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And when you visualize that in your mind, it calls to mind these five different things that you must do throughout your day.
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Now, let's move on to another technique.
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And the reason I present these techniques together is because very often we teach them together.
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We have a treatment protocol where we teach patients with MS
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and patients who have traumatic brain injury to use these techniques in their daily life.
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The second technique is context.
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Context refers to what comes before or follows a word.
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So if I need to remember the word house, going back to our previous example, I might say the old house on the hill was charming.
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I've enriched my memory for that word by providing more semantic meaning to it.
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It's old, it's charming, and it's up on a hill.
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It's a much richer memory for me now.
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Just like imagery, you can do this with extremely unrelated material.
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So now let's use another daily life example.
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Let's say that you're running to the store and you have to pick up string beans, hot sauce and a mop.
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Three completely unrelated items located in different parts of the store that have very different uses.
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How might you remember this?
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How might you put this into a context?
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What you could create is a mini story where a man walks into a restaurant, he orders string beans with hot sauce on it,
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proceeds to get ill, and the busboy has to come over with a mop.
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It's a little bit crazy, not likely to see it in your everyday life,
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however, that little bit of eccentricity makes it easier for you to remember it.
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So the true power of context comes when you combine it with the imagery.
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And I'm going to show you how to do that now.
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So you have your little story of the man in the restaurant ordering the string beans and the hot sauce.
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Let's create a mental image around that story.
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Your image might be a static picture because that's how you think.
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So you have a picture in your mind of a young man sitting in a restaurant
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and he has string beans in front of him with hot sauce on top, and maybe you have the busboy off to the right holding
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the broom with his hand on his hip waiting for that man to get sick.
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So that's one image if you like to do it in an image format.
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Someone else may think more in a movie reel.
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Perhaps someone else would envision the man walking into the restaurant, sitting down, ordering his hot sauce and his string beans, and then he sees him get ill.
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He sees the waiter come over and clean up the mess.
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way it works, but you have to do it in a manner that works best for you.
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So at Kessler Foundation, we've been doing this research in traumatic brain injury and multiple sclerosis.
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We teach these two techniques in a 10 session treatment protocol.
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It's five sessions per week for two weeks.
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And what we find after treatment is a significant improvement in someone's memory abilities.
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On our paper and pencil tests of memory functioning, where we ask patients to remember a list of words,
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they do substantially better after treatment than they do before.
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But more importantly, these patients are reporting that their memories in daily life are better.
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They're able to apply these techniques to their daily life.
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Their memory dysfunction is less impactful on their daily life.
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They're able to participate in society.
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They're able to manage their finances.
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They want to pursue meaningful employment, which they weren't able to do beforehand because these memory difficulties can be so debilitating.
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So that's a tremendous finding.
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Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, depending on your background,
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we also see that the brain changes how it's learning and remembering information in only 10 sessions across five weeks.
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We're changing how the brain is working, and that's a pretty amazing finding.
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So on the left side of the screen, you see brain function when somebody is learning information before treatment.
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Just normal learning.
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On the right side of the screen, you see the brain of someone learning information after treatment.
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Those little red areas indicate areas of brain activation.
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Those are areas where the brain is active when it's learning information.
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So what we see is significantly more activity after someone learns how to use these techniques than before.
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And this was a monumental finding, that we're actually able to change brain function in such a short period of time.
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Now, we've shown that these techniques are helpful for persons who have multiple sclerosis, persons who have traumatic brain injury, and we have additional research on it ongoing.
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But what's important to everyone in here today is that these techniques are helpful to everyone.
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Everyone can use these techniques.
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They're very simple, but they require practice, a lot of practice.
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You don't necessarily need to go to therapy to learn the techniques.
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You can simply start to visualize things.
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Start with one item, and then make it two items, three items.
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Bounce your ideas off your significant other.
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The way we teach the techniques is we ask people to visualize.
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That's how we start.
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We give them a story and we ask them to visualize.
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They communicate their images to us, and we provide feedback.
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We tell them how they might visualize better in a manner that might be more memorable for them.
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And we do the same with context.
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So you can do this at home and you can work with somebody else
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to try to improve your ability to visualize information and therefore remember information.
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The message I want you to take home with you today is that memory is not static.
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We can improve it with effort, but it takes effort.
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And like everything else, it takes practice.
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Practice, practice, practice.
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So I'd encourage you to try these techniques, and I hope that you like what you see.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, learners will explore effective techniques for enhancing memory and learning, as presented in the TEDx talk by Nancy D. Chiaravalloti. By understanding the stages of memory—encoding, consolidation, and retrieval—students will practice vital English skills through shadow speech exercises. These techniques will help improve their ability to absorb new information and retrieve it when needed, ultimately enhancing their overall communication skills.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Memory failures - instances where we forget information we had previously learned.
- Encoding - the process of learning new information.
- Consolidation - the stabilization of a memory after learning.
- Retrieval - accessing the stored information when needed.
- Imagery - creating mental images to remember ideas better.
- Verbal memory networks - areas of the brain responsible for processing spoken or written words.
- Visual-spatial memory system - areas of the brain involved in processing visual information and the spatial orientation of objects.
- Daily life learning - the continuous absorption of new information through everyday experiences.
Practice Tips
To effectively use the shadowing technique with this video, learners should consider the following tips:
- Start Slow: Begin by watching the video at a slower speed, if available. This allows you to grasp the content and the pronunciation of new vocabulary without feeling rushed.
- Repeat Phrases: As you listen to Nancy D. Chiaravalloti, pause after each key point. Repeat her phrases aloud to practice your pronunciation and intonation, focusing particularly on the vocabulary listed above.
- Visualize as You Speak: Utilize the imagery technique discussed in the talk. As you shadow the speech, create mental images related to the vocabulary and concepts being presented to reinforce your memory.
- Record Yourself: Use a recording device to capture your shadowing attempts. Listen back to evaluate your fluency and the clarity of your pronunciation, adjusting your approach as necessary.
- Engage Actively: Treat this practice as a conversation. Respond verbally to the points made in the talk as if you were engaging with Nancy, which helps build confidence in your speaking abilities.
With consistent practice using these strategies on a shadowing site, learners can significantly enhance their language retention and improve their speaking skills, preparing them for real-world conversational settings.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.
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