Don't forget memory class at BYU

PROVO — Call it a given. At some point during Education Week at Brigham Young University, someone will realize they forgot their schedule in the last class and find themselves staring an acronym-laden map of BYU.

Was that next class at 1 p.m. or 1:30? Was it in the JSB, JKB or JFSB?

Fortunately for event attendees, BYU psychology professor Kenneth Higbee will again be doing his part to help people not only remember the names behind BYU's beloved abbreviations, but anything else that might come in handy for future reference.

For 36 years now, Higbee's course on improving memory has been a popular mainstay at BYU's annual Education Week, which starts Monday.

The hour-long window he has doesn't give much time for memory coaching, but he said the focus is to empower people to pursue memory improvement on their own.

"The main thing is people coming to realize that they are capable of remembering more and doing more with their minds than they thought they were," he said.

Higbee said there are many commonly held misconceptions about the foundation of a good memory.

"Memory is a learned skill," he said, "rather than you're stuck with a bad memory or blessed with a good one."

Most of the techniques he teaches are not new, but based on simple practices, some of which are thousands of years old, Higbee said.

His fascination with the human memory began as a teenager, Higbee said. The opportunity to make a career out of studying it arose shortly after he joined the BYU faculty in 1970, when Education Week organizers asked him to prepare the memory course.

The class was an instant success, and university officials asked him to turn it into a course at BYU. Higbee said there were no texts on the subject at the time that were both informative and intelligible, so he began researching his own. The result, "Your Memory: How It Works and How to Improve It," was first published in 1977 and is still in publication.

In his research, Higbee has found that the most common reason people seek to improve their memory is to better remember names. At the college level, studying and remembering facts for tests becomes the main reason, although remembering names is still a high priority, he said.