4 scientifically proven ways to activate memory and retain information

Psychology research indicates our inability to accurately monitor the level of our knowledge and skills, so we tend to exaggerate what we understand and know, which encourages us to use the same failed methods of study. What science advises us to perform better?

divide your effort

It is certain that filling the brain with information once on exam night is the most common strategy among students in transitional stages, yet research since the late 19th century has shown that distributing study time over a larger number of sessions and reducing the duration of one session is better than collecting and reviewing the curriculum in one long session .

The theory was confirmed year after year through 200 research studies, and a research team at Santa Clara University in California confirmed that preparing for the exam only two or three days before - no matter how repeated the information - was a waste of effort, so important details are lost, and it is difficult to integrate the information in a purposeful and tidy manner.

To avoid this, divide the syllabus into several sessions spaced out, one to two hours every two days, or at least once a week rather than stuffing it in your head during the 12 hours before the exam. During the session, each session is also an opportunity for you to review the syllabus or course repeatedly over multiple sessions so that you can use your memory for the long term.

Stuffing the brain with information once on the night of the exam is the most common strategy among students, but it is a useless method (social networking sites)

Remember and repeat

We think that reading a text many times makes it familiar, but our memory does not take pictures like a camera. Instead of looking at the text and repeating it a lot, memory works when you understand how to use our previous knowledge and new information to combine them together, so that your ability to retrieve information in one study session does not mean that you retrieve it when needed .

You can use your effort to practice "repetitive retrieval," which involves remembering information more than once so that it becomes easier to retrieve it in the future.

Psychology researchers at Purdue University in Indiana explain the benefits of this practice. In one of their studies, they divided participants into 4 groups, while they were learning a foreign language word. The first group repeated reading the word without trying to retrieve it, the second retrieved the word once, and the third group retrieved the word. 3 times in one 30-minute session, and the fourth group retrieved the word 3 times in different sessions.

It was not surprising that the last group's ability to retrieve information was 80% compared to 30% of the third group, and less than 1% for the first and second groups.

mix materials

When organizing a study schedule, we usually separate different subjects to finish one subject before starting another, but recent research has proven that alternating between different subjects can be more effective, especially for subjects that are similar in nature and can be easily confused, such as social sciences for example.

“Alternation” is not limited to completely different subjects, but it works within one subject, alternating between several chapters. If you divide a study schedule for a subject into chapters, so that each chapter is interested in explaining a different class of drugs, you can change the way you remember, from focusing on a drug One is to focus on definitions of drugs, then how they work, and then their side effects.

Psychological research suggests that alternating and shifting study directs your attention to looking for differences between topics, such as a comparison table, but instead of listing complete data for one column, you list the first category of each column to achieve the goal of comparison.

Preparing for the exam only two or three days before - no matter how repetitive the information - a waste of effort (social networking sites)

Do not use the summaries of others

In our university years, we used to go to the library and print the student’s summary of the materials days before the exam. That student wrote the summary through his own understanding and reconstructed the information he received and produced it in a new form, but those who print his production will not be able to form their own understanding.

If you are asking about the most important motivator for understanding silly material, it is the question about what you read. By answering your own questions you are forcing yourself to think about how to explain the material in your own words, pointing to your previous knowledge of other parts and merging them together to build a strong memory.

You can use the Detailed Questioning approach by systematically asking questions in your reading, and writing clear explanatory answers in your own style. Try to focus on the interpretation as much as possible, because your goal is to make the information meaningful to you. Questions that begin with "how" and "why" will help.

Use your summary in the beginning to test yourself periodically until you dispense with it, and make "recall" part of the study routine, because people often tend to re-read the syllabus rather than testing their ability to remember the information.