How We Memorize

After we talked in class today about the different ways that your body helps you to remember your lines I decided to do some research. I found this article about a couple of Psychology researchers who studied the ways that actors remember lines to get an insight into the workings of memory. They found that when we are learning lines we're using pretty much all of our brain's methods of learning something and also that repetition seems to be the least effective and least used of line learning methods. It seems that we are able to learn our lines because we do character work. The brain works best at memorizing when it is aiming to remember the overall concept and meaning. Something clicked with me when I read that and I suddenly realized why I sucked at Algebra II in high school, if you can't understand the meaning behind something you're going to have a lot more trouble memorizing the exact words, or in the case of Algebra formulas. I hadn't thought about the fact that I always learned my lines better after doing background character work but it is absolutely true. The scientists who did this project went on to do experiments in order to prove their points even further, I've attached the link to the article below so you can check it out if you're interested.

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/feb/20/health/he-acting20