Where You Memorize Affects What You Remember

You ever study for an exam for hours at the library, certain you know your stuff, only to choke in the exam room?

You may have been the victim of a severe context shift.

Context when dealing with memory, is essentially the brains way of connecting ideas (in this case words) with its environment.

We notice context most in academics when we study hard for a test, only to get into the classroom and completely forget what we learn. Then we we get back to our room, suddenly all the answers come flooding back to us. We connected that information for the test to the context of our bedroom or wherever we studied. The same things happens with lines. We had them at home, but when we get to the rehearsal space, poof, they’re gone.

What happens is we subconsciously link certain lines to specifics areas in our rooms. Its like a real life memory palace. When you get stuck on a word for a line, you look at the window sill and there’s the word, waiting on that window sill. We do this so subtlety we hardly notice it. Then when we get to rehearsal, that specific window sill isn’t there, and so that word is left at home and we go up on our line.

By instituting a change in context during the memorization process, we create another redundant pathway to our lines, and thus mastery is further solidified.