Hey everyone, and welcome to TopThink.
Today, we are going to learn about 7 memory tricks to learn anything faster.
Now, let’s begin.
1.
The Production Effect Have you ever locked your car only to forget
five minutes later whether you locked it or not?
Why do we have so much trouble remembering such obvious things?
Your memories are separated into two different categories: implicit and explicit.
Implicit memories are things you remember unconsciously.
You don’t recall brushing your teeth or eating breakfast most mornings, because you
do these activities without thinking.
Explicit memories, on the other hand, are things we consciously remember.
When you study for a test, this information is a lot easier to recall, because you’re
making a conscious effort to learn.
Habitual activities like locking your car fall into your implicit memory.
We do them so often, that it doesn’t make sense to store each one as a conscious thought.
Since you’re essentially doing it without thinking, it’s hard to be 100% sure that
it actually happened.
This is where the production effect comes into play.
It converts an implicit memory into an explicit memory by bringing your attention to your
behavior.
All you have to do is say what you’re doing out loud.
It’s incredibly simple and takes no extra effort, but transforms your habitual recall.
A 2010 study tested this exact phenomenon.
They split participants up into two groups.
One read words silently, while the other said every word out loud.
Sure enough, the second group recalled content better than their counterparts, showing the
huge impact that vocal production has on recall.
By incorporating this simple but powerful technique, you can start to instantly sharpen
your memory.
2.
The Power of Paper Over the years, pencil and paper have fallen
out of favor.
In most colleges and even some high schools, students are taking notes exclusively on computers.
Typing lets you copy down more information at a faster rate, but what if typing your
notes is making it harder for you to learn?
A 2014 study compared the test scores of students who typed and wrote out their notes.
The researchers guessed that the pencil and paper students would perform better.
Turns out, they were right.
Pencil and paper students out-performed typing students, because of how writing things out
interacts with your brain.
This older method forces you to spend less time copying and more time processing.
Many students can type as fast as their teachers talk.
Without realizing it, they do more transcribing than actual learning.
Because pencil and paper is slower, you have to constantly condense and restructure new
information.
In other words, you get a deeper understanding by writing less.
Pencil and paper also gets rid of the most detrimental key on the keyboard: delete.
You need to be able to make mistakes while you learn.
When you type, it’s too easy to mindlessly erase errors without understanding what was
wrong.
On paper, you’re forced to make physical corrections.
That way, you’re learning from your mistakes, instead of pretending they never happened.
3.
Context Cues Context sharpens your memory, because it’s
encoded alongside the information you’re trying to remember.
Let’s say you want to memorize a presentation for work.
While you’re practicing a really difficult section, you start eating an apple.
Your brain will naturally pair the apple and that part of the presentation in your memory.
The apple becomes a sort of cue that you can use to retrieve more complication information.
These contextual cues can take pretty much any shape, but the most common is visual.
Another study from 2010 examined the exact role of visual context in memorization.
The researchers gave each participant a set of words to remember.
Each word was paired with a certain type of picture.
Group 1 saw pictures of normal faces, while group 2 saw pictures of scrambled faces.
As the researchers predicted, visual context significantly boosted recall.
The first group, who saw pictures of normal faces, had a much easier time remembering
their list of words.
In each of these examples, there’s been a noticeable stimulus, but context cues will
work either way.
The uniqueness of cues like the apple or the picture didn’t actually matter.
So you don’t have to do a bunch of weird stuff while you study just to improve your
memory.
Your brain encodes all types of context in the same way, so all you have to do is be
aware of your environment.
4.
Spacing Effect Every student has been told at some point
not to cram right before a test… yet we’ve all done it anyway.
You’ve known about the test for weeks, but try to re-learn an entire semester’s worth
of information in 24 hours.
How does this strategy usually play out?
You end up only remembering a fraction of what you studied.
Your brain gets so overwhelmed and exhausted that it can’t perform.
According to the Director of the Cognition and Education lab at Dartmouth College, our
brain can only retain so much information at one time.
We need extended periods of practice to make durable memories.
Scientists call this the spacing effect, because the space in between practice sessions is
what gives our brain the chance to encode and recover.
To test this, researchers looked at two different learning techniques: massed practice and distributed
practice.
Think of massed practice like cramming.
After being exposed to a stimulus, you try to retain all of that information by studying
it immediately afterwards.
And just like cramming, it doesn’t typically work.
Distributed practice is when you spread the learning process out over several shorter
sessions.
By studying the same thing each time, you actually absorb the information, so you can
recall it whenever necessary.
But why does spacing make such a big difference?
The best explanation is called study-phase retrieval theory.
Each time you encounter a piece of information that you’ve learned before, your brain tries
to retrieve any encoded memories.
When it successfully finds a memory, the information becomes harder for you to forget.
Distributed practice forces you to do this repeatedly while creating necessary space
in between.
That way, you have time to remember something, forget it, and then remember it again.
Each time, the information becomes more pronounced.
It becomes easier and faster to recall, because it’s sitting closer to the surface of your
memory.
5.
Mental Stretches Why do athletes always stretch or jog before
practice?
A good warm-up gives your muscles the flexibility and strength to perform at their best.
For most people, this is second nature.
Obviously, you can’t just start sprinting right off the bat… so why do you expect
your brain to do the same thing?
Like any muscle, your brain needs the right warm up to maximize it’s potential.
It can’t go from 0 to 100 instantly.
You can’t transition from watching Netflix to learning some complex concept.
If you do, you’re going to feel hazy and slow.
You’re going to have a hard time absorbing information, because your brain isn’t ready.
You can use mental stretches to prepare your brain to work, think, and encode memories
efficiently.
Mental stretches are low intensity games that gradually get you brain up and running.
Concentration is a great example.
Not only is it quick and relatively fun, but it also focuses on boosting your ability to
retain information.
Just make sure you aren’t going too hard too fast.
Mental stretches shouldn’t make you feel cloudy or cluttered.
If your warm-up is too intense, your brain will start feeling fatigued way faster than
normal.
Always keep things fun and simple to see improvements in your cognitive performance.
6.
Interleaving You can actually stimulate your memory by
regularly alternating between different topics.
Interleaving is the process of mixing multiple subjects to enhance your ability to learn.
You might, for example, start with math, transition to English, and then finish with history,
all in the same study session.
On the surface, interleaving sounds pretty inefficient.
It’s exactly the opposite of blocking, which is probably the most common learning technique
out there.
Blocking is when you dedicate an extended period of time to only one subject.
You might spend Monday on math, Tuesday on English, and Wednesday on history.
Blocking makes more sense to most people, but interleaving is actually more effective.
Rotating between topics forces your mind to stay active and adaptable.
When you only learn one thing at once, your brain slacks off.
It pays less attention, because things are getting easier and more repetitive.
By jumping from subject to subject, you force your brain to completely shift gears each
time.
These smaller, hyper-efficient chunks are easier to learn from, because they offer more
of a unique challenge.
But that isn’t even the best part of interleaving.
This learning technique compels you to draw broader connections in a way that blocking
never will.
You’re giving your brain the opportunity to see the bigger picture.
To not only understand what something is, but also where it fits into the field as a
whole.
7.
Self-Testing Self-testing is another effective way to boost
your memory.
Once you think you have something memorized, you shouldn’t wait until your exam or presentation
to test whether or not you studied enough.
Put yourself to the test beforehand to get an idea of how well you actually know the
content.
9 times out of 10, you’ll discover you’re not as prepared as you thought.
Luckily, self-testing show you exactly where you’re weakest.
It tells you what you need to re-learn, but only if you do it right.
Your tests won’t do anything for you if you let yourself cheat.
For example, when you’re using flashcards, don’t flip over the card before you answer.
It’s tempting to make excuses like, “Oh, that’s what I meant,” but you’re only
hurting yourself.
If you can’t get the right answer in this low-stress situation, there’s no way you
will when the pressure’s on.
To make this doesn’t happen, try to write down or say your answers out loud.
It’s easier to let an incorrect answer slip by when the test is in your head.
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