> When tested later on their memories of the event, the person who verbally described the incident will be worse at later remembering or recognizing what actually happened. This is verbal overshadowing. Putting an experience into words can result in failures of memory about that experience, whether it be the memory of a person’s face, the color of an object, or the speed that a car was going.
> The idea that describing something in words can have a detrimental effect on our memory of it makes sense given that we use words to categorize.
I find this a little backwards. Describing something in words is a way to demonstrate our understanding of that thing. The fact that our memory is made worse by engaging in verbal description I feel like indicates that our memory and understanding of the experience was incomplete or incorrect in the first place. This seems completely antithetical to the Feynman technique.
> When tested later on their memories of the event, the person who verbally described the incident will be worse at later remembering or recognizing what actually happened. This is verbal overshadowing. Putting an experience into words can result in failures of memory about that experience, whether it be the memory of a person’s face, the color of an object, or the speed that a car was going.
> The idea that describing something in words can have a detrimental effect on our memory of it makes sense given that we use words to categorize.
I find this a little backwards. Describing something in words is a way to demonstrate our understanding of that thing. The fact that our memory is made worse by engaging in verbal description I feel like indicates that our memory and understanding of the experience was incomplete or incorrect in the first place. This seems completely antithetical to the Feynman technique.
It's more productive to store the raw experience memory and draw understanding from it over time later.