Most of us imagine that we read one word at a time from left to right along the page. The situation is in fact a little more complex than that. The physiology of the eye is one factor that can and does limit how fast we read.
Our eyes have a lens which focuses light onto the retina. For text held at arms length, we only see about four or five letters in perfect focus. This represents light falling on the fovea at the centre of the retina. Light falling further away from this central point gets ever more blurry. However, our brains are capable of correcting this blurriness so that our whole visual field appears to be in focus. Our eyes are capable of recognising images flashed onto a screen for a very short period of time. We can recognise four words flashed onto a screen for a mere 1/500 seconds. However, we can only process about ten separate images a second. This is why TV and film which plays at 24 frames a second seems continuous to us. It is faster than our eyes can process. Some animals such as birds of prey can process many more than 24 images per second. For them, TV and film would look like a sequence of still images.
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Strings of numbers are generally difficult to recall. Fortunately, most people now store phone numbers on their mobile phones so there is no need to recall them. However, that means that we have fallen out of the habit of recalling numbers.
It is a good habit to practise memorising sequences of numbers. If you lose your phone it might just save your life! We are more likely to remember numbers if they can be made meaningful in some way. Meaningful numbers might be, for example, your birthday or those of your friends and family, perhaps the number of your house or the year your favourite team won the FA Cup. If you can incorporate these meaningful numbers into the sequence you want to recall, that will make it easier. For other numbers that don’t have any obvious meaning, you can link numbers to images. Do this by converting a number to letters. 23 would be BC (B being the second letter of the alphabet, C being the third). This might make you picture Bill Clinton. You are more likely to remember the image of a person you know or a famous person than a number. You can do the same for all numbers 00 - 99 and then link these images together to remember sequences of numbers. You are more likely to recall information if it is meaningful to you in some way. One illustration of this is the effect known as the baker / Baker paradox. You are more likely to recall someone whose profession is a baker than someone whose name is Baker, even though the word is the same in both cases.
When you think of a baker you are likely to think of bread, the smell and taste of it, your local bakery, your favourite sandwich, feeding ducks in a pond with bread and so on. This web of associations ensures that you are likely to remember the profession. Contrast that with the person whose name is Baker. In this case there are no immediate associations. The more associations with the information that you want to recall, the more likely you are to remember it. So if when you meet someone, you associate their name to information that you are already familiar with, you will be more likely to remember it. If you meet someone whose name is Baker, link it to all of the associations that you would have when you think of a bakery. |
AuthorThe Oxford Centre for the Mind Archives
June 2016
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