Many students believe they don’t do well academically because they were “born with a bad memory”.

I’ve always believed, however, that memory ability depends in large part upon what strategies are being used. And since strategies are things that can be taught, a bad memory can easily be improved and good memory can be made great.

Here’s a nice study that shows an individuals’ power of memory depend largely on what strategy they use. The study uses a fairly new technology called fMRI (functional MRI) that reveals in real time which brain regions are being used.

“From brain imaging data, we were able to find a significant correlation between different learning strategies and brain activity,” said Brenda Kirchhoff of Washington University. “We were excited to see that differences in brain activity patterns between people could be explained in part by differences in learning strategy use.

“One very interesting aspect of these findings is how they reveal that not all of us memorize information in the same way. Differences in memorization strategies emerge both behaviorally and in brain activity patterns,” said Randy Buckner, a professor at Harvard University and researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.