#depth of processing

Highly intelligent, highly intense, highly sensitive person

First of all, to even begin to explore this topic (without stumbling over our own resistance to it), we have to get over the sticking point so many of us have about using the term “gifted” (as I’ve covered amply in a previous post). Let’s drop all the culturally indoctrinated stigma, because of a general dislike or suspicion of the label; stop wasting any more time in our process of…

We HSPs need our solitude. It's a scientific fact. But we also need connection. The secret here is that we crave connection, but only a specific kind of connection. And that connection is vital to our happiness and growth.

Read just how important emotional connection is to us:

The curve of forgetting (Hermann Ebbinghaus) shows that the amount of information retained in memory is lost progressively over time.

Perception => Sensory Memory => Working / Short-term Memory

We receive massive amounts of input from our senses. Perception is about filtering this input through the recognition of small details including motion, colours, faces, places, and objects.

Through various types of encoding

Acoustic - Echoic memory, sounds rehearsed to facilitate remembering.

Visual / spatial - Iconic memory often has strong emotional content.

Tactile - the feel of an object [How does this break down? Weight / pressure, motion, texture, temperature, and what about its smell, taste.]

Semantic / verbal -  Sensory input that has a particular meaning, applied to a particular context. [Words received through auditory & visual stimuli?]

5-9 items or chunks can be retained in working Memory (George Miller)

Working / Short-term Memory => Long term memory (2 types)

New information can be remembered if anchored by associating it with existing information. The more familiar and personal the association the easier and more accurate the recall. The most vivid memories are emotional events, but these are often narrowly focused, with peripheral details forgotten. Memory is not a neutral recording device, it is related to our society and background (Fredric Bartlett). We reshape details to something more familiar to us when remembering.

Memories and neural connections are mutually interconnected in extremely complex ways. Each memory is embedded in many connections, and each connection is involved in several memories. A single memory may involve simultaneously activating several different groups of neurons in completely different parts of the brain and multiple memories may be encoded within a single neural network, by different patterns of connections.

Associating words with images provides additional ways of remembering, establishing spatial relationships also help to order and recollect memories.

Procedural /implicit /unconscious memory of skills and how to do things, use objects or move the body. Acquired through repetition and practice, these behaviours become so deeply embedded that we are no longer aware of them. Once learned, they allow us to carry out ordinary motor actions more or less automatically. Previous experiences help the performance of a task without explicit and conscious awareness of them.

Declarative /explicit /conscious memory of facts and events, which consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved.  It can be further sub-divided into Semantic and Episodic Memories (Endel Tulving) - memories of shared facts versus those of personal biography.

Long Term Memory => Consolidation => Retrieval => re-Consolidation

Practice reinforces individual memories, but does not strenghten the ability to memorise in general (William James).

The brain organizes and reorganizes itself in response to new experiences, creating new memories. As new experiences accumulate, the brain creates more and more connections and pathways, re-routing connections and re-arranging its organization. The repeated firing of certain cells in a certain order strengthen these connections making it easier to repeat this firing later on. This Neural plasticity is the foundation of memory and learning.

Retrieval cues helps us to access memories again which can be both internal or external states.

Sleep is important in improving the consolidation of information in memory, and activation patterns in the sleeping brain, which mirror those recorded during the learning of tasks from the previous day, suggest that new memories may be solidified through such reactivation and rehearsal.

Memory re-consolidation is the process of previously consolidated memories being recalled and actively consolidated all over again, in order to maintain, strengthen and modify memories, either naturally through reflection, or through deliberate recall. This is needed for memories to last for many years, depending on the depth of the initial processing. Retrievals can take place at increasing intervals. This spaced repetition (Ebbinghaus) is familiar in the way that “cramming” for an exam is not as effective as studying at intervals over a much longer span of time.

The very act of re-consolidation, though, may change the initial memory. The memory may become associated with new emotional or environmental conditions or subsequently acquired knowledge, and expectations.

Let’s play a game. Memorize the following passage, and then continue to read. On your honor, do not scroll back up to this phrase when asked to recall it. Ready?

The phrase is “I could be in love again, if you’d just let me in.”

Sometimes, I joke about the “Law of Players”, stating that players will do exactly what you do not expect them to do whenever you least expect them to do so, and couple that passage with the advice that the best possible defense is to guide the players to the best of your ability. A potential way of performing this feat is by tricking them into remembering certain things more than others, thereby assigning more value to that decision. This is a phenomenon known as Depth of Processing.

This one is rather hard to explain, so I am going to dive directly into the definition and elaborate thereafter. Depth of Processing is a phenomenon of memory in which information that is analyzed deeply is better recalled than information that is analyzed superficially. 

The key determining factors as to how deeply information is processed are the distinctiveness of the information, the relevance of the information, and the degree of elaboration on the information. A general combination of all three of these elements will lead to effectively memorable information, and therefore the most easily recalled information.

Distinctiveness refers to the uniqueness of the information relative to other information in the surrounding perception and previous experiences. Relevance refers to the degree that information is deemed to be more important than any other information absorbed by the viewer. The degree of elaboration refers to the how much thought is required to both interpret and understand the information given.

If I were to ask you to play Epona’s Song in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, anyone that has ever touched Ocarina of Time would know immediately the C-Buttons to press to summon that horse. The reason being every single time you wanted the horse, you had to actively interact with the right buttons.

Alternatively, if I were to ask exactly how many rupees are required to buy the Hylian Shield, it is less immediately recalled. It is equally important, as the shield is required for the duration of the game after purchasing it, but less memorable as the player has less interaction with the decision to buy it, simply knowing that they need it. Most players would also state that the Hylian Shield can also be obtained from the Kakariko Village graveyard. This is a more easily recalled experience, because it again requires the player to analyze the situation of how to obtain the shield.

Here are some examples for bringing this to tabletop:

Password: Often, I am engaged in games that require a level of subterfuge and secrecy, where the players are agents working for a cause. In this, they are required to remember a specific password or phrase to repeat back to an NPC to gain access to information.

For example, attempt to now recall the phrase at the beginning of this article, and repeat it to yourself. If you can, congratulations! You can continue into the seedy brothel to investigate a murder. If you had to scroll back to check the phrase, it was for the simple reason that the phrase was meaningless to you.

It was the same as any words I might say followed by “Remember this!” to a player. As there is no relative importance put on how much they need to remember, when they need to remember it until, or the benefits of remembering it, the memory will be very “surface” and bounce directly off of the player.

Navigation: Now imagine instead of asking for a passphrase, I had asked thrown out the name of a town I wanted the player to visit. They would hear the name of that town, but without any repetition or depth of analysis on the town, it would be just another series of meaningless words. It would be easy to believe that the player would instead pick another town to visit, as they wouldn’t be able to place value on that memory.