We all faced cases, when we forgot something important. What makes us forget the necessary things and do not recollect them when needed? Scientists could not find the exact answer on this question, but they have discovered a few principles of how our memory works. Based on those principles, there were a lot of memorizing techniques developed.
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1. Rule of Attention
To remember something you should be maximally concentrated on the material. Remove the distracting factors, such as side thoughts, noise (phone rings, sound of TV set or radio etc.), tiredness, irritation, and haste.
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2. Rule of Brightness
We remember bright and unusual things the best. To memorize better, you should add something bright to the required information. Think of the text written on a balloon or numbers in form of flowers on the road.
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3. Rule of Understanding
If you understand what you have read or/and learned, you will help your brains a lot to memorize the info. Highlight unknown words, return back to the sentences where you saw them; ask your tutor lots of “childish” questions until you get the point.
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4. Rule of Meaningfulness
Any information can be divided into 3 groups by its meaningfulness. The necessary information for life goes to the first group (regime of having meals, possible dangers etc.). This information stays in your mind without any efforts. The second group includes interesting and subjectively important information. It is easy to remember as well. The third group contains the rest. This is a huge amount of facts so it is the most difficult to remember them all. To resolve the problem with the information from the third group, make yourself interested in it, and convince yourself in its importance. You will thus move it from the third to the second group.
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5. Rule of Activity
If you perform some actions with information, you will remember it better. Calculate something, compare the parameters, find the regularity etc.
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6. Rule of the Previous Knowledge
The new information gets connected with the one you already know. The mind compares the facts, finds the common features, sets associative connections etc. Based on this principle, you will easily memorize details concerning the issue you are already aware of. So, to memorize better, you should memorize more.
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7. Rule of Settings
Set when you will need the details you are going to remember: the date, the month, the year or the whole life.
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8. Rule of the Memory Brakes
There are two processes that brake memorizing. Proactive brakes: the previously remembered information prevents memorizing of the next one. Retroactive brakes: the further information brakes memorizing of the previous one. To cheat your brain a bit, memorize at mornings or evenings, make breaks while learning, do not learn the information of the same type one by one (for example mathematics and historical dates), do not perform difficult tasks one by one: let your brains have some time to process the information.
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9. Rule of the Temporal Layer
Information is kept in the form of layers, meaning that the facts learned at particular time will be interconnected. If you want to recollect something, think of other tasks you were doing that day.
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10. Classic Associations
It is known that any potato and every melon is connected in your memory to all the potatoes and melons you’ve ever seen (and, of course, all the situations when you encountered these vegs are memorized in relation to them, according to the ninth rule above). Speaking in metaphor, in order to recall info about some Bella Rosa potato statistical sizes in 1979 just start thinking over vegetables – that will give you a trace to follow.
