The strength of memory codes, and thus the ease with which they can be found, is a function largely of repetition.
Simply speaking, the more often you experience something (a word, an event, a person, whatever), the stronger and more easily recalled your memory for that thing will be.
This is why the most basic memory strategy — the simplest, and the first learned — is rote repetition.
Repetition is how we hold items in working memory, that is, “in mind”. When we are told a phone number and have to remember it long enough to either dial it or write it down, most of us repeat it frantically.
Spaced repetition — repetition at intervals of time — is how we cement most of our memory codes in our long-term memory store. If you make no deliberate attempt to learn a phone number, yet use it often, you will inevitably come to know it (how many repetitions that will take is a matter of individual variability).
But most of us come to realize that repetition is not, on its own, the most effective strategy, and when we deliberately wish to learn something, we generally incorporate other, more elaborate, strategies.
Why do we do that? If memory codes are strengthened by repetition, why isn’t it enough to simply repeat?
Well, it is. Repetition IS enough. But it’s boring. That’s point one.
Point two is that making memory codes more easily found (which is the main point) is not solely achieved by making the memory codes (the ways you use to remember something) stronger.
Also important is making lots of connections.
Memory codes are held in a network. We find a particular one by following a trail of linked codes. Clearly, the more trails lead to the code you’re looking for, the more likely you are to find it.
Elaborative strategies — mnemonic strategies, organizational strategies — work on this aspect. They are designed to increase the number of links (connections) a memory code has.
