Ways to better remember information. Movement helps you remember
Why are we sometimes unable to remember information and reproduce it later? Scientists disagree about how our memory works. However, there are several practically universally recognized mechanisms that make it possible to simplify memorization, make it more reliable and facilitate the reproduction (remembering) of the memorized information. These mechanisms can be called the laws of memory. Here are the main ones:
The Law of Attention. Complain that you can't remember anything? Have you made any effort to remember? Maybe you also watched TV while memorizing? For good memorization, concentration of attention on the material is necessary. The following lists several factors that negatively affect the retention of information in memory and which should be eliminated if possible:
extraneous thoughts
Distractions (noise, radio, TV, calls, …)
Fatigue, irritation
Rush
The law of brightness. It is best to remember everything bright and unusual. During the day you meet a lot of people, but in the evening you can only remember those who stood out in some way, were different from others. Therefore, before memorizing, it will be useful to try to give the information a bright, unusual look.
The law of significance. According to the importance for a person, information can be divided into three groups. The first includes vital information (diet, knowledge of dangers, ...). It is remembered effortlessly and almost forever. The second group includes interesting and subjectively important information for a person. It is also relatively easy to digest. All other information belongs to the third group. It is the worst to digest. Unfortunately, this information is overwhelming. From this follows several laws that facilitate memorization:
Law of Interest. As already mentioned, information related to the interests of a person (the second group) is easy to remember. Therefore, you need to at least temporarily interest yourself in what you are going to remember.
Law of motivation. You need to convince yourself of the importance of the information you remember. Imagine the benefits of memorizing it: faster promotion, winning a quiz, etc. Then the information will temporarily move to the second group and will be remembered much more reliably.
The law of activity. The information with which you perform some action is remembered better. Therefore, try to do something with it: calculate something, compare it with something, etc.
Law of understanding and comprehension. Trying to remember something without understanding it is almost a lost cause. By understanding and comprehending the information, you will greatly help your memory.
Law of previous knowledge. The information you remember interacts with the information already stored in your brain. Associative links are established, comparisons are made, common features are identified, ... Therefore, the more information you have on any topic, the easier it is to remember new information on this topic. In general, the more you know, the easier it is to acquire new knowledge. So to remember better, remember more.
The law of adjustment and installation. You have to tune in to remember. First of all, decide for yourself how long you need to remember the memorized data: a day, a year, a lifetime. This will help the brain place them correctly. Before memorizing, skim through the material to be memorized. This will prepare the brain for its memorization, will allow you to assess the complexity of the material. It is very useful to remember the material on this topic that you know before memorizing. And to improve recall, imagine a situation where you will remember this, an exam, for example.
The law of memory brakes. There are two processes that slow down (worse) memorization. Proactive braking: the previous memorized information worsens the memorization of the next one. Retroactive braking: subsequent memorized information worsens the memorization of the previous one. The presence of these processes is due to the fact that even after the completion of the perception of memorized information in the brain, the processes of its assimilation and placement take place. In this regard, we can give the following recommendations for memorization:
Memorize important information in the morning or evening. At this time, the influence of braking processes is the least.
Take breaks while memorizing. During breaks, you can not receive any other information (read, watch TV, listen to the radio). This will reduce the effect of braking processes.
Do not memorize the same type of information one after another. So one should not learn mathematics after memorizing historical dates. And there, and there work is done with numbers. This will make it difficult to remember.
Do not do anything difficult for you immediately after memorization. The brain will focus on complex activities and will not be able to correctly place the remembered information.
The following two laws make it easier to remember information.
The law of the time layer. Information is stored in memory in layers. There are many types of these layers, and one of them is the time layer. All information that was remembered at about the same time is stored side by side. Therefore, if you need to remember something, try to remember what you did on the day you received the necessary information.
Law of thematic layer. Another layer of memory is thematic. All information on similar topics is stored in the brain nearby. Therefore, when trying to remember something, try to remember information related to the topic. For example, if you forgot the name of a city, remember the names of several other cities.
I hope that the laws described in this article will allow you to more easily and reliably remember everything you want. Good luck remembering!
People joke: "The only thing we really 'learn' in school is how to memorize information." If you ask ordinary passers-by on the street how to quickly memorize things, most of them will probably tell you: "Repetition is the mother of learning!" As it turned out, they are very far from the truth.
Below are 9 universal steps to mastering the art of memorization.
Before we begin, you need to figure out what type of learner you are: an auditory, visual, or experiential learner? If you are best at absorbing information by ear, then the most effective way for you to understand and remember is to hear. As you might guess, visual learners are better at remembering what they see, while experiential types learn from events and experiences. Most of us are a combination of at least two of these categories. And we will designate which method of memorization is the most beneficial for your learning style.
Step 1: Preparation
To optimize the memorization process, pay close attention to what environment you are in. For most people, this means choosing a location with few distractions. Although some people can easily speed up the process of absorbing information in public places. Once you figure out what is the ideal environment for your learning, you can get started.
Next, have a cup of tea. Scientific studies confirm that green tea is a natural catalyst for improving memory.
Mechanically speaking, our ability to reproduce information comes down to the strength between the neurons in our minds that are connected by synapses. The more you train the synapses (by repeating), the stronger the resulting memory capacity will be.
As we get older, toxic chemicals damage our neurons and synapses, leading to memory loss and even Alzheimer's disease. Green tea contains substances that block toxins and keep your brain working properly for much longer.
Step 2: Make an audio recording of what you want to remember
This is especially useful if you are trying to memorize information from a lecture. Use a voice recorder to keep track of all acquired facts and listen to the audio recording at home. If you're trying to memorize the words, write them down while you read aloud and replay them several times in a row. Obviously, this is the most useful way for auditory learners. The audio recording ensures that you get more context from the lecture, which in turn helps you learn the material much faster.
Step 3: Write down the information on paper
Before you begin, try to remember the information yourself, and then write it down in your notebook and rewrite it again. This will help you become more familiar with the material you are trying to remember. While recording, listen to your tape recorder at the same time - this way you can save more data and small facts.
This method of memorization will be most effective for experiential learners.
Ekaterina Dodonova
Business coach, blogger, memory and speed reading instructor. Founder of the educational project iq230
1. Understand
Very often people try to memorize unfamiliar words and phrases without even understanding their meaning. Perhaps this is enough for a few days, say, to pass an exam. Unless, of course, the lecturer asks to explain what you mean by ablation and what are the signs of those same chromosomal aberrations from the first ticket.
The brain perfectly remembers words connected associatively. He discards incomprehensible letter combinations like garbage, not wanting to waste time on them.
For this reason, most people have difficulty learning. A strange-sounding word does not evoke native and understandable pictures to the heart.
Therefore, for better memorization, you must first parse and understand all new terms. Try to feel the word and associate it in your imagination with familiar concepts.
2. Come up with an association
The presence of fantasy is one of the most powerful tools for remembering information. greatly facilitate the process of memorizing important reports, presentations, texts, including in foreign languages, due to artificial associations.
Take the word "Monday". What frames are running on your internal screen? It could be the morning, terrible traffic jams, a thought pulsing in my head, a day on the calendar, a page in my childhood diary, or a buzzing office anthill. What do you see?
To make associative connections strong and durable, you can use the five-finger rule. Each finger has its own association, filled with one or another content.
| Fingers | Association |
| Big | "Raisin". Original, absurd, absurd |
| Pointing | "Emotions". Use only positive |
| Average | "About yourself beloved." Feel free to associate the object of memorization with yourself |
| Nameless | "Feel". Connect the senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, tactile sensations |
| Little finger | "In move". Make your subject move. The brain remembers information faster in dynamics |
Thus, the necessary information will be imprinted in your memory at once at all levels of feelings, which will allow you to use it for a long time.
3. Fool the magic number 7 ± 2
The famous American psychologist George Miller found that short-term human memory cannot remember and repeat more than 7 ± 2 elements. The mode of constant information overload reduces this number to 5 ± 2.
Nevertheless, there is a simple way to deceive the laws of short-term memory: the use of the method of stories, which involves the logical linking of disparate memory objects into one chain. You can have a funny, incredible and completely impossible story in real life. The main thing is that with it you can remember more than 15 elements at a time.
As conceived by the director in the next scene, you should swim in a pool filled to the brim with semolina. Yes, just imagine this madness in bright colors. Feel with your skin how semolina sticks to your skin. How hard it is to swim in this warm liquid, although the porridge is not too thick. As in the air it smells of milk, butter and childhood.
4. Repeat correctly
Our brain can be programmed - it's a scientific fact. It requires awareness and daily work in the chosen direction. Therefore, if you have firmly decided that it is extremely important for you to learn English in six months, then the brain has already tuned in to intensive memorization. But in addition to regular training, regular repetition of the material covered is also important.
Use certain time intervals for the best memorization: repeat the material immediately after learning, then after 15-20 minutes, after 6-8 hours (preferably before bedtime) and the last time after a week.
5. Tune in
Perhaps there is nothing worse when a person thinks about himself in negative terms: “I will never cope with this”, “It is impossible for me to remember this”, “I will not be able to learn such a difficult report”. Use only positive affirmations when programming your brain for work and results.
Tune in correctly, tell yourself: “I remember!”, “I have a good memory. I will remember”, “I will remember and easily retell in my own words in two hours”. Customize yourself. The resource state of the brain is your area of responsibility.
Knowing the five secrets of memory, you can easily learn to memorize really complex and versatile materials. In addition, there are many interesting and natural ways for a person to train memory and consolidate the necessary memory objects, which Ekaterina Dodonova also talks about in detail in her book.
Happy reading and have a great memory!
Image copyright Thinkstock
To understand the techniques that allow you to instantly and forever memorize facts, the correspondent met with a group of scientists and champions of memorization tournaments.
The world's leading experts on memory make me feel ashamed of my modest abilities. Ben Whatley, for example, told me about a famous mnemonist named Matteo Ricchi.
Lived in the 16th century a Jesuit priest became the first European to pass an examination for high-level officials in China.
This exam was a very painful test and included, among other things, the memorization of a huge array of texts of classical poetry. This task could take a lifetime.
"Only 1% of the subjects passed these exams, and yet Ricky managed to pass them after 10 years, although he did not know a word of Chinese before."
Can psychology endow us with the same brilliance in our own memory? That is what Watley is aiming for.
Together with former memorization champion Ed Cooke, he has already developed the Memrise educational application, which uses some of the principles of mnemonics.
Now they have joined forces with researchers at University College London to find ways and means to improve their techniques.
They approached memory experts and asked them to run a series of experiments to discover the easiest and most effective method for remembering new information.
Which way to choose
First round. The task given to the contestants is seemingly simple, says Rosalind Potts of University College London: "If you only have one hour to memorize 80 words, what will you do to remember them in a week?" The task is complicated by the fact that the scientists chose 80 words from the Lithuanian language.
The participants in the experiment were divided into two groups. In one group, they used special techniques for memorizing words (they were prompted by scientists), in the other group, participants did not resort to any tricks.
Some techniques could not lead to an improvement in the memorization and subsequent reproduction of information. "It shows how difficult it is to translate scientific principles into real learning," says David Shanks, also from the university.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption To better remember information, admit to yourself that you do not know everything.Boredom proved to be a serious obstacle: a member of one of the teams fell asleep during an hour-long session of memorizing words, despite the fact that he and his colleagues were paid for participation in the experience with cakes.
"It happens," says Jana Weinstein of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, who served on the panel of judges.
However, many teams managed to learn something from the experiment. Some participants were able to memorize twice as many words - instead of being locked into one single technique, they tended to use a combination of several techniques.
Admitting one's own ignorance
Self-examination is one of the most reliable ways to improve memory.
For me, a trick called "false reproduction" turned out to be surprising and potentially useful.
The participants in the experiment were made to guess the meaning of certain Lithuanian words without prior preparation.
"They always got it wrong the first time," says Shanks. However, as psychological studies have shown, initial mistakes lead to the fact that later words - in the correct meaning - are well remembered.
"This method gives much more tangible results than simply memorizing words."
Simply admitting one's own ignorance appears to stimulate memory and allow one to absorb twice as much information as those groups that do not use this method.
In psychology, it is known that if you complicate the task a little, this can increase concentration and lay a stronger foundation for subsequent memorization and reproduction of information.
Sliding on the waves of memory
Excessive study leads to a waste of time. Some participants developed algorithms to determine the level of effort needed to memorize and recall each of the 80 words.
You can go the other way and rely on your own intuition when drawing up a training schedule, setting longer and longer pauses between sessions of self-examination and work on errors.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The more you interact with the information, the higher the chances that you will be able to remember everything.One of the mentors arranged short breaks for the participants of the experiment and showed them a waterfall on video (as planned, the rest was supposed to contribute to memorization).
Of course, when you study, you need to take short breaks so that fatigue does not reduce your natural abilities.
Buffet principle
You can be tempted to sort the material into blocks by topic and memorize these blocks one by one. So, some mentors did, organizing the words into categories and topics.
However, one team concluded that repeating all 80 words in a circle could also be an effective method. As Ben Whatley points out, memorization tournament champions memorize the sequence of cards in a deck in a similar way. They skim through the entire deck quickly, instead of dividing it into blocks and memorizing them one by one.
If this method confuses someone, experiments show at least one thing: training sessions need to be diversified. It is better to spend time studying a variety of subjects and mastering different skills than concentrating on one single subject. Imagine that you are trying different dishes from the buffet, and not ordering lunch by choosing something from the menu.
Entertaining stories
Any form of "topic development" is a way to activate connections between neurons and stamp information into memory. One of the mentors asked the participants to write a short story using the words they were supposed to learn. Cook and Whatley were pleasantly surprised when they discovered that one team had adopted the "memory palace" method. This is a way of remembering by linking words to objects in a place you know well, for example, in your own apartment.
The program developed by them will show you a picture of the room and suggest you the Lithuanian word lova - bed. You can imagine your sweetheart on the couch. Once you organize the memorization process, you can reverse all your steps and easily remember the right word.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption A string on your finger and a cross drawn on the inside of your wrist will help you remember small but important things.It was this method that helped the Jesuit Matteo Ricchi to master the Chinese language at such an advanced level. It also underlies Cook's ability to memorize 2265 two-digit numbers in less than half an hour. Cooke and Watley's computer program simplifies the process, making it nearly automatic. "If our method wins, it will be a big breakthrough," says Cook.
And yet it is difficult to get rid of the idea that these methods are very far from what we need in everyday life. In the previous task, I tried to learn about 1000 Danish words using mnemonics. And although these techniques helped me remember the words individually, I was never able to start using these words on a flight, in a bar or restaurant.
Cook agrees that this is just the first step. Such techniques, he says, can only form the basis of memory training. The same method makes it easier to learn not only languages, but also any other disciplines - history, mathematics. "Repeated checks, increasing the interval between tests - these techniques work in almost every case," he says.
Educational games
The judges hope to be able to hold competitions every year as they improve the art of memory.
In the future, new inventive approaches may emerge that deserve attention. Shanks, for example, mentions one project that didn't get approved this year but may prove promising in the future.
"They developed a video game where you have to shoot down spaceships in the sky. Quite by accident, these ships have Lithuanian and English words written on them," he says. "I think it's a brilliant idea."
The real challenge for memory experts, however, is not just to make learning fast and efficient.
As every student knows, the biggest barrier to learning is distractions, whether it's the thought of going to the park to sunbathe or turning on the TV. Many new competitions may be required before this hurdle can be overcome.
Throughout life, a person has to learn something. And the learning process, as you know, often associated with the need to remember a large amount of information in a short time. For some people, this is not a problem at all, while others experience some difficulties, especially if there are unfamiliar words, terms, and difficult-to-understand phrases in the text.
Of course, today there are many recording devices, but we can not always use them. And there is so much information in the modern world that it is best to keep it in the most reliable place, namely, in your head.
It is enough to learn once how to remember a large amount of information in a short time, and this skill will help you out in any situation. For example, at school or at the institute, during advanced training at work, before the exam in the traffic police. The main thing here is to tune in to the result, read a few useful recommendations and immediately put them into practice. We invite you to learn right now how to quickly remember a large amount of information.
Do you know the situation when you need to quickly memorize a large amount of information, and there is very little time? What do you experience? Are you starting to panic? You feel like a loser who at one time skipped classes, and now suddenly took up his mind and decided to learn all the material covered.
You shouldn't be upset. Even if you don't have a perfect memory, there are special techniques that allow you to learn a large amount of information in a short time, be it a voluminous textbook paragraph, the text of your public speech or presentation, or a whole hundred exam tickets.
Memorization can be mechanical, requiring memorization, or logical, that is, meaningful.
Consider the main ways of perception and reproduction of information.
- cramming method. It is not suitable for everyone, although it helps to quickly memorize information. However, she also quickly disappears from our heads, leaving only pleasant reminders in the form of a good grade or praise.
- Retelling method. Everything is very simple: you read the text and prepare a detailed retelling. Wherein best to sit in front of a grateful listener. Thus, you will not allow yourself to relax and will subconsciously select the necessary words and clear formulations.
- Recording method. Good students write notes. Do you know why? This is very a good way to organize and organize information. Even if you missed a lecture, feel free to rewrite or make a short summary. Firstly, all the necessary information will be at your fingertips, and secondly, you will lead the story according to a clearly drawn up plan that is visualized in your head. Plus, writing helps you remember better.
- repetition method. Mentally repeat the material covered, the poem or the learned exam tickets.
- Reading aloud. Some people find this method helpful. Important read the text several times, comprehend it. You can break what you read into paragraphs and apply the retelling method.
- The method of "remembering the place". Try remember the situation when you received information, you may need to focus on smells, surrounding objects, landscapes.
How to quickly memorize information using visual images?
The technique of meaningful memorization of information is called mnemonics. Exists some secrets of mnemonics, which help to remember information better:
- Try to convert information into images. Moreover, living pictures can evoke not only poems - with the help of images, you can remember dates, tables, graphs and even formulas. To do this, of course, you need to choose a high-quality and most suitable image. Here you can use the method of associations based on the correspondence of color, shape, select abbreviations, create small stories.
- Paint bright pictures in your head. Do not be afraid to use fantasy - let your images move, interact, line up in chains. So one information will gradually come from another, creating a complete picture.
- Stop at the details. Try to describe in detail the subject you are talking about. Remember its features and characteristics. For example, you need to talk about a mobile phone. List its components: display, keys, charging port, speaker, microphone.
Video lessons: how to quickly memorize a large amount of information?
