Memory Tips and Tricks to Improve Recall & Learning
The ability to efficiently and accurately recall information is so important for learning. Whether it’s learning to read, learning a new job, studying for exams, or learning the names of people you just met, here are some memory tips and tricks for you to try.
The Big Picture: Protect Your Brain Health
Memory and recall are functions of your brain that require lots of different areas to work together. Research shows that regular exercise, lower stress, healthy fats, and other nutritious food choices can help improve the communication pathways in your brain. Quality sleep is also critical. Sleep is the time when your brain stores information and processes new knowledge, and a lack of sleep can be hugely detrimental to your ability to concentrate and remember new things.
Memory Tips & Tricks:
If you feel like you’re always one step behind, or if your child struggles in school, here are some memory strategies to try!
Visual Images
When you can “see” something in your mind, you are more likely to remember it. If someone tells you their name, getting in the habit of making a quick picture can help it stick. Or if you’re trying to remember facts for an exam, rather than just remembering lists of words, turning these things into a “movie in your mind” with actions, senses, and connections will help them “stick” more efficiently.
Example: You just met a man named Joe Carpenter. Instead of just trying to remember that, picture him as a wood-working carpenter building a large wooden coffee mug (“cup of joe”). This association and image will help you remember his name more easily!
Put It To Music or a Mnemonic
Using songs, rhymes, imaginative connections, acronyms, or other similar tools can help make knowledge more easily accessible. The more you practice this, the easier it will become so you can find the tools that work best for you as an individual.
Chunk and Organize
If you’re approaching a large body of information that you need to remember, just trying to learn it by osmosis is not going to be effective. Instead, take this approach:
- Actively break it into pieces (in a way that makes sense to you)
- Find things that are alike and “sort” those together in your mind
- Find bits that you can apply to previous knowledge and form a connection
- Use some of the other tools listed here to make each fact, memory, name, or concept more vivid and memorable
These small steps take something large and daunting and create lots of smaller things that are actually easier to remember.
Make “Pegs” and Associations
The art of remembering efficiently is about “taking information that is lacking in context, lacking in meaning and figuring out a way to transform it so that it makes sense in the light of all the other things that you have floating around in your mind” (Joshua Foer).
The ability to make associations, connect them to key pieces of knowledge, and use these connections to actively recall new things is the secret many individuals use in extreme cases like memory competitions. Pegs are facts or concepts that you are confident in. Over time, you can “hang” new knowledge on these pegs so it is easier to remember and recall!
Hand Write It Down (Typing Doesn’t Count!)
Taking notes by hand is more effective than typing for cementing new knowledge into your brain. But don’t sit there writing down every word verbatim – the process of hearing, deducing the main points, and putting THAT into writing in your own words is more helpful than simply rote transcription would be.
Especially as more and more of our learning experiences move online, being intentional with hand-written notes can help some learning and recall become more successful!
Repetition and Time
Actively quizzing yourself on new information refreshes the neural connections that you use to learn and remember. For most of us, just hearing something once is not enough to cement it into learned knowledge. The repetition of revisiting, active recall, and spacing out these sessions over a longer period of time can help new knowledge “stick” in a way that just reviewing it would not.
Example: When you’re studying for a test, don’t just keep your notes open in front of you. Close the book and see how much you really know. Doing this over and over again, gradually increasing the time duration between sessions, will help the information move to long-term memory.
Memory Help That Makes Your Brain Stronger
These memory tips and tricks are helpful tools, but what do you do when nothing seems to work? Poor cognitive skills can make recalling information much harder than it needs to be. Whether for a 1st grader memorizing spelling rules or an 80 year old struggling to remember day-to-day essentials, building cognitive skills is a great way to improve the efficiency and strength of your memory.
Brain training targets weak memory by building in strategies to improve auditory memory, visual memory, working memory, and more. These strategies translate into improved short- and long-term memory—and greater confidence at any age!
Find out more about our approach to memory help for adults here, or our help for struggling students here.
