Many people who enter drug and alcohol treatment think they have neurological problems either as a result of their addiction or alcoholism, or because they think they were born with some neurological defect, but many times people are simply uneducated as to how the brain works and how memory works. Sometimes just educating someone on how the brain works in addiction treatment will help ease their fears about their own memory. In the NTS Academy, we help our college students in addiction treatment learn how the brain works when it comes to memory. This helps our NTS Academy college students devise ways to remember information they are learning in college.

So how does memory work?

Short-Term memory can only store 7 +/- pieces of information. That is the reason why phone numbers are only 7 numbers long and license plates are only allowed the number of letters and numbers they are allowed. It's been hypothesized that anyone who can store more information than that is either an insane genius or some type of autistic savant. The short term memory will automatically remove information when it reaches its limit to make room for new information. So, for instance, if you have a lot of things to do in a day, you don't have a day planner to keep track and remind you of what you have to do, and those things you have to do exceeds 7, then you will inevitably forget to do something you were supposed to do.

The short-term memory of individuals sends information to be encoded to the long-term memory. This process is called Encoding and is the process of initially storing information in Short-term working memory and eventually sending it to Long-term memory (Labeling Memories). Retrieval is the process of identifying information from long-term memory and the information being sent to short-term working memory for correct processing of information.

There are two types of retrieval- Recall and Recognition. Recall is the ability to consciously retrieve and reproduce information that was previously encountered. When our NTS Academy students have to write an essay for an exam, they must use this type or retrieval process. This type of retrieval process is more difficult than the recognition retrieval process. Recognition retrieval is the ability of a person to identify information that was previously encountered and involves partial information. This type of retrieval is used during multiple choice exams. So, when our NTS Academy students in our addiction treatment facility have the notion that multiple choice exams are easier than essay questions they are technically correct, but the problem is that people tend to study less for multiple choice exams, which ultimately leads to them doing more poorly on the exam than if they had studied for the exam as if they were taking an essay exam. In the NTS Academy we help students learn how to perfect their study skills and master the essay and multiple choice tests.

Labels: College Combined with Addiction Treatment, Memory and Addiction Treatment, Study Skills