Improving Your Memory

With the enormous amount of new information which is becoming available to us, there is more and more that we are expected to remember. Here are some ideas for improving your memory:

Repeat and repeat.

Say it out loud over and over again, or look at it over and over again. But be alert while you are doing it. Be in the “active” mode when you are repeating your information.

Personalize the information.

If at all possible, relate the information to something about yourself or your life. For instance, if you need to know a history date, see if it relates to a family member's birthday or another date which has personal meaning.

Use your imagination.

Draw a picture or a diagram in your mind of what you need to remember. For instance, if there are three people you must remember with a specific event, try to picture them there. Give the people and the places names you can remember. Then relate those names to their real names. By picturing the place and people at the time you need to remember, the facts will come back to you.

Use relationships.

Create relationships of the information to information which you already know. For instance, if you are familiar with a period of history through a story you have read, you can then relate that information to a chapter in history.

Draw a diagram on paper.

Put the information in clusters of related facts. Then draw lines to connect the ideas. You will be able to better memorize all the ideas if they are organized. You can also then picture the diagram and fill in the blanks as needed.

Use the outrageous.

You might sing the information to a tune you know. Create a rap or a poem.

Look for something odd.

For spelling words, you might use this technique: break down the word or look for something unique about it. For instance, “capacity” becomes “cap a city.” (You can then picture a city with a big cap on it!) Another example is that the word “achievement” has the word “eve” in it.

Create an acronym out of the sentences or words you need to learn.

For instance, the acronym ICPAC stands for the Indiana College Placement and Assessment Center. Or make a sentence acronym of names or words you need to learn. An example of this would be “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas” to remember the planets in order in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

Link items.

To remember a list of items, link the first item with the second, the second to the third, and so on.

Path method.

Imagine a path, and place items to be remembered along the path. For instance, if you need to remember the order of battles fought during a war, identify the battles along an imaginary path. It might be easier than trying to learn a list of the battles.

“Research shows people can remember 25 to 50 percent more simply by intending to remember,” states Debbie Nelson from Indiana University. “It's a matter of focusing on remembering. There's no such thing as a bad memory - only an untrained memory.” According to studies, most people use only three percent of their brain.