An Experiment On Memory Retention

I'm busy preparing for my new job these days, a job I'll start in less than a week. Other than organizing and packing eight and a half year's worth of office crap and moving it from one building to another in some semblance of planned chaos, preparation requires only one thing: STUDY.

My company sells nearly 3000 products, not counting the ones sold at other sites globally, and I will have to know or be able to retrieve obscure facts about nearly every one of them at a moment's notice to help the customers. The one best way to do this is to read and be able to regurgitate the product literature, especially the tome-like company handbook that we distribute to customers.

It's over a thousand pages long.

I have one of the worst memories of anyone I know, at least for common day-to-day stuff. If I have to shop for more than three things in one trip, I'd better write a list or I'll have hell to pay from my lovely wife, who never ceases to remind me of my particular handicap, especially if I go to the store for cheese and come back with four bags of not-cheese groceries. My memory is better for work-related topics, but not exactly stellar, and though my long years of developing products has given me a strong basis of wisdom to grow from, it is still a daunting task to absorb so much product data.

I was thinking about this tonight as I pulled out my company handbook, when my wife proudly exclaimed that she had just finished the 759th (and last) page of the final book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Then it occurred to me how one might better be able to retain large amounts of data: Fiction.

Children's books do it all the time – teach lessons by incorporating them into the text and pictures of a fiction book.

I told my fantastic idea to my wife, and she immediately scoffed at the idea. "An adult ought to be able to study information without having to have it in story form." But I wonder. I can recall exquisite details about nearly every book of fiction I have ever read. It seems most any Harry Potter fan out there can do the same. Just ask one what Lord Voldemort's real name is, the name of the spell that scares away the Dementors, or who Mrs. Norris is.

So I am devising a test, and I'm wondering what you think of it. As a writer of fiction, I imagine I could convert your average textbook chapter into a reasonable story that contains the same facts. Of course it would be much longer in order to accommodate all the data plus a tolerable plot and dialogue, but I'd be willing to read extra if I was sure it would help me retain the info. My test would have one group of volunteers read a couple textbook pages, and I would have another test group read a work of fiction which contains the same information plus some sort of reasonable plotline. Sure, it wouldn't be able to compete with J.K. Rowling, but I'd bet that incorporating the data this way would allow it to be better processed in our brains. I'd then test the volunteers on what they read just after the reading, a day after, and a week after, to determine the retention rate. I'd put my money on the fiction-readers.

Do you agree? Would you volunteer for this test?


Image taken from HERE.