Remembering the Future

If I had known this when I was in school I would have studied after the exams I bombed!

Another one from Psychology Today...

In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that in her land, "memory works both ways." Not only can the Queen remember things from the past, but she also remembers "things that happened the week after next." How much better would our lives be if we could live in the White Queen's kingdom, where our memory would work backwards and forewords?

Across nine experiments, Dr. Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, examined the idea that our brain has the ability to anticipate future experiences.

For example, we all know that rehearsing a set of words makes them easier to recall in the future, but what if the rehearsal occurs after the recall? In one of the studies, college students were given a list of words and after reading the list, were given a surprise recall test to see how many words they remembered. Next, a computer randomly selected some of the words on the list as practice words and the participants were asked to retype them several times.

The results of the study showed that the students were better at recalling the words on the surprise recall test that they were later given, at random, to practice. According to Bem, practicing the words after the test somehow allowed the participants to "reach back in time to facilitate recall."

The example is a bit confusing but the entire article is interesting and worth a read.