By: Joshua Stanley
Studying for classes or a test can be stressful at times, and prevent you from fully understanding the full material. Even when you prepare for a big exam you may not remember everything you studied and that can lead to an unwanted grade. A way to make your studying easier is by relating words or information to survival value. Doing this will make studying more effective because it taps into how human memory naturally works.
Our brains are wired to prioritise information that seems important for survival, so when something feels relevant to staying alive or solving real-life problems, the brain processes it more deeply and remembers it better. For example, instead of trying to memorize vocabulary or facts you can ask yourself how that information might help you in a real life situation, that way the information comes easier to remember because you related it to a real world experience. Say you were studying biology terms, you should think about how knowing them could help you identify or understand an illness.
In school, having a mindset of “why would this matter if I had to rely on it?” will help because, when you connect new information to meaningful or important ideas like survival, you’re not just memorizing; you’re actually understanding and organizing the material. That deeper level of processing makes it much easier to remember.
Everybody that has gone through at least their high school years has definitely had a thought or conversation wondering about why they are learning about something that will not help them in the real world. You ever realised how in some classes you feel like you understand way more compared to other classes. For example in high school, I felt like I understood way more in my economics and my financial aid classes compared to my English or history classes because in those classes I was learning about supply and demand, and how to deal with loans. The classes that had more relevancy to the real world were the classes I had the most success in because of the information had survival value.
(1) When words are processed for their fitness-relevance, they remember better than when they are processed for non-fitness issues; the survival processing advantage. In the present research, we investigated memory performance as a function of the level of relevance of words to survival issues. In study 1, a sample of French adults had to rate 732 words on the survival problems of “avoiding predators”, “avoiding contamination” or “finding food and water”. Three experiments were then conducted using the collected ratings to investigate whether the survival processing advantage in memory was moderated by the relation between relevance ratings. Words of high survival relevance were recalled better when encoded either for survival or for pleasantness.
The evidence from those studies show that your memory is in fact more efficient when relating the information to survival value. Relevancy is a strong tool for memory, if it’s relevant to you or your current situation you’re more likely to recall it if need be. That also applies to this technique, connecting the information to your relevant life will make it easier to remember because since it’s relevant it has more value to you so it’s less likely to be forgotten.
(2) This survival processing effect has been explained by selective tuning of human memory during evolution to process and retain information specifically relevant for survival. Our data demonstrate that the survival memory advantage indeed relies on the capacity-limited central stage of cognitive processing. Thus, rating words in the context of a survival scenario involves central processing resources to a greater amount than rating words in a nonsurvival control condition. We discuss implications for theories of the survival processing effect.
These results prove that just putting yours words in a survival scenario makes your brain go through a deeper faze of processing of that information, which makes your thoughts more relevant to you.
(3) Previous work in our laboratory has shown that human memory may be specially tuned to retain information processed in terms of its survival relevance. A few seconds of survival processing in an incidental learning context can produce recall levels greater than most, if not all, known encoding procedures. Survival processing produced the best recall, despite the fact that pleasantness ratings of words in a categorised list has long been considered a “gold standard” for enhancing free recall.
I can agree with the claim that survival processing is the best way to recall because of my personal experience; I often times find my self remembering more information when the topic is to some importance to my current life.
(4) Forty-eight university students completed a free recall task using words rated for their relevance to two survival-related dimensions: obtaining food and avoiding death. Results showed that high-survival-value words were recalled significantly better than neutral words across both dimensions, demonstrating that intrinsic semantic properties can engage adaptive memory mechanisms. These finding extend traditional theories that emphasise contextual survival scenarios as necessary triggers for the mnemonic advantage, suggesting that survival processing can also operate as a semantic feature of stimuli.
These experiments show that making words have survival value is reliable, and it actual works. Using this as a method for you school or even just as a mindset in your classes can help you stay more untuned with your material and find school to be easy.
(5) Processing items for their relevance to survival improves recall for those items relative to numerous other deep processing encoding techniques. Perhaps related, placing individuals in a mortality salient state has also been shown to enhance retention of items encoded after the morality salience manipulation
Another related method to survival value is shown to have similar results. They both are seen as a way to manipulate yourself into making information seem more important to you that way it holds more value which makes it easier to remember. You can think of it as a dresser for cloths; Say you have a drawer full of shirts, the drawers represent your brain and the shirts inside represent your memorise. When you open the drawers you see the folded shirts at the top first because they have more value to you so you wear those more often, then there are the forgotten shirts at the bottom that are nearly never worn. When the information has higher survival value to you, they are the first thing you see when you open your drawer. That’s the value in making words have survival value.
- Bonin, P., Thiebaut, G. & Méot, A. Ratings of survival-related dimensions for a set of 732 words, their relationships with other psycholinguistic variables and memory performance. Curr Psychol 43, 8200–8218 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04979-2
- Kroneisen, M., Erdfelder, E., Groß, R.M. et al. Survival processing occupies the central bottleneck of cognitive processing: A psychological refractory period analysis. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 274–282 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02340-z
- James S. Nairne, Josefa N.S. Pandeirada Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, 703 Third Street, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USAReceived 2 April 2008, Revised 5 June 2008, Available online 21 July 2008.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749596X08000545
- Zerpa, A. E., & Alonso, M. A. (2026). Beyond the Grasslands: Memory Advantages from Intrinsic Survival-Value Stimuli. Digital.CSIC. http://doi.org/10.20350/DIGITALCSIC/18171
- Burns, D. J., Hart, J., Kramer, M. E., & Burns, A. D. (2014). Dying to remember, remembering to survive: Mortality salience and survival processing. Memory, 22(1), 36–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2013.788660