How To Train Your Brain To Remember Everything
Todd Sampson, an Australian TV personality, underwent a brain makeover in a six-episode series called Redesign My Brain. By the end of the first season, Todd was able to memorize and enumerate a shuffled deck of cards at the 2012 World Memory Championships in London.
“The brain is a dynamic organ”, says Psychology Today. “It can change its architecture throughout life, responding to experience by reorganizing connections — in short, by wiring and rewiring itself.”
Behind the Redesign My Brain project was Michael Merzenich, a psychologist who pioneered the fastest-growing science in the world — neuroplasticity. He wanted to prove his hypothesis that each part of our body is mapped onto its own area in the brain.
He believed that our central nervous system wasn’t as hard-wired as previously thought. He rightly guessed that there are specific exercises we can do to train our brain to excel in particular areas.
The method of loci (also called mind palace technique) is one of the mnemonic techniques used for developing superior memory performance. To put it simply, it’s all about associating new information with something you already know. And, in this case — places (“loci” means “places” in Latin).
Visualization is at the core of this method — the more vivid, the better. Joshua Foer, a writer who happened to win the U.S. Memory Championship, opens up about this technique in his TED Talk.
You have to pick a location (your home, neighborhood, office floor, etc.) that you know very well, and most importantly, you have to imagine the pathway you usually take navigating through that location.
Whatever the items you need to memorize, try placing them on the checkpoints along that path. So, let’s say you’re cramming for a chemistry exam and you need to remember this equation:
Now, imagine Mg opening the door and greeting you into your own home. You say hello and step in only to see hydrochloric acid appearing from behind the closet and taking magnesium by the hand.
The two of them take you to your living room. Suddenly, the hydrogen and chlorine from hydrochloric acid decide to go to the bathroom and come back with their twin brothers (H2 and Cl2).
They fight over magnesium, and magnesium decides to leave with the Cl twins leaving H2 twins behind. Breaking bad, right?
This technique does wonders for memorizing lists of items when you go grocery shopping, for example.
Like the previous method, it’s based on the power of visualization and association whereby something too familiar to remember is associated with something more meaningful to you. It’s also essential to make those items interact.
Let’s say you want to go shopping for coffee, bread, wine, and cheese.
Before you walk out the door, think about a situation where Kofi Annan (the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations) and Brad Pitt (the famous Hollywood actor) are having their photo taken under a grapevine, and the photographer says “cheese!”.
Once you step into the supermarket, the image is bound to stick in your memory.
3. Beat the Doorway Effect
Picture this all-too-common situation: you are sitting in your living room, and you suddenly remember you have to call someone. You dash for your phone that’s in the other room… but as soon as you go through the door, you no longer remember why you got up in the first place.
Walking through the doorway causes a temporary loss of memory, a study says. Because we experience a location update, our brain sets up a mental block. To stop being confused, you need to beat your mind to it.
The moment you decide you need to go to the other room to fetch or do something, stop yourself for a second and visualize yourself in that other room, doing what you intended to go there for.
If it’s the phone call, envision yourself actually finding the phone, dialing the number, and answering.
Our brains are wired for grouping things and seeing patterns, so why not use this superpower to improve memory performance?
It’s all about taking small bits of information and combining them into meaningful wholes i.e. larger units. According to the Peak Performance Center, chunking decreases the number of items you are holding in short-term memory by increasing the size of each item.
One example of chunking is creating keywords or acronyms. Our brain can hold 7 items maximum (+/-2), so you should not go over that number for a single unit.
Say you can’t memorize the names of the Great Lakes of North America — Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior. Take their first letters and make an acronym “HOMES”. Simple as that! For more advanced chunking techniques, check out this resource.
Spaced repetition is one of the best learning techniques that revolves around spacing out your studying intervals. It’s been discovered that “long-term memory is enhanced when learning events are spaced apart in time, rather than massed in immediate succession” (Vlach & Sandhofer 2012).
Scientists agree that we all possess a “forgetting curve”, meaning that our ability to retain the memory of something we’ve learned declines over time unless we stop at an ideal moment and review.
Depending on the complexity of the new information you’re trying to retain in your long-term memory, the moment you stop to review will vary.
The key is to stop at the right moment and repeat what you’ve learned. This needs to be done multiple times over a period of time.
The rule of thumb is that you should make your first review the day after you started studying. After that, you can make the second one after a week, the next one after approximately two weeks and the last one after a month. (As you can see, the periods double.)
If you’re afraid you can’t decide on your own, there are apps you can use to help you out. They are based on the old-school principle of flashcard studying with sophisticated algorithms that can gauge the intervals. The most popular so far are Anki, SuperMemo, TinyCards, and EdApp.
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” ― Albert Einstein
Have you ever been in a situation where you thought you’d learned something, and then, when you started explaining it to another person, it all got blurry? Well, you’re not alone.
Once you start learning something new (studying for an exam, reading a book, etc.), make a stop after every section or a chapter and share it with someone else!
Try and explain what you’ve learned as if you’re teaching a class. In fact. It’s been suggested, “that [when] students actually teach the content of a lesson, they develop a deeper and more persistent understanding of the material than from solely preparing to teach.” (Fiorella & Mayer 2013)
If you can’t find anyone in the mood for listening, be your own audience. Stand in front of the mirror and start talking.
While these tactics will surely increase your memory performance, you also need to take care of your brain’s wellbeing.
Get enough sleep and practice relaxation techniques as frequently as possible.
Of course, some foods will send your memorization potential skyrocketing too. Dark chocolate, blueberries, fatty fish, broccoli, and nuts should be topping your next shopping list. (Here’s a great way to start your super-brain journey: try and memorize these foods by using some of the techniques we’ve mentioned!)
Take baby steps at first, and don’t get discouraged if the methods don’t work right away. You could also combine several of them at once. For example, you can mix chunking and storytelling.
And remember, memory power is not a sign of intelligence or the lack thereof. It’s just one of the ways our minds work, and one of many you can amp up with enough practice and patience.
By Eric Sangerma (Medium). Image Credit: Rawpixel.