Use Active Experiencing to Improve Your Learning Abilities

A study carried out by two US psychologists suggests that people would be able to remember much more information if they learned like actors.

Surely you've asked yourselves at least once how come actors are able to remember hundreds of lines which make up a play.

Most people imagine that learning a script involves hours, days, or even months of rote memorization. But actors often don't consciously try to memorize lines at all.

And still, how do they succeed in remembering so much information? Could persons who are not actors use this ability as well?

These are the questions answered by psychologists Helga Noice and Tony Noice.

According to the researchers, the actors' secret lies in their ability to focus on the meaning of words rather than on words in the script. To get inside the character, an actor will break a script down into a series of logically connected "beats" or intentions.

Good actors don't think about their lines, but feel their character's intention in reaction to what the other actors do, causing their lines to come spontaneously and naturally

The key, the researchers have found, is a process called active experiencing, which they say uses "all physical, mental, and emotional channels to communicate the meaning of material to another person."

It is a principle that can be applied off-stage as well as on. For example, students who studied material by imagining conveying its meaning to somebody else who needed the information showed higher retention than those who tried to memorize the material by rote.

Some of the Noices' findings confirm those of other researchers on memory. Memory is heavily reliant on emotion, action, and perception. In their work with actors, the Noices' have found, for example, that memory is aided by physical movement.