Levels of Processing: The Great Mnemonic Filter

connections: structure, sound, concept, a n d personal connection. These are the four levels of
processing. They were identified in the 1970s by psychologists who created a curious questionnaire
with four types of questions and gave it to college students:
• Structure: How many capital letters are in the word BEAR?
• Sound: Does APPLE rhyme with Snapple?
• Concept: Is TOOL another word for “instrument”?
• Personal Connection: Do you like PIZZA?
After the questionnaire, they gave the students a surprise memory test, asking which words from the
test they still remembered. Their memories were dramatically influenced by the question types:
students remembered six PIZZAs for every BEAR. The magic of these questions lies in a peculiar
mental trick. To count the capital letters in BEAR, you don’t need to think about brown furry animals,
and so you don’t. You’ve activated the shallowest level of processing—structure—and moved on. On
the other hand, you activate regions throughout your brain to determine whether you like PIZZA. You
automatically utilize structure to figure out what word you’re looking at. At the same time, you’ll tend
to hear the word pizza echoing within your skull as you imagine a hot disk of cheesy goodness.
Finally, you’ll access memories of pizzas past to determine whether you enjoy pizza or just haven’t
met the right one yet. In a fraction of a second, a simple question––Do you like PIZZA?––can
simultaneously activate all four levels of processing. These four levels will fire together, wire
together, and form a robust memory that is six times easier to remember than that BEAR you’ve
already forgotten.
The four levels of processing are more than a biological quirk; they act as a filter, protecting us
from information overload. We live in a sea of information, surrounded by a dizzying amount of input
from TV, the Internet, books, social interactions, and the events of our lives. Your brain uses levels of
processing to judge which input is important and which should be thrown out. You don’t want to be
thinking about the number of letters in the word tiger when one is chasing after you, nor do you want
to be assaulted by vivid memories of cows when you buy milk. To keep you sane, your brain
consistently works at the shallowest level of processing needed to get the job done. At the grocery
store, you are simply looking for the words chocolate milk, or perhaps even Organic Wholesome
Happy Cow Chocolate Milk. This is pattern matching, and your brain uses structure to quickly weed
through hundreds or thousands of ingredient lists and food labels. Thankfully, you forget nearly every
one of these lists and labels by the time you reach your milk. If you didn’t, your encyclopedic
knowledge of supermarket brand names would make you a terrible bore at parties. In more
stimulating circumstances, such as that tiger in hot pursuit, your brain has a vested interest in memory.
In such a case, should you survive, you’ll likely remember not to climb into the tiger enclosure at the
zoo. In this way, levels of processing act as our great mental filter, keeping us alive and tolerable at
parties.
This filter is one of the reasons why foreign words are difficult to remember. Your brain is just
doing its job; how should it know that you want to remember mjöður but not disodium phosphate (an
emulsifier in your chocolate milk)?

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