There’s something called “spaced repetition” that is incredibly effective and efficient at locking information into long term memory.
The basic idea is that the best time to review information is right before you forget it. When first encountering new info, you should review it again fairly soon, like within 10 minutes or so. Then go do something else and review again in one hour, then half a day or so later, and so on… Each time you successfully review the information the amount of time you can take until the next review increases. After only a few reviews, the information should stay with you for weeks, then months, then be fairly locked in almost permanently.
There are apps that can schedule reviews for you. One of the most popular around here is Anki. It is a flashcard app that is extremely customizable and contains a built in algorithm to schedule cards for review based on how you rate the ease of answering the card. If you rate it as “easy” it will extend the time between your next review. If you rate it “hard” it may shorten the time until you see it again.
Using spaced repetition, along with other memory techniques is amazingly effective for learning and retaining information!
Yes indeed. This forum is all about exploring techniques like this. Most common memory techniques involve taking abstract or boring information and converting it into a form that is more memorable, either through representational images, little mini story scenes, or other forms.
A memory palace or memory journey is a way to organize those mnemonic scenes in a way that takes advantage of most human’s innate skill of spacial awareness and navigation. By imagining a familiar route and picking out sequential “landmarks” along the way, you can use those landmarks as settings for memorable mnemonic scenes that represent the information you want to remember. As you imagine navigating these paths, the landmarks should provide a prompt for the scenes that you’ve created, and you just decode the imagery to bring back that information.
A quick example: I’m going to the store and want to remember the 5 things I need to buy. Candy Bars, Eggs, Swiss Cheese, Beer, and Bacon. I can imagine walking up my driveway to my house and passing my mailbox, my vegetable garden, my shed, my basketball hoop and my garage door. I’d imagine each item or something that represents it doing something at each location. I open the mailbox and a waterfall of candy bars pours out. In my veggie garden, the vines have eggs on them instead of cucumbers. The ramp up to my shed is a huge slice of swiss cheese. I use the rim of the basketball hoop as an enormous bottle opener and pop open a gigantic beer bottle. A pig smashes through my garage door and nearly knocks me over as it tries to escape being turned into bacon.
These really simple images are very memorable, and because I’ve set the scenes in a location I’m very familiar with, its really easy to imagine them and recall them later.
You can also link images together in one connected story to help you remember: as you open a candy bar, an egg falls out of the wrapper, and the egg falls onto the sharp edge of a wedge of swiss cheese and cracks open, and out of the holes of the cheese pours foamy bubbly beer.
These ideas can be expanded to help remember all kinds of things.
There are also techniques that allow you to turn abstract things like numbers and symbols into more solid representations like people and objects to make them much easier to remember. Things like account and phone numbers or math formulas can be learned and remembered quickly and easily with these techniques.
The science is inconclusive as to the impact of things like daily brain puzzles on cognitive function, but I think the important habit to get into is to be an active thinker. If you consciously remember to remember, it should help you remember better!
If you find a motivation to care about the information that you are working with, that should help as well. Whether its school, work, personal interest, or just as a personal challenge to see if you can do if, finding a healthy reason to learn and memorize what you want goes a long way.
I think a trap many people fall into here is wanting to just memorize without understanding. People are looking for shortcuts to just “become a walking encyclopedia” or something where you could be able to reproduce information verbatim, but if you don’t understand it or aren’t passionate about why you want to learn it, it likely won’t stick and the process won’t be that much fun or interesting. It will be a lot of effort towards something that won’t really provide much benefit unless you can define what that benefit is.
There are tons of threads on here that explore just this question. You can also post examples and we can talk through different ways to approach what you are trying to learn or remember better!
The first step is to pick something small scale that you feel would be a little bit challenging to remember, but that you would really love to be able to remember well. Make a post detailing what it is and see what kind of suggestions you get. After you play around with some techniques and see what kind of results you can achieve, you can branch out to more and more complex things and start to figure out what kind of techniques work well for you.
One last bit of advice on that note… There is no single “perfect” technique that fits everyone and works “best.” Everyone’s brain is a little different when it comes to the things that really “click” and “stick.” Be skeptical of people who use subjective and absolute terms to describe systems when they make suggestions to you. What one person may describe as the “best” may not work well at all for you, and a technique that that person absolutely hates may be a great fit for how you perceive and process information. The only way to know if a technique is the “best” for you is to try it and see.
Have fun exploring!
