How to Improve your Memory
Do you know you can challenge your brain everyday to improve memory?
Stimulating your brain should be a high priority in your life. It provides positive results in the long term for your overall health. Specifically, it keeps your brain healthy and strong. One way to stimulate your brain is to focus on training and improving your memory.
The hippocampus is a major part of your brain. This area of your brain is linked with long-term memory and spatial navigation. This is the part of your brain you should be trying to exercise in order to improve your memory and to strengthen and challenge your brain as a whole.
Attention is a component that helps us achieve better memory skills. It is our ability to focus a single subject or object while tuning everything else out. By placing your focus on that one item, it causes you to form a personal interaction with it. Even further, it can create personal meaning or attachment to it.
Two ways of helping focus your attention is through the use of elaboration and repetition. Elaboration is a technique that allows you to give more meaning to the item or fact you are trying to commit to memory. Combining visual, auditory or other factors to the focused item helps you to remember it better. And, of course, repetition helps in this process as well. Reciting a fact over and over in your head will help you remember it.
Interestingly enough, mnemonic techniques are not as helpful as we may all think. For example, the mnemonic Roy G. Biv may not necessarily help you remember the names of the colors, but it does help you remember the order of the colors in the rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Same with the planetary mnemonic – My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.
This mnemonic essentially helps an individual to remember the order of the planets from the sun, but it doesn’t necessarily help you with the actual names of the planets. However, now that Pluto isn’t considered a planet anymore, a new mnemonic probably needs to be created for students.
These techniques are helpful when we are young, but the older we get the harder our brains have to work to complete the same task that would have been easier on our brains as a young child. As we get older, our brains slow down which causes difficulty in learning new things as adults. Basically, it becomes harder for us to focus on any one thing.
As adults, we need to exercise our brains so that it becomes easier on our brains to learn new things and to commit things to memory. The harder it gets to focus on just one thing, the more effort it takes. Don’t get distracted or discouraged. Keep practicing. When you’re learning something new, give yourself enough time to commit things to your brain before moving onto something else. Make sure you’ve given meaning to an item before moving onto the next item that you are trying to learn.
Photo by Tim Psych
