The information field envelops us more and more tightly: the amount of information needed for comprehension and memorization increases exponentially.
In your mind, you need to keep the phone numbers, the names of new acquaintances, passport details, and the neighboring house’s index to order a parcel from iHerb… And this is just a drop in the bucket: right now, you might need to prepare paraphrases from the book, memorize new facts about Pluto, learn the peculiarities of nouns declension in Spanish, the key dates of Chinese civilization, the limit of a sequence and much, much more.
There is a paradox: we need to learn more, but the information’s availability eliminates our motivation to cram separate numbers, memorize lists, and remember the facts. Search engines, calculators, online dictionaries make life easier and at the same time weaken our memory.
In the age when information is available more than ever, we, like an overweight cat, lazily open our mouths to eat another portion of elite marbled beef pate and feel no taste at all. So, the information, the value of which we don’t perceive, passes through us, practically not settling in our minds.
I want to help everyone who wants to cope with the increasing burden on the brain. And I offer four ways to improve cognitive abilities and five special mnemonic techniques for memory. Read about what broccoli, an eight-year-old child, and running on the stairs have in common in my article.
Set Up Your Daily Schedule
Memory training is the same training as any other. But it is not a one-time activity, but a long-lasting one. Therefore, it is worth starting with essential but straightforward aspects: sleep, diet, and physical exercise. These three aspects make it possible to establish the mode and become the most productive.
Sleep
Deep and prolonged sleep for 7-9 hours is the main factor of the body’s vital activity. Sleep deprivation affects not only the appetite increase but also the memory deterioration. For example, an experiment with nurses working the night shift showed that they were more likely to make mistakes while performing mathematical tasks and showed worse memory tests than their colleagues from the day shift.
Besides, during sleep, memories, and facts from the short-term memory go into the long-term, which means that the information is absorbed better. This effect is precisely familiar to everyone who had to learn poems at school or prepare for an exam: a material learned on the day of the exam is forgotten much faster.
Diet
Another well-known yet essential aspect is nutrition. Although the brain takes about 2% of the total body weight, it consumes about 20% of the body’s energy, which means it must get enough calories. Thus, two key questions arise for maintaining and developing good memory: what and how much to eat?
To avoid unintended consequences for the brain, it’s essential to maintain a balance between intake and outtake of calories. Not only oversupply is harmful, but also a shortage. Different calorie counters are great for controlling this parameter, and now you can find many online apps to your taste. Moreover, some products have a positive impact on brain activity. Mainly these are products rich in fats, omega-3, vitamins, protein, and fiber: salmon fish varieties, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, olive oil, and black beans, broccoli, eggs, spinach, and turmeric.
Physical Activity
Sports and any movement activity significantly improve memory and cognitive abilities. Physical exercise saturates blood with oxygen, and contributes to endorphin production, positively impacting brain function and productivity. Indeed, there is no need to exercise on purpose: an evening walk outdoors or several flights of stairs will already help you remember more information for a more extended period.
Memory Training
It can be divided into thinking activity, which makes your brain work harder, and special techniques and exercises for memory development.
- Solve sudoku or crossword puzzles
- Play chess
- Learn poems and tongue twisters
- Hold a writing pen or spoon in your left hand if you’re a right-handed person and vice versa
- Сount in your mind without using a calculator
- Translate unfamiliar words in a foreign language without the help of a translator
All these methods are perfect!
The important aspect is consistency and discipline. 10-15 minutes of daily work on such small tasks will positively impact the speed of thinking and memory quality.
Mnemotechnics
Mnemotechnics is necessarily studied by people who have to memorize information: actors, simultaneous interpreters, speakers, professional card players, operators learning Morse code, and many others.
Mnemotechnics allows you to memorize difficult information: a sequence of 100 unrelated numbers, a list of 80-100 phone numbers, a speech plan, grammatical rules, and much more.
Below I have picked up a few examples of simple and effective mnemotechnics for you.
Rhyme
In those cases, when you have to remember the material detached from life and object reality like abstract images or grammatical rules – the rhyme works perfectly.
Think of a vivid rhyme or rearrange the elements of the text studied so that they rhyme, and the information will be stored in memory for a long time and will be easy to reproduce.
Associations
The creation of associations allows you to ultimately remember “colorless” information: new words in the native and foreign language, a sequence of numbers, a shopping list. The more unusual, absurd, and paradoxical the association is, the better it will be memorized. Suppose you need to remember the word “collision” (conflict, clash). The sound of the word may cause an association with the Roman Colosseum. The Colosseum will bring your thought to gladiatorial games, which are a perfect illustration of conflict. Thus a chain of associations will lead you to the desired result: collision = conflict.
Visualization
Perception of information may vary from person to person. Based on this difference, we can distinguish visuals, audiovisuals, and kinesthetics. It’s considered that the visuals predominate in this proportion, which means that most people use the visual channel to perceive information. Take advantage of this knowledge – create visual images for the types of data most often deprived of it: text, numbers, and so on. You can illustrate your abstracts, develop pictogram images, mentally represent images from memorized text, etc. Even highlighting the text with color markers will make your memory work more efficiently.
