The Great Acting Blog: “Using Memory To Learn More Effectively”

The Great Acting Blog: “Using Memory To Learn More Effectively”

I have been wanting to write something about learning lines for a while now but have struggled to come up with a way of making it seem, well, sexy. My recent research on the nature of memory however, has lead me to discover new ways of making our line learning sessions more effective. While this is not exactly what I would describe as sexy, I would proffer the following as interesting because it may help us to learn our lines in the shortest time possible, leaving us free to pursue sexier activities.

If we have to work hard to bring something to consciousness it means we are learning. So, when testing ourselves during our line learning sessions, resist the urge to glance down at the page or ask for a prompt if you’re struggling. Instead, fight to remember. This might seem like harder work up front, but it will help you learn the lines faster. Also, the harder we’ve worked to remember the lines, the stronger our memory of them will be. Without honest testing, we will never learn the lines. That’s why just staring at the page doesn’t accomplish anything.

Learning is impacted enormously by where we do it. This may help to explain why sometimes we remember the lines perfectly well in the place where we learned them but struggle to remember them in a new place. It’s worth learning lines in various locations then, so that we get used to remembering them in different places.

Learning is more effective when we switch between tasks. Instead of trying to become a master of the first line of dialogue before moving on, just make a start on it then move onto the next line of dialogue. This might seem messy and unproductive but the switching between the dialogues forces your memory to keep remembering them, which in turn re-inforces the learning.

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