One of the stories that Annie Murphy Paul tells in her book The Extended Mind is a technique that actors use to help them memorize their lines.
What they do is wait until that particular scene has been blocked – where their motion on stage has been mapped out so they know what they’re doing with their body. Once they’ve got a sense for their movements, that’s when they start to connect their lines to those movements and to the objects that they’re interacting with.
That merging of physical movement with lines to remember is an example of what researchers call The Enactment Effect, which engages two types of memory at the same time.
First of all, you get access to procedural memory, which is all about how to do something, like how to ride a bike, for example, or how to move through space as a actor.
You also get access to declarative memory, which is about remembering specific pieces of information (in this case the lines that you need to say out loud).
Making use of the enactment effect isn’t just for actors. It’s been shown to work well for students too. Incorporating physical motion as a learning tool (thereby engaging procedural memory) led to 76% retention, compared to just 37% when only using declarative memory.
The enactment effect lives within the broader category of embodied cognition, which is one of the topics that Annie Murphy Paul explores in her book, and I think there are some interesting connections between the enactment effect and the skill that we focus on here, the skill of visual thinking.
What we do is make marks on the page that help us remember a complex set of ideas or think through a challenging problem or present an interesting topic. When used as a presentation tool, there’s something similar between visual thinking and the enactment effect: the ability to not feel the pressure to memorize the entirety of a speech that you’re about to give, but instead get that speech into your body so that you can access it through procedural memory and not just declarative memory alone.
So with the enactment effect, thinking about actors in particular, the lines live in your body.
With visual thinking, the ideas live in your hand just as much as they live in your head.
There’s something really refreshing and powerful about that idea, whether you’re working to remember something that you just want to apply to your own life, or there’s something that you actively need to present to others.
You can take the pressure off of what Annie Murphy Paul would call the brain-bound experience of just trying to remember everything in your head, and instead you can bring that into your body. That way, rather than just reviewing important ideas, you actively recreate them. You sketch them out from memory in your notebook, on the whiteboard, or on your tablet.
We know from the book Make It Stick that the act of retrieval is a much more powerful learning activity than the act of review. Here we’re adding another layer of nuance. Instead of just relying on your declarative memory when you’re retrieving that information, bring in some procedural memory as well as you sketch out whatever it is that you’re reminding yourself of or reminding others of.
In contrast to actors, whose goal is to deliver the lines precisely as they were learned, here I encourage you to not stick to the script. Don’t try to repeat things exactly as you did last time. Instead, use that recreation as an opportunity to reflect on the model in the moment, in the current context, for this current audience. Use your procedural memory to get the core ideas down, but then meet the moment where it is and give yourself the opportunity for something new to come from those core ideas.
For other ways to think outside of the brain, go pick up Annie Murphy Paul’s book The Extended Mind. If you’ve already read it and want to see a visual summary, I’ve got a video on that.
And if you’re interested in developing your visual thinking skills as a way to tap into the enactment effect and engage both procedural memory and declarative memory when you’re working to learn something new or present some important ideas to others, check out our programs Sketch Instinct (for lifelong learners), Sketch Strategy (for organizations and leaders), and Sketch Ed. (for schools and teachers).
Cheers,
-Doug