Let’s check how well you perceive and remember information. Can you remember the phone number of two or three of your relatives? Do you remember the number and series of your passport? And when was your mother’s grandmother born? If you do not know the answers to these questions, then it’s time to train your memory. And if you could answer, then let’s find new tools to improve your skills.
Here are 11 tips to help improve your memory.
1. Eat Balanced Diet
You do not think that the car is able to drive with an empty fuel tank? Likewise, your brain cannot function at the optimal level without the necessary “fuel”.
By making three balanced meals a day, you give the brain what it needs: “fuel,” the right building material for optimal performance. This is the most basic thing you can do to develop memory.
2. Train Your Memory
Your body is the result of millions of years of evolution. To maintain the body in optimal condition, constant training is needed. Your distant ancestors did not lie all day on the couch.
Through training, you help your body and brain maintain the functions of all systems and organs at an optimal level. Through exercise, you improve the cardiovascular system, metabolism and the supply of nutrients to the brain. Physical activity provides a good night’s sleep and minimizes possible stress during the day. Maintaining a regime of physical activity, you keep a clear mind and remember everything you need
3. Get Enough Sleep
To make the most of your memorization skills, you must be calm and attentive. The main way to properly tune in to memory is to sleep enough.
With a lack of sleep, you will be unable to maintain the necessary concentration to encode what you want in your memory. Attention is the gateway to memory. If you are unable to maintain concentration, the gates will not open. Keep your gates open, relax and sleep enough
4. Extravagance
Any unusual, strange or absurd thing is remembered better than usual. For example, color and movement help to consolidate information in memory. It is much easier to remember the contents of the film than books, text underlined by colored lines than regular text. Come up with bright accessories – for example, put the ring on your other finger or tie a knot on the scarf.
5. Develop Attention Span
Attention is extremely important for memory. Concentrate to remember something. In the absence of attention, you will not be able to transfer short-term memories to long-term memory. Do everything you can to increase concentration. Do not engage in several tasks at the same time and do not jump from one activity to another.
Try to focus on some kind of activity, gradually increasing the duration.
6. Build Associative Relations
The brain consists of many systems that provide different ways of coding memories. Using several systems to encode information, you enrich your memory and facilitate the process of memorization.
The more ways you can remember something, the higher the chances that you will remember it.
For example, if you want to remember a certain car, pay attention to its brand, shape, color, smell, engine sound, as well as your feelings about driving this car. And then later you will easily remember him.
7. Imagine
Mental images play an important role in remembering information. The image is held in memory much better than the word. Therefore, visualization is used to memorize verbal material using the emotional component of visual associations.
8. Keep An Eye On The Context
As a rule, during the assimilation of information, the moment and place in which memorization takes place are also remembered. We all happened to greet a man on the street, although we could not remember how we knew him. To better remember, you need to associate the remembered with a specific context. Information learned in the context is better remembered if fragments of the context are present in the memory.
9. Add Some Stress
Did you know that stress stimulates your memory to work better. The reason lies in evolutionary development. It was life-threatening events that should have been remembered. In difficult conditions for life, everything happened at lightning speed, and only the fastest individuals who could remember this experience and accurately reproduce it with the necessary speed survived. This is also confirmed by the results of scientific research: the human brain instantly remembers the experience gained under stress and quickly reproduces it over time.
How to create this mild stress? Try to scare yourself a little or imagine that tomorrow you will have to pass the exam to a strict teacher.
10. Constantly Stimulate The Thought Process
For the development of memory, you need to constantly maintain the thought process in an active state. The lazy brain does not remember well.
No matter how old you are, always set yourself ambitious goals. In this case, the brain responds by forming more neural connections (via branches in the form of dendrites), and you remain attentive and involved in what is happening around.
11. Be Organized
Adhering to a certain order in your activity, you will better encode all the desired information into memories. Being organized does not mean being numb. This means distinguishing the experience gained and coding it into appropriate associative relations. Organize your life to gain the ability to remember.
You can also read:
Lucy Palladino – Find Your Focus Zone: An Effective New Plan to Defeat Distraction and Overload
“I Like to Win But I Like To Lose” – The Story Of A Man Who Challenged His Abilities