Do you find it a challenge to remember what you study? Sometimes the problem is not in learning the material; it is in finding the material in your head when it is time to relay what you have learned! As any viewer of the hyperactive visuals of TV programming can tell you, memory is not an attribute that is necessarily valued in the pop society of today. However, there are some tried and true ways to remember more effectively material that is studied a short period of time ago. Below we will list a few of them: Use Mnemonics. One way that you can have your brain recall things immensely fast is to use names and alliteration. The brain loves patterns, and when you give the material that you study a pattern, you clue in to the way that your brain already processes information, giving you a much better chance of recalling consciously the facts that you need to recall. This is a great trick to use with names of famous history figures. Use "cue words." The brain also uses short phrases to remind itself of longer phrases, much like the first part of the binary code is what draws the computer to a document or picture. So if you have a poem to remember, or a long string of facts, attach the string to a cue word, or the biggest, most memorable word in the phrase. Once your brain remembers that word, it will cue the rest of the phrase. Write and speak at the same time. By a study done at Harvard, people remembered 90% of what they wrote down and spoke aloud at the same time. If they only did one of the actions at a time, the rate of memory went way down. Write and speak what you need to remember at the same time. Do the Bart Simpson Repetition is king when it comes to memory. Just like the teacher makes Bart Simpson write on the chalkboard repeatedly the action that he is not supposed to perform in later classes, the brain loves to recall what it has done repeatedly in the past. If you have to remember something, write it repeatedly. For added memory, combine this step with Tip 3 and say what you are writing out loud as well. Find a natural order. If you can put something like a list in alphabetical order, or a set of numerals from smallest to largest, your brain will have a much easier time remembering not only the sequence, but more of the content within the sequence as well. Your mind has been taught alphabet, smallest to largest since preschool, so even though this may not be a natural way of learning, it has been imposed enough that your brain has learned how to learn this way. Use it. Source
