“Survival of the fittest” is that old saying that goes on to describe that whoever comes out on top is guaranteed to survive and thrive. Adaptation is what we have to do to ensure the best outcome for survival, and it is not always a physical obstacle. Sometimes our memory is the reason we are able to come up with the survival strategies to adapt to our surroundings. This is called the survival and adaptive value, also known as survival processing and adaptive memory. So, what is survival processing and adaptive memory? Why does this pertain to our everyday lives, and why is it so valuable? Well, we all like to survive and live on to the next day. And, we all adapt to new obstacles everyday, but how much of that would you believe stems from our memory? So is it really “survival of the fittest” or survival of the best memory?
Have you ever wondered why some teachers or professors will use real-world situations or concepts to explain certain topics? You could say that it’s because they aren’t great at explaining concepts in class, and had no better way to drive home a point. But in reality, they are using concrete examples to amplify your learning experience, make the lesson memorable, and fill in the gap between hard-to-grasp concepts and reality. So, what are concrete examples, really? Concrete examples are specific, real-life examples (or tasks) that help to illustrate an idea or concept (2). Concrete examples are an extremely powerful tool that will help turn abstract ideas into tangible concepts that are easier for students (or anyone) to grasp. There are multiple advantages to using concrete examples to supplement your studying and aid the learning process (5).
Have you ever told a story and had a fiend stop you in the middle and say ” wait, that is not what happened?” You are not the only one. Our memories are strong, yet they are also imperfect. When we remember something, we are not replaying a flawless, put in order video. Instead, we are reconstructing bits and pieces from our memory and some times we leave parts out. This is known as leveling.
Leveling is a type of memory distortion where people unconsciously leave out minor or less important details while remembering or retelling an event¹.For example, imagine your brain pressing the TL;DR (to long, don’t read) button when you try to recount a story. Let’s assume someone tells you about a wild weekend excursion where they met three individuals from various nations, tried a meal they couldn’t pronounce, and ended up traveling in a truck bed under the stars. You might relate it as: “They met a bunch of people and had some food and a crazy night.”
leveling is one of three memory distortions, the other two being sharpening and absorption. Sharpening emphasizes or exaggerates crucial aspects, while assimilation changes memories to meet our expectations, leveling is all about simplification²
When does it start?
Leveling begins in childhood. When children learn to recall and explain events, they frequently omit specifics and focus on the broad picture. This is not laziness; it is how cognitive development occurs. Our brains learn to prioritize relevance over completeness³. As we mature, this behavior becomes ingrained in how we store and access a wide range of information, from personal recollections to academic content. In fact, researchers believe leveling is a product of schema-based memory. Schemas are mental frameworks we use to understand the world. When something doesn’t fit a schema, we’re more likely to forget it or reshape it to fit our expectations⁴. In this way, leveling becomes a tool for our brain to make sense of complex, confusing life events.
My research
One of the most famous studies on memory and leveling comes from Frederic Bartlett’s 1932 experiment, The War of the Ghosts. In the study, British participants read a Native American folktale filled with unfamiliar cultural references. When asked to recall the story later, they tended to simplify it, leave out foreign elements, and change details to make it more familiar⁵.
This demonstrated that memory is not a perfect recording, but rather a reconstruction. Leveling helped participants remember and recount the tale more easily, but it also generated distortions.
How to use leveling to study
When you’re studying for a huge test or trying to remember knowledge from a lecture, your brain will naturally strive to simplify it. This can be useful—you could compress a lengthy paragraph into a brief summary that is simpler to recall. However, if you level too much, you risk missing out on important information.
Assume you’re studying psychology and learning about classical conditioning. If you remember that it contains dogs and bells but overlook the fact that the unconditioned stimulus and reaction are part of the main process, your knowledge will be incomplete.
According to cognitive research, students often level material in ways that hurt comprehension, especially when dealing with unfamiliar or complex topics⁶. In fact, when students (me as well) take notes, they frequently simplify too much, leaving out essential information that would otherwise help them appreciate the big picture.
Study smarter
Here are some tips to help study better ( Ive started to use some of these myself)
Review regularly. When you go back to your notes or readings, you’ll catch any details that your brain might’ve “leveled out” earlier.
Use self-explanation. Try teaching a concept to someone else. If you find you’re oversimplifying, revisit the material.
Create concrete examples. Just like in math or history classes, using specific real-world scenarios helps you remember more than just the gist.
test yourself. Practice questions that force you to recall deeper details, not just the broad strokes.
real world example of leveling while you’re learning
imagine a law student learning about the United States Supreme Court. Reading briefs, delivering oral arguments, collaborating, and writing opinions are all part of the process. However, after a few weeks, the student recalls it simply as “The Supreme Court decides big cases.” That’s leveling: they preserved the overall notion but removed the individual steps.
While the reduced approach may aid in general knowledge, it will not suffice to answer an exam question that requires the entire process. This demonstrates why understanding levels is especially beneficial for students: you can utilize simplification to your advantage if you know what the original concept looked like.
lets end this thing
Leveling is a memory shortcut that allows us to condense complex experiences, but it can also lead to forgetting or misinterpreting the finer details. From childhood to adulthood, our brains typically remove elements to make stories simpler to remember and share. However, when it comes to studying and learning, we must realize when we are oversimplifying.
Whether you’re studying for an exam or simply trying to comprehend new material, being conscious of levels allows you to become a more strategic learner. Consider this analogy: leveling is similar to film editing. If you remove the wrong scenes, the entire story may lose its meaning.
So, the next time you respond, “I kind of remember that,” take a moment to consider what your brain may have missed.
Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, PubMed
Loftus, E. F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind: A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning & Memory,PubMed
Fivush, R., & Nelson, K. (2004). Culture and language in the emergence of autobiographical memory. Psychological Science,SAGE Journals
Alba, J. W., & Hasher, L. (1983). Is memory schematic? Psychological Bulletin
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press. APA PsycNet
Kiewra, K. A. (1985). Investigating note-taking and review: A depth of processing alternative. Educational Psychologist,Taylor & Francis Online
Many people have said that you must go to college to get the “college experience,”
which would open you up to new opportunities and material that would help fulfill your dreams in life.
Over the years I have recognized this fantasy and replaced it with a more “real” outlook on college.
Deadlines lurking around every corner,
A new assignment posted every hour,
A forgotten project pushed to crunch time.
In short, the college experience has been extremely overwhelming and tough, but there is no reason to fear it because there are many ways in which you can drastically increase your attention ability.
We will look at a particular psychological concept in this paper, that can improve your cognition and daily functioning [1], and help you grasp the most important information for studying. This concept is known as selective attention, and it works as our brain’s built-in thought filtration system.
When you first enter college life becomes a whirlpool of lectures, assignments, quizzes, and exams. In the midst of all of that chaos you have to continuously attempt to retain large amounts of information for things such as a quiz, an essay, or an exam. Although there are many ways to go about remembering one of the techniques that can be used is Maintenance Rehearsal.
What is Maintenance rehearsal?
Maintenance rehearsal is pretty much as its name suggests. It is the process of repeatedly rehearsing information in a short-term memory without any meaningful processing or connections to existing knowledge” [1] The Atkinson and Shiffrin memory model describes it best as something that simply roams in your head till it is time to use it. An example of this includes things like remembering a phone number regardless of how bad you want to keep it in your head most likely after it’s served its purpose you won’t remember it much after [2]. This is part of the phonological loop and is seen as the first step which is taking verbal information in and keeping it in your head temporarily before it gets lost or is stored [3]. Along with that while preparing for a test normally one will repeat the information to retain it just long enough to pass the test, after that the knowledge is like it never existed.This skill is used by pretty much everyone at some point in their life but now more than ever you may find yourself needing it.
Being honest about college…. studying often feels like continuous highlighting of textbooks, thousands of lecture slides that all start to look the same, and magically hoping some of the needed information will be understood for the next day’s exam. The good news is that cognitive psychology has an amazing trick up its sleeve that can help you out and it’s something called the generation effect. By understanding the generation effect, it could make the difference between truly remembering the material long term and just memorizing the material for a test. At this level of study, you will be expected to learn new material and apply it to new learning so it’s important not just to memorize.
Just found out you have an exam coming up soon? Need a new way to study to keep your focus? There is a simple trick to help you instead of cramming and rereading the information for hours. It is called chunking! Chunking helps you break down course material into more manageable pieces to help you remember. We will be diving into how this works and how to help you study a lot smarter!
What is Chunking?
Chunking is a strategy where you take information and break it up into smaller pieces to help your brain remember the information.1 Chunking can help you remember things in smaller quantities instead of memorizing everything at once. Think about it when you were younger trying to remember your mom or dads phone number. You learned the phone number in chunks not all at once. Everyone uses chunking without even realizing it. Why not use it to get that good grade on your next exam.
If you’re a college freshman, I hate to break it to you but college level courses aren’t as easy as high-school classes.
Your high-school teachers spent weeks slowly covering basic concepts, making surface level information easy to learn
But college is different…
Professors break down complex topics at a fast pace, while expecting you to learn more in less time…
And from my experience as a college senior, most freshmen use inefficient study tactics that prevent them from gaining a deep understanding of class material.
If you spend hours upon hours rereading the same notes and highlighting texts, while your grades suffer…
Studying for college exams can be stressful and scary especially when you do not know what to study, or how to know what information or material you should be reviewing. Not knowing what to study or how to study can cause students to not get the best results from reviewing, or completely avoiding it altogether because it does not help. When studying do you ever think back to see if you can recall the information? Knowing what you will be able to recall is known as metamemory. Using metamemory you can estimate how well you will be able to remember something, or judge how well you will be able to bring it forward when that information is needed. Maybe sometimes you have studied, and when you are given the exam you cannot quite pull the information forward that you know is in there somewhere. This is also metamemory.
The beginning weeks of college can be a very stressful and overwhelming time. To cope with this our mind uses several strategies that we are not aware of. Visual imagery is just one of these. Visual imagery involves picturing things in your mind even if you are not looking directly at them (4). This can involve seeing something from the past or present. We have the ability to represent spatial patterns from memory (4). Simply put, if you experience visual images when answering questions, you are experiencing visual imagery. For example, throughout our entire collegiate career and life for that matter, but even more so in the first few weeks of our college experience, our mind is using the process of visual imagery to process the emotional and mental challenges that come with starting college. The first few weeks of college can be full of chaos as we meet multiple new people, attend new classes, try to remember every last thing on the syllabi, and try to navigate living on our own for the first time. Being able to create mental images such as a schedule that is jam packed allows us to associate those experiences with just a quick picture.
