9 Easy Habits to Improve Your Learning and Memory Skills
Cramming an exam, the salsa dance steps from last class, or a grocery list. Luckily, we can help our brains a little (or, a lot).
It’s uncountable how many times I’ve remembered something unimportant, instead of something I ‘needed’ to remember.
Take the lyrics of Natasha Bedingfield’s first album, I’m completely fine to live without them. But that story my bf told me and was important to him (and me); I wish I remembered that in more detail.
With plenty of information thrown at us, it’s a demanding task of the brain to remember everything. Not even everything, ‘only’ what we decide is important, is a lot.
Besides it being ‘nice’ that we remember better, it’s great brain gymnastics to apply memory techniques. See it as like going to the gym. Our brains are truly happy longer when they can strengthen their muscles.
Let’s see what we can do to give our brains a headstart.
It depends on the type and the amount of information you want to remember which method to choose. A combination of memory techniques works best. More learning techniques, more pathways to the information your brains will have. See which ones resonate for you.
Memory Techniques
1— Focus
First and foremost, focus.
With that, I mean to allow your brains to focus on one thing at a time. Set a certain amount of time for a task and make it specific (‘the upcoming two hours I’ll work on the project due on Friday’). Turn off notifications. Silence the phone. Work in a calm way, no need to rush.
You will be surprised how much time there is in an hour.
Our consciousness works serial: it does one thing, and then the next. We can’t multitask. It’s how our brains are wired to protect us from overload.
Use this to your advantage. It means that when you’re doing one thing, something else can’t enter your consciousness simultaneously. The more we utilize and practice this, the more we are able to be in the moment, not be distracted by thoughts, and learn and work efficiently and enjoyably.
Working and studying can be clear-minded and flowing. Feel free to enjoy it.
2 — Make it personal
Relate to what you’re learning. Make it yours.
For example, you’re learning for a full-on psychology exam. It has all these terms thrown around.
Take neurotransmitters. What do they mean? What would it look like if you had a disbalance in them? What does it feel like to have too much dopamine? Or too little?
By translating concepts to ourselves, making stories, we can relate. Internalize it.
In this way, it becomes something easy to remember, because it almost feels like we’ve experienced it. And experiences are much easier to remember than loose facts or words.
3 — Sleep
Maybe an unexpected one in this list, but so important. Sleep a proper amount of hours before the day of The Event. And if there’s no specific event, sleep to treat your brains well in general.
Sleep has many functions. Research has shown that if we’re sleep deprived we’re much worse on any cognitive test, or anything, really. We’re slower, make mistakes, and can’t focus. It impacts our metabolism, cells, and organs. Sleep improves our cognitive (and motoric) abilities immensely.
It’s better to not study the night before an exam and to sleep a proper amount instead of the other way around. (Assuming you’ve studied some before that night.)
I’ll get into more detail about what sleep can do for you in a different article. For now, I hope you take with you that sleep is a true gift to many body parts, and surely for your brains and memorizing.
4— Loci, to localize
Have you ever moved from one room to another to get something, and when you arrived you were clueless why you went there?
I call it The Sims Effect. The Sims is a game where you can design a family, their house, what they do, and try to meet their needs. Perhaps you have also experienced how their lives can become a complete disaster, but that’s a different story.
The ‘tasks’ they receive are displayed above their heads, in order. We can remove these tasks by clicking on them.
That’s what happens when I go upstairs to get the charger. I arrive there, ‘plop’, my task got removed, and I don’t have a clue why I went up there in the first place. The best thing to do to remember why I went upstairs is to go downstairs. Being downstairs I immediately remember ‘of course, the charger’.
That’s how Loci works. We memorize better when we link what we need to remember to a location.
We can use it for a grocery list, for example. Before leaving the house (instead of writing down the ingredients), think of the location where they should be.
Fridge, upper shelf, butter. Cupboard, left of the green tea, coffee.
Scan your house while being in the supermarket, and fill in the spots with ingredients.
(Yes, nowadays I try to apply Loci whenever I can, instead of going downstairs to remember why I went upstairs.)
5 — Mnemonic
Terrible word to pronounce, I agree. No need to remember that one. Go for the technique.
With a mnemonic device, as it’s called, we for example put letters in an order to remember more words. Such as HOMES for the Great Lakes in North America: Lake Huron, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, Lake Superior. This way we don’t have to remember the names individually but can retrieve them when we think of HOMES.
The knuckles used to memorize the days of the months is another one. With that trick, we don’t need to remember that May has 31 days. We can scan our knuckles and find out.
These mnemonic devices are easy to make. Take the first letters of the impossible words you try to remember and put them in order. Or in a slightly different order, if that helps to remember.
You can also ask yourself: what does the word or name look or sound like?
An example. Imagine a person named John Carper. He was a major pioneer in the fabric industry and created beautiful patterns. We are studying his work for our art history class. When thinking of his name, we can make ‘carpet’ from it. That way his name is easy to get to during the exam.
Be creative, go funky. That way learning can be fun at times and makes it even easier to remember.
6 — Overview method
This is great for an exam, courses, or other events where a lot of (text) information comes together.
Before diving deep into all the information you need to know: scan first. Scan the whole shebang. Check the titles, subtitles, and highlighted terms. Don’t read the big chunks yet. This gives your brains an overview.
Why is this handy?
Later, your brains can more easily organize the new information in your head. You already know more or less what goes where.
An example to explain the effect. Let’s say, you have the first day of a new job ahead of you. It’s a big company with lots of employees. You know you will meet many new colleagues on your first day. In this example, you would like to remember who works with whom and in which department.
You happen to see a map of the company’s structure on their website. It displays the departments, how they’re connected, and how the company flows.
What happens if you don’t see this map before you meet your new colleagues? Nothing terrible. But it’s more difficult to organize the names, links, and relationships in your mind.
When seeing this map in advance, you can quite easily ‘put the people on the map’ in your mind. This way we can see a pattern, and the connections. And, importantly, remember the people better next time.
7 — Spread out learning
As much as our memory likes structured information, it loves repetition and small chunks. (Yep, this is how Natasha Bedingfield got stuck in my head 15 years ago.)
I know it can be difficult to start when the deadline is far away. With this method, you will do your future self a huge favor.
In case you have an exam. Cut the information you need to know in parts. Study 10–30 minutes every day instead of blocking 2–3 days (and nights) before the exam.
The information will sink in deeper. Everything makes more sense. You remember it much longer. And it’s way easier to reach it at The Moment it’s needed.
8— Mindmapping
Like the before-mentioned overview method, this helps to get an overview. A visual one. And because we make it ourselves, it sticks even better.
It’s especially nice for people who enjoy something tangible, instead of a screen.
Don’t worry about the esthetics. Of course, feel free to go wild with pens, markers, colors, pencils. You can for example choose a color for a specific topic or theme, to make the mindmap more structured.
Get a big sheet of paper. Start at the middle. What’s this whole thing about, in one word? Write it down.
Now expand. What’s the first main topic that comes to mind when you think about this? And the next one? Write it beside the word in the center.
Connect the words with lines. What effects what in which way? In what order do things happen?
Continue like this. You’ll have everything you need to know in a visual structure.
9— Visualizations
You might think why the hell is coffee shown here, it’ll get clear in a sec.
Visuals work, research shows. Visualizing an action is almost the same for your brain as actually doing the action itself.
I have had periods of insomnia. I’d lay in bed and couldn’t sleep. My mind was too awake to sleep, my body too tired to get out of bed. It was extremely helpful and relaxing to visualize myself doing Yin Yoga. Visualizing made my body and mind experience I was actually doing those postures.
This method can be very helpful when for example having to perform physical tasks at work.
Such as, working as a barista and learning all the new skills. Visualize yourself doing all the steps needed. Weigh the beans, grind the beans, tamp the ground coffee, etcetera.
Visualizing yourself doing this makes it much easier for your mind to retrieve the steps when needed. With less stress.
Conclusion
Our brains work hard. We throw a lot and all kinds of information at them, almost non-stop. No wonder some things slip our minds.
That being said, we can truly help ourselves and treat our brains well. Give them the information they need to remember in an enjoyable way. Make learning fun for them and yourself.
That way you’ll remember more, save time while learning or studying, retrieve memories faster, and be more relaxed while you’re doing what you’re doing.
I’m hoping this article was useful to you. And I’m very curious: what helps you? I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Have a lovely day!
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