4 Strategies to improve your memory power

 

 

 

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4 Strategies to improve your memory power

 

Our life is convenient if we have powerful memory. We can easily recall important information without much effort as if knowledge is always at our finger tips. For those school students, it would be great to score well in exam that requires a lot of memorizing

 

However, having a weak memory can be a nightmare. Imagine putting your heart and soul in reading a wonderful book and end up remembering very little. That’s a waste of precious time and energy.

 

Don’t worry. The good news is that memory can be improved. By following the four strategies below, your memory can become like a super sponge that soaks up information for a long time. Unfortunately, these strategies require you to be serious and take real action for them to work. But I believe you can do it well.

 

The 4 strategies to power up your memory:

 

• Mental development
• Information conversion
• Memorizing technique
• Recalling power

 

1) Mental development

 

If you want to be physically fit, you exercise to build muscles, increase stamina, and promote flexibility. This is the same as mental fitness – you exercise to increase your mental power.

 

Mental training is not just an abstract process that happens in imagination. It actually develops your physical brain. As your mental power develops, the inter connectivity of your brain cells improves. It won’t take a long time to see the progress of your mental performance, so it’s worth investing in developing your mind power.

 

Good mental fitness can improve our memory directly or indirectly. Some of the mental aspects that you can develop are creativity, thinking skill, imagination, awareness, analytical skills, and many more. There are many self improvement books on this topic, such as the ones written by the famous Tony Buzan and Edward de Bono.

 

For example, imagination is a good tool to help increase your memory. Imagination should involve various senses, not just visualization alone. You train yourself to create mental reality with vivid picture, realistic sound, touch, taste, and smell. You feel your body’s gravity and internal body resistance. You develop your imagination so well that simulating a real life event is easy like peanuts. A student who can properly imagine a well polished, artistically carved, shining pewter vase can remember much more objects than a guy who can’t even clearly visualize the letter A.

 

2) Information conversion

 

Remember reading through a whole chunk of dull text? This kind of information is hard to digest. So we convert this raw information into a form that is “tasty” enough for our memory to digest. “Tasty” information is bits of info that is easy to remember, hard to forget.

 

We can convert a boring article into bullet point form, which is much tastier than before. Each bullet point should be short, simple, and contain only one core message. The language used should be simple and direct. Avoid difficult words and ideas that are not clear.

 

Besides that, we can use other methods like color coding, highlighting, mind mapping, simple database for illustration (diagrams, graph, table) and many more “tasty recipe” to spice up knowledge input for a nice “educational dinner”. Always convert complex information into simple bits with simple words and structure.

 

3) Memorizing technique

 

We build up our mental fitness in strategy 1 and now we can apply it directly to absorb knowledge. The 3rd strategy is similar to strategy 2, but it is purely a mental process in converting information.

 

Our brain can remember information better with certain kind of stimulation. It remembers emotional stories much better than scientific facts and boring statistic. Therefore, we can make information “tastier” to the brain by altering the information without reducing its content.

 

For example, we can peg or relate a dull fact that lacks meaning to something meaningful to us (plain number like 12365 can be remembered as “one year has 12 months 365 days = 12365”). We can relate information to a concrete, interesting analogy. It’s also a good idea to relate information to certain emotions or senses (music, color, happy event etc.). There are so many ways to peg information and it’s up to your creativity to spice up your meal of learning. Tony Buzan has authored many books on ways to memorize information so that’s a good place to start with this strategy.

 

4) Recalling power

 

Most of the time, we don’t forget something, we just fail to recall it. You don’t forget your dream 10 minutes ago, you just failed to remember it. We can condition our mind to get use to recall things like having a portable DVD player that replays past event.

 

We usually let our subconscious mind do all the learning work and left our conscious mind pampered too much like a spoilt kid. Now it’s time to let our conscious mind exercise a bit by increasing our awareness.

 

We can increase our awareness of daily activities through daily retrospection. Before we go to bed, we recall the events happened in our life today. We replay the life scenes and see the people we interact with, the food we eat, the things we read, the stuffs we do etc – a mental simulation of our life in one day. This awareness-increasing exercise trains you to recall things well. As we improve, we can go further on until we can recall events in many days.

 

Sometimes daily retrospection works so well that we can even recall dreams. Don’t just stop there, get a dream journal and record your last dream right after you wake up. Days later you will have deeper awareness until you can remember a few dreams easily. If you can recall daily events and dreams, you can remember many other things. Heck! you can even play back the classes you attended and extract information from there.

 

Meditation is also a good way to increase awareness. It has many other positive “side effects” as well, such as better disciplined mind with less inner “monkey” voices, and better emotional control. You can do a few short meditation sessions per day, where each session lasts about 6 minutes (a timer or egg alarm would be useful here).

 

Finally, the last trick to enhance recalling ability is to have a habit of repeating what we have learned. For example, when you read a book, recall what you have read previously. And before you put down your book, mentally summarize the whole thing that you have just read. By doing so, you screen through the reading material 3 times. You can recall repeated information better than stuffs that you read only once.

 

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