Memory takes a cue from acting

It seems to be the question that actors hear most frequently: “How did you learn all those lines?”

“You ask that question to any kind of actor and they will laugh,” says Susan Anspach, who should know, given her roles in movies such as “Play It Again, Sam,” “Blume in Love” and “Montenegro” and her experience as an acting teacher and coach. “Learning the lines is the easiest part of acting.”

And yet, why should it be so easy for actors to memorize vast pages of dialogue and so difficult for most other people to simply remember the name of a dinner partner or the plot of a recently read novel? It couldn’t just be, as the old joke about getting to Carnegie Hall goes, practice.

Researchers writing this month in the journal Psychological Science have found the strategies and techniques used by many actors when they tackle a new script are concrete illustrations of some of the abstract theories that psychologists have developed in explaining memory and understanding. The researchers, cognitive psychologist Helga Noice and her husband, actor Tony Noice, have found that the way actors learn lines offers lessons for those of us who sit in the audience worrying about what we forgot.

In the same study, the researchers found that when older people participate in acting classes for four weeks, their cognition and word retrieval capabilities are improved for up to four months. Overall, the work suggests ways to enhance memory -- not just for the task at hand, but in ways that last over time.

“When we saw the strategies that actors used for acquiring a script and so forth, they unwittingly used almost every information-processing device that is known to psychologists,” says Tony Noice, who was a professor of theater at Indiana State University when he conducted the research, but has since moved to Elmhurst College. “Because they were meaning what they were saying as they were saying it, their retention of the lines came naturally.”

He and his wife, a professor of psychology at Elmhurst, have studied actors and what their approach to memorizing scripts may reveal about memory for almost 20 years. This study builds on their previous work.

In this research, the Noices tried to break down the process that actors generally use when memorizing a script. How did their approach make it easier to remember long and often intricate passages?

They found that actors rarely acquire roles by rote -- by repeating and repeating a word, a phrase, a line, a dialogue -- or at least not as their first step. Instead actors examine the “goal of every utterance of the character,” looking at the motivation and the character behind each word of the script. Anspach, who lives in Oakland and continues to teach acting, says that in acting, “First comes who I am, then what do I want, third come my feelings, and finally come the words to get what I want. Once you develop all that, the words will naturally flow.”

This process is consistent with early memory research, says Arthur Glenberg, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied memory.

In the past, researchers thought memory was divided into sensory memory -- or the initial brief storage of sensory information -- short-term memory and long-term memory.

But in 1972, two researchers, Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart, realized this model did not shed light on what makes us able to remember some pieces of information but not others. They concluded that the potency of memory depends largely on the amount of meaning that the memory contains.

“Basically, you can spend a lot of time and effort trying to remember something, but if you haven’t focused on the meaning of the message, you won’t remember it very well,” Glenberg says. “If the focus is more on how something looks or sounds, often memory is not as good as when the focus is on meaning.”

As the Noices write in their current article, “When the words have been learned, the actor must mean them each time he or she says them so that every performance is identical and yet unique.” They say even though specific words remain the same, the “mental-physical-emotional interactions” between the actors inform how those words are spoken. The gestures, the movements across the stage and the expressions on the other actor’s face, all contribute to the ease and accuracy of retaining the lines.

A complete emotional, physical and intellectual immersion in the material may be part of the professional actor’s repertoire, but others can benefit as well. As the Noices recently found, the process of imbuing words with meaning can assist the cognitive processes for most people.

In one part of the research, they asked university students to read some material and imagine, in great detail, someone who needed the information they were studying. The students were told not to remember the words, but to concentrate entirely on the meaning of those words.

When the study participants focused on the meaning, and on explaining this meaning to someone they knew, they were able to remember the words and concepts far more accurately than when they simply tried to memorize them.

“We call this active experiencing,” Tony Noice says. “Which is just another term for staying in the moment.”

This strategy was also employed in four-week acting classes for a population most famous for complaints about memory: senior citizens. The Noices recruited about 124 people, age 65 to 86.

The Noices divided the participants into three groups: 44 were given theater training, 44 were given art appreciation training in the visual arts and 36 were the control group. The researchers provided classes in a number of different settings -- assisted-living facilities, community centers -- and tested all the participants on various cognitive tasks such as word recall, short-term memory, quality of life evaluations and problem solving before and after the classes.

In the acting classes, a professional director presented a series of progressively more difficult acting exercises in which the participants had to learn lines and movement for the performance.

The participants were given short scripts, which they carried around and referred to as they did the scenes. Through repeated performances they absorbed some of the lines and movements, but never as a result of being told to memorize the script.

The emphasis of the classes was on the interactions with the other participants emotionally, physically and mentally. If they learned lines at all, Tony Noice says, and many did, “they did so on the fly.”

After the study, the theater group performed better than the control group on word recall and problem solving. They even scored significantly better than the visual arts group on problem solving. Overall, the theater group showed an increase in recall performance of about 18% and a 55% increase in problem solving.

After the training, the psychological well-being scale, which includes such qualities as personal growth, self-acceptance and positive relations were all higher for the new thespians than for the other two groups.

These results are encouraging because the training did not require any actual memorization, Helga Noice says. Nevertheless, memory improved along with other aspects of healthy mental functioning.

Although people with faltering memories may not be able to immediately enroll in an acting class, these findings and others about memory contain some practical advice.

Memory is tremendously dependent on context, Glenberg says, and creating a context for what we need to remember can go a long way to lock that word, or fact, or list, or name, into our minds.

“A lot of times when people find that their memory for something is not there, it often means that they never attended to it in the first place,” Glenberg says. “If you haven’t focused on the meaning of the message, you won’t remember it very well.”

For those of us who, like Shakespeare’s Othello, “remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly; a quarrel, but nothing wherefore,” these findings may provide a key for bolstering our flagging cognition.