The Modern Student

If you can cultivate a better memory, you will reap many benefits. One of the most obvious being that you will be able to remember more of what you study during tests and examinations. There are many ways to improve your memory, but keep this rule in mind – if you don’t use it, you lose it. It works like a muscle, the more you exercise it, the bigger and stronger it gets.

Improving your memory seems like a very vague activity to many people. The good news is that you can work at improving your memory with little conscious effort.

Here are the simple guidelines for how you can get to work on improving your memory.

The more you concentrate on what you are doing, the more information you will be able to consciously retain in your memory. This is a very important fact to keep in mind. If, for example, you are studying, and you have plenty distractions, you are not going to remember much of what you are learning. Similarly, if you are not concentrating in class or during a lecture, your memory of that class or lecture will be less then what it could be, meaning that you will have to study harder.

The next super effective technique to remember information is association. I have used association for most of my high school career, and it made studying information and getting it to stick a breeze. The technique of association’s premise is this – associate things to things that you want to remember. It can be anything. Often times I had to memorize different lists of 30 or more items for exams. I used a story for each list, stringing the items together chronologically in their order. The more creative you can be in making up stories around information that you want to remember, the better the technique will work. It is much easier to remember a storey with a timeline and a logical succession of events then it is to remember 30 sometimes unrelated bits of information, be they names or numbers or places or words.

Even paragraphs become easy to remember when you connect keywords together in a logical sequence.

Using images, sounds, feelings and symbols to represent information in your imagination is the key. The more vivid you can make your imaginations, the easier it will be to recall at a later stage, sometimes even weeks or months later. Here are guidelines for creating effective associations:

• Use positive, pleasant images. Your brain often blocks out unpleasant ones
• Use vivid, colorful, sense-laden images - these are easier to remember than drab ones
• Use all your senses to code information or dress up an image. Remember that your assocoation can contain sounds, smells, tastes, touch, movements and feelings as well as pictures.
• Give your image three dimensions, movement and space to make it more vivid. You can use movement either to maintain the flow of association, or to help you to remember actions.
• Exaggerate the size of important parts of the image
• Use humor! Funny or peculiar things are easier to remember than normal ones.
• Similarly, rude rhymes are very difficult to forget!
• Symbols (red traffic lights, pointing fingers, road signs, etc.) can code quite complex messages quickly and effectively

As a basic example, you might link a lion and a polar bear together by imagining the polar in a swimming costume laughing at the lion that is freezing from the cold whether the polar bear is used to, and the lion, who is furious with embarrassment, wears a pink jacket. I have used association to remember anything from long lists of countries to names to currency exchange rates, weather predictions, to complex mathematical formulas used in calculus.