10 Suggestions For Improving Your Memory
Your life is full of activities, emotions and memories. Here is short advise from Kevin Daum (columnist, marketer and best-selling author).
1. Establish Routine
We rarely lose our keys or sunglasses because we put them in the same place every time. Sometimes you ''violate your program'' putting them in another place and it may be quite difficult to find them. The same applies to important information. If you establish specific e-mail and desktop folders for critical documents, you'll know right where to find them.
2. Go Against Habit
Let's say you always keep your keys in your right-hand pocket. Do on the contrary, put them in the left one in the morning! So when you are ready to leave you have to break your pattern a little. Find a new way to go to work or meet your friends in a place different from five years in succession. This is a good task to create new ideas and an excellent method to break a mechanical sequence.
3. Eat More Beneficial Food
Several food products filled with special antioxidants and vitamins really improve your brain activity. Add green tea, blueberries, salmon, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, dark chocolate and turmeric to your daily intake. Experts say a glass of red wine every so often can help as well. You can also read a book dedicated to ''brain food''.
4. Get More Sleep
Good sleep is clear mind and fresh thoughts. If you don't get enough sleep, you'll tax your memory and start forgetting things. Stay rested so you can keep your mind alert.
5. Have a Mental Workout
To make brain activity more efficient, get your brain used to continuous work (e.g., do sums/conundrums, study foreign languages). Ultimately, you can ''practice'' even trying to remember names at a party on the first try.
6. Create Stories
Names and numbers by themselves can be easily forgotten if there is little or no context involved. As you are being introduced to new information, be aware of the surroundings and any possible details you can associate with the specific information.Recognize the order of events and then you can replay them in your mind to retrieve the answer. Assume that you need to remember a 96-32-45 phone number. Let's suppose that 9 is for a sofa, 6 is for a pole, 3 is for a throne, 2 is for a street cleaner, 4 is for a devil and 5 is for a heel. So, create a story. A sofa positioned on a long pole is a throne for a street cleaner who is drunk as the devil and scratches his heel. The more funny, vulgar and preposterous story is, the more unlikely to forget it.
7. Write Things Down
Today having a smart device is not a problem. The keyboard on your computer, smartphone or tablet can help you take notes and keep records. The pen is mightier than the board when it comes to encoding the brain. The actual act of physically writing something down helps to register text in your mind where you can recover it later.
8. Get Creative
Make up poems or songs to lock important facts in your memory. They can be very powerful tools. For example, there is a mnemonic to remember π number (i.e., How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics) where number of letters in each word corresponds with its figures. However, self-authored phrases are always more memorizable.
9. Focus on Important Items
To shift facts from your short-term memory to long-term memory (i.e., a common student issue), focus on an important item while counting to 8 alligators (rabbits, cats, monkeys) and lock it in. Science dictates that this complicated, in our opinion, process takes about 8 seconds only.
10. Exercise
Known since our childhood, ''A sound spirit in a sound body'' proverb was never revoked. Thus, you will double quality and speed of brain activity. The author of the text came up with 18 column ideas on a 10-km run and was able to remember all 18 by the end.