HELLO

WELCOME
 CHAPTER 6
THE MIND

Part 1: Reading Skills and Strategies

PRESENTER:
- Phạm Đức Triệu
- Nguyễn Thùy Trang
• Before you Read

Strategy
Previewing and Predicting
As you learned in Chapter 2 on page 28, before beginning to
read an article, it's helpful to preview it and predict what it
might be about. Try to figure out the topic and main ideas.
Then think about what associations or connections there are
between your life and the topic. Ask yourself: What do I
already know about this topic? This will improve your
comprehension.
1. Preview and predicting

• 1. look at the title. What the part pfthe mind will be

discussed in this article

• 2. Scan the article and look for these words:

psychologists, study, research. Do you think you will
get one point of view on the mind or several different
ones?
3. Is there something practical you might learn from this
reading? Where in the article do you find references to
mnemonics or memory tricks?

4. What is the earliest event in your life that you can remember
and approximately how old were you when it occurred?

5. Why do you suppose you can remember the event in

question 4?
2. Identifying synonyms

Vocabulary Synonym ?
1. Fashionable • Poor F stylist
2. Exceptional • Unusual T

3. Impressed • Sad F affect

4. Cooperate • Work with others T

5. Extraordinary • Normal F unusual

6. Memorized • Learned by heart T

7. Exclusive • Unique T
 2. Identifying synonyms
Vocabulary Synonym?
8. Novice • Beginner T

9. Intellectual skills
• Abilities of the mind T

10. Adequately • Badly F satisfactorily

11. Subordinate • Boss F Working with her

12. Insure • Guarantee T
13. Rare • Not very cooked T
14. Effortlessly • With difficultly
F Without difficultly
 • answers
To sum up 1
2
F
T

2. Identifying 3
4
F
T
synonyms 5 F
6 T
7 T
8 T
9 T
10 F
11 F
12 T
13 T
14 F
 READ
• Memory is one of the most important functions of the mind,
without our memories, we would have no identity and no
continuity from past to present to future. The following article is
about a mnemonist, a person with an extraordinary power to
remember. The title, A Memory for All Seasonings, includes a pun,
a form of humor dependable is for all seasons. Here the phrase is
changed to for all seasonings because this mnemonist happens to
be a waiter. A waiter serves food, and seasonings is another word
for spices used in food, such as salt, pepper, and curry.
A MEMORY FOR ALL SEASONINGS
 AFTER YOU READ
• Strategy
• Improving study Skills: Underlining and Marginal
Glossing John Conrad spoke of the importance of having
an organized mind for developing one's memory. In this
section, two skills will be presented to help you organize
materials for study: underlining and marginal glossing.
• 1. Underlining Material
• 2. Marginal Glossing
 AFTER YOU READ
3. Underlining and glossing
Example. The first paragraph
• One evening two years ago, Peter Poison a member of the
 Peter Polson psychology department at the University of Colorado, took
from University his son and daughter to dinner at Bananas, a fashionable
Colo. Psy. Dept, restaurant in Boulder. When the waiter took their orders,
saw a waiter at Poison noticed that the young man didn’t write anything
Bananas down. He just listened, made small talk, told them that his
Restaurant with
name was John Conrad, and left. Poison didn’t think this
an amazing
was exceptional: There were, after all, only three of them
memory. The
waiter was John at the table. Yet he found himself watching Conrad closely
Cornad when he returned to take the orders at a nearby table of
eight. Again the waiter listened, chatted, and wrote nothing
down. When he brought Poison and his children their
dinners, the professor couldn’t resist introducing himself
and telling Conrad that he’d been observing him.
Psychologists For decades, the common belief among psychologists
believe that memory was that memory was a fixed quantity; an exceptional
is a fixed quantity: memory, or a poor one, was something with which a
exceptional or poor person was born.

This point of view has come under attack in recent

years; expert memory is no longer universally
This view is
considered the exclusive gift of the genius, or the
contradicted, some
abnormal. “People with astonishing memory for
researchers
(Poision and pictures, musical scores, chess positions, business
Ericsson, ..) believe transactions, dramatic scripts, or faces are by no means
that memory will be unique,” wrote Cornell psychologist Ulric Neisser in
improved by Memory Observed (1981). “They may not even be very
training, and rare.” Some university researchers, including Poison and
exercised it Ericsson, go a step further than Neisser. They believe
regularly that there are no physiological differences at all between
the memory of a Shereshevskii or a Toscanini and that of
the average person. The only real difference, they
believe, is that Toscanini trained his memory, exercised
it regularly, and wanted to improve it.
 Like many people with his capacity to remember,
Toscanini may also have used memory tricks called
Toscanini may mnemonics. Shereshevskii, for example, employed a
use mnemonics technique known as loci. As soon as he heard a series
and of words, he mentally “distributed” them along
Shereshevskii Gorky Street in Moscow. If one of the words was
uses loci.Did the orange, he might visualize a man stepping on an
waiter at orange at a precise location on the familiar street.
Bananas have
Later, in order to retrieve orange, he would take an
such a system?
imaginary walk down Gorky Street and see the
image from which it could easily be recalled. Did the
waiter at Bananas have such a system? What was his
secret?
Research
John Conrad would be the subject of Anders
associate Ericsson Ericsson’s second in-depth study of the
worked with machinations of memory. As a research associate at
Wiliam on a CamegieMellon University in Pittsburgh, Ericsson
person with an had spent the previous three years working with
average memory William Chase on an extensive study of Steve
– Faloon, and Faloon, an undergraduate whose memory and
after 20 months intellectual skills were considered average. When
working with Ericsson and Chase began testing Faloon, he could
Chase and remember no more than seven random digits after
Ericsson, Faloon hearing them spoken once. According to generally
was could accepted research, almost everyone is capable of
memorize and storing five to nine random digits in short-term
retrieve the 80 memory. After 20 months of working with Chase
digit and Ericsson and Ericsson, Faloon could memorize and retrieve
will study John 80 digits.
Conad's memory
4. Recalling information

1. The psychology professor discovered John Conrad’s incredible

ability to memorize …
a. in school
b. on a test
c. in a restaurant

2. Conrad agreed to let the professor study his memory because…

a. Conrad was interested in psychology
b. Conrad wanted to increase his income
c. Conrad needed to improve his memory
3. The famous Russian mnemonist Shereshevskii used a
memory trick called loci to remember objects by …
a. associating them with events in Russian history
b. imagining them placed along a street in Moscow
c. picturing each one in his mind in a afferent color

4. The memory trick used by Steve Faloon was the

association of certain numbers with …
a. running times
b. important dates
c. both of the above
5. Conrad had been …
a. a gifted student
b. a below-average student
c. an average student

6. Part of Conrad’s motivation for developing memory

tricks to aid him as a waiter was …
a. his desire to get his boss’s job
b. his great admiration for the headwaiter
c. his fear of not finding any work
7. Imagine that four customers have requested that their steaks be
cooked in the following way: well-done, medium, medium-
rare, rare. According to John Conrad’s mental graph technique,
this order would be remembered as …
a. a steadily ascending line
b. a steadily descending line
c. a mountain range

8. From this article, a careful reader should infer that …

a. everyone has about the same memory capacity and can develop
a superior memory through practice and motivation
b. a good or bad memory is an ability that a person is born with
and cannot change to any great degree
c. there is still no conclusive evidence as to whether outstanding
memories are inborn or developed