“ Making Memory Work: Tips to Improve Memory”
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It is difficult to imagine what life would be like without memory.
The meanings of thousands of everyday perceptions, the bases for the decisions we make, and the roots of our habits and skills are to be found in our past experiences, which are brought into the present by memory.
Memory can be defined as the capacity to keep information available for later use.
It includes not only remembering things like arithmetic or historical facts, but also involves any change in the way an animal typically behaves.
Memory is involved when a rat gives up eating grain because he has sniffed something suspicious in the grain pile.
Memory is also involved when a six-year-old child learns to swing a baseball bat.
There is no magical formula available yet for making everyone a wizard of memory. Many of the gimmicks that one hears about have proven to be mostly wishful thinking. For example, learning in sleep has never been shown to be effective. Indeed, one of the most important requirements for learning is to pay attention.
This also relates to the use of hypnosis, another potentially 'magic' learning aid. Under hypnotic suggestion people do learn a little faster, but the advantage is of just the magnitude expected if a person concentrates harder for any reason.
There are many variables that may make a difference in how well you learn and remember something. Spacing practice is one of these. It is usually better to study or practice a particular thing a little at a time rather than all at once, at least insofar as its meaning and logic are not impaired. Even the way in which flash cards deck of, say, French-English vocabulary is arranged for memorization can make a difference.
If the same card is studied twice in a row, the second practice does almost no good. It is best to study one card for a while, and then put it away while you study at least six or eight others.
After something has been learned, the degree of retention may be greatly influenced by the manner in which practice was organized. If instead of learning just to master, the learner goes on to study more, his rate of forgetting is much less rapid. Tests are even more effective in preventing forgetfulness.
In some cases, less will be forgotten in a month with a properly arranged test than in a single day without one. Tests are probably most effective, as compared with just more studying, when the material is already fairly well learned.
Certain methods of organizing information as it is learned can make it easier to retain and retrieve. These 'tricks' are sometimes called mnemonic devices. For example, medical students often try to remember a sequence of nerves by memorizing a poem in which the first letter of each word stands for the first initial of a nerve. Junior high school students use the same trick to remember the order of planets.
Another technique to help improve memory is to create a vivid visual image – one full of bizarre and unusual features – incorporating the thing or things to be remembered. These memory aids work by organizing the materials to be learned and making them more meaningful. They thus take advantage of things the person already knows to help make new connections more varied, rich and salient. Under what conditions these various memory aids work and do not work has not yet been established.
Does memorizing make a person a better “memorizer”? The answer is complicated. The use of various aids, together with proper organization of practice time and other good study habits, will increase your ability to learn and retain information. But simply doing a lot of memorization will not strengthen your memory. Practice makes you good only at exactly what you have learned.
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Memory Enhancement: Remembering Names Better
According to "How to Win Friends And Influence People" author Dale Carnegie, "a person's name is to him the sweetest and most important sound in the language." This statement couldn't be any more true. Many people who are masters in their particular industries practice this to their advantage.
Not all of us have the capacity to remember names. In fact, people's poor ability to recall names is so common that it has been the subject of many jokes. However, we have to realize that the failure to remember is a serious issue. Sure, it is very embarrassing. But, it can come at the expense of a friendship, or an important business relationship.
Carnegie was deeply bothered by this folly that he tried to study the reasons behind it and how it can be prevented. In his quest for answers, he found that a person's ability to accurately remember faces and names is not an inherent trait in people. It is a skill that may be learned and taught like any other subject in school.
Below are the steps he suggested so we can recall names a lot better. His recommendations take some practice, but, in the long run, are very effective.
1. Get someone's name clearly when he or she is being introduced to you. Don't hesitate to ask the person to repeat his or her name (politely, of course) if you did not hear it right the first time.
2. Give the name a chance to sink in. You can do this by repeating the name aloud around two to three times and using it during the succeeding conversation.
3. Study the face that owns the name. Note the person's distinguishing physical features. Does he have a mole? Does she have red hair? Does he have unique mannerisms?
4. Connect the name with the face. If this is difficult, try to assign something, an image, that's related to the name. For instance, Mr. Butler might actually be a butler or may dress like one. Or, as Carnegie suggests, create a silly image of the person and his name in your head. You're the only one who knows about this, anyway, so you might as well try to see if it does work.
The issue of name recall may seem minor, but it is actually serious. It has the power to gain peals of laughter, but it also has the capacity to destroy potential and existing relationships. Thus, we must all seek to improve our memories, especially with faces and names.
The ideas recommended by Dale Carnegie have worked for many already to improve their memory for people’s names, but you might have recalled boosting techniques of your own. Use them.
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