The more you can explain about the way your new learning
relates to prior knowledge,” the authors write, “the stronger your grasp of the
new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you
remember it later.”
Developmental psychologists and cognitive scientists have
found range of factors that help do just that — and some of them are pretty
weird.
Here are a few.
Reading physical books will improve your memory of what you
read, since memory is also tactile.
We usually think of reading as a totally visual exercise;
after all, it’s just your eyes scanning the page, right?
Not quite. Turns out that we remember things better when we
read them in a more physical form, like say, for instance, a book. It’s because
the experience of reading is also tactile. When you’re reading a book, you’re
also holding it, feeling the heft of it in your hands. As you read through the
text, the pages move from your right hand to your left, redistributing the
weight of the book. Research suggests that your brain uses this movement of
weight as an anchor of memory.
A happy marriage lets you “distribute” your memory tasks
between you and your partner.
In news that will delight monogamists everywhere, research
shows that people in long-term relationships have several memory benefits
stemming from their couplehood — like recalling people’s names or what happened
at events.
When two people are in an intimate, long-term relationship,
they distribute the responsibilities of thinking in the same way that they
split up household chores.
One psych writer observed that a couple isn’t just two
individuals spending lots of time together, but a “socially distributed
cognitive system.” Put in plain English, two heads really are better than one.
A little “expressive writing” will free up your mental
resources, thus improving your ability to recall.
For 30 years, psychologists have been studying “expressive
writing“ — writing about difficult experiences for at least 15 minutes.
Experiments show the introspective exercise is much more than just navel
gazing. People who regularly write expressively have lower blood pressure,
higher productivity, and a greater sense of personal well-being.
North Carolina State University psychologist Kitty Klein has
shown that expressive writing increases memory, too. Her explanation:
Expressive writing lets people disclose thoughts they otherwise spend mental
energy trying to avoid, allowing more energy to be allocated toward memory.
A walk through the woods will put you at ease — and improve
your memory.
University of Michigan psychologists asked two groups of
experiment participants to go for walks. One group walked around an urban
environment, and the others wandered around a forest. Then they were given a
recall test. The folks who sauntered among the trees performed 20% better on
the memory test.
Connecting what you just learned with what you already know
will strengthen your memory.
Washington University cognitive scientists Henry L. Roediger
III and Mark A. McDaniel co-authored “Make It Stick,” a masterful book on the
way we learn. The book’s got tons of great takeaways, but the most immediate
are approaches for training memory. One of those techniques is elaboration —
the process of connecting novel information to what you already know.
“The more you can explain about the way your new learning
relates to prior knowledge,” the authors write, “the stronger your grasp of the
new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you
remember it later.”
Say, for example, you’re learning about heat transference.
Instead of memorizing the definition — heat moves from a hot object to a cooler
object — you could use an example the way that the heat from a hot cup of cocoa
warms up your hand on a chilly winter’s day.
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