Psychology in Everyday Life: The Psych Files Michael Britt

It's hard to remember names - here's how to do it. You'll use your imagination and some weird imagery - but this works. Here's another great use of mnemonics. I'll give you a bunch of people's names and describe the images I created to help me remember them. Give your brain a little room to roam and put it to practical use. Also, I look at recent research that provides yet another reason why names are hard to remember.

Here is part 2 of my interview with author and actor Jared Kelner. In this episode he tells how he uses the DSM (Diagnotic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in his work as an actor. We also talk a little more about his use of mnemonic devices to memorize lines. 

You have no doubt asked yourself this question after watching a play: "How did those actors memorize all those lines?". In previous episodes of The Psych Files I have discussed a few of the techniques actors use to do this, but on this episode I have an interview with a professional actor, Jared Kelner, who wrote a fascinating book exactly on this topic. It's called, naturally, "Line?". If you're interested in psychology, memory, and how actors accomplish the amazing feat of memorization - especially for long plays containing many many lines (perhaps for a Shakespearean play). Here are the answers. 

You've probably heard about these Brain Training games. Do they really help you keep your mind sharp? Will they prevent cognitive decline as you get older or will they slow the effects of Alzheimer's disease? In this episode I review some recent studies on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of these popular games.

Another of my episodes on mnemonic techniques you can use for just about any purpose. I recently discovered a pegword system in a great book called, "Line?". It's a book for actors that was written by a memory expert like myself, Jared Kelner. Check out his book on Amazon. In this episode I demonstrate how this memory tool works and how an actor might apply it to memorize a famous speech from Shakespeare's comedy, Twelfth Night. A very fun little system. I show how the system could be sued to memorize the firs t three lines of the speech, but it certainly could be used to remember the entire speech.

Might you be able to rid yourself of an illness by "turning back the clock"? That is, by immersing yourself in a time in your life when you were not ill? We know that thinking about things in a positive way - which we sometimes call "reframing" can make us feel and act differently, and we know that the "placebo effect" is real, but how far can these ideas be taken Psychology has always struggled to separate itself from those who would "borrow" good ideas and take them too far or twist them in ways that promise people too much. We're now more sensitive than ever about how psychological research is conducted and there are a lot of questions about a proposed new study by Ellen Langer that seems to be skirting some serious ethical issues in order to carry out a study with cancer patients - a study that could be done much less elaborately than is planned. Is this groundbreaking research, or as James Coyne suggests, quackery? We'll find out what's going on in this episode of The Psych Files. And by the way, what the heck is the nocebo effect? We find out.