The mind’s capacity to store and recall information is truly wondrous.
However there are Always ways to improve our memory capacity and our abilities to recall information.
This article provides 8 stategies to rember better:
- Become interested in what you’re learning. We’re all better remembering what interests us. If you’re not intrinsically interested in what you’re learning or trying to remember, you must find a way to become so.
- Find a way to leverage your visual memory. It requires mental effort to do this, but if you practice you’ll be surprised how quickly you can come up with creative ways to generate images. Remember: Memory for humans is predominantly visual.
- Create a mental memory tree. If you’re trying to memorize a large number of facts, find a way to relate them in your mind visually with a memory tree. Construct big branches first, then leaves. Branches and leaves should carry labels that are personally meaningful to you in some way, and the organization of the facts (“leaves”) should be logical.
- Associate what you’re trying to learn with what you already know. It seems the more mental connections we have to a piece of information, the more successful we’ll be in remembering it. This is why using mnemonics actually improves recall.
- Write out the items to be memorized over and over and over. Writing out facts in lists improves recall if you make yourself learn the lists actively instead of passively. In other words, don’t just copy the list of facts you’re trying to learn but actively recall each item you wish to learn and then write it down again and again and again. This method has the added benefit of immediately showing you exactly which facts haven’t made it into your long-term memory so you can focus more attention on learning them rather than wasting time reinforcing facts you already know.
- When reading for retention, summarize each paragraph in the margin. This requires you to think about what you’re reading, recycle it, and teach it to yourself again. Even take the concepts you’re learning and reason forward with them; apply them to imagined novel situations, which creates more neural connections to reinforce the memory.
- Do most of your studying in the afternoon. Though you may identify yourself as a “morning person” or “evening person” some studies suggest your ability to memorize isn’t influenced as much by what time of day you perceive yourself to be most alert but by the time of day you actually study—afternoon appearing to be the best.
- Get adequate sleep to consolidate and retain memories. Not just at night after you’ve studied but the day before you study as well.
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