Practical Memory Techniques For Real Life Situations
August 20th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Since Alzheimer’s disease became the disease du jour of the media, people have been afraid that any memory loss might be the onset of Alzheimer’s. But this is not true. And it’s never too late to learn how to improve your memory by easy to use memory techniques. There’s a lot of details in the world that constantly bombard us, so these memory techniques should help you learn what you need to remember when you need to.
Pronouncing Words Or Names
One of the most embarrassing things that can happen is pronouncing somebody’s name wrong, especially if that someone is either your boss or your client. It’s also frustrating for children (and adults) to get around tongue-twisting words like “abominable”. For this memory technique, you make a picture in your mind to help you learn how to correctly pronounce the word. Picture a bull staring at you, chewing cud. Inside of that bull is a ticking bomb. What do you have? A bomb in a bull – or the pronunciation of the word “abominable”.
Short Lists
Perhaps you’ve gone to the grocery store and didn’t bother to make a list because you only need a few things. But when you get home, darn it if you discover that you forgot something. One memory technique for remembering short lists is to devise a very short rhyme that includes all of the items on your list. For some reason, the brain remembers short rhymes better than prose. For even better memory, set it to a tune you know well. So, to the tune of “Take Me Out To The Ball Game,” your shopping list memory poem might sound something like:
“Take me out to the food store
Take me out to the crowd
Buy me some wheat bread and Snapple, Jack,
I would care for some ham for a snack!
So, it’s root, root, root
frozen veggies
Chicken broth, I implore
For it’s salt, pepper and paprika
That I need at the store!”
Okay, so it’s not Shakespeare, but that’s not the point.
Sleep On It
Another memory technique often works for those mulling over a stressful problem, like where you last put your half-written manuscript. Just put the lost item or idea out of your mind and try to get to sleep as usual. The unconscious often works on our problems as we sleep. When you wake up, you’ll most likely remember. Getting regular sleep will also help you to concentrate and remember these memory techniques.
Improve Your Memory with Simple Strategies
August 20th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Memory strategies or ways to improve your memory may seem like very complex procedures, and you may shy away from the whole process, just blaming the gazillion times you have misplaced your keys or forgotten to bring milk on your way home from work on your ‘poor memory’.
However, there are several fairly easy ways to improve your memory provided you have the willingness to do so. If you feel that memory loss is just a side effect of growing older and dismiss it, then memory strategies cannot really help you. However, if you take inspiration from older, wiser people who have very good memory despite being double your age, you can make a conscious effort to improve your memory.
Exercise Mind and Body
One of the simplest memory strategies is to lead a healthy lifestyle. Many research studies have shown that people that sleep well and eat a balanced diet have better memory. Those who exercise regularly pump more blood through the body and to the brain and hence have better ability to retain facts and figures. Conversely, people who live a lethargic lifestyle often put their retention ability ‘on hold’ and do not feel they can remember dates and numbers and names so they don’t even try.
Exercising your mind is also a great memory strategy by solving puzzles, playing games, reading and socializing. Sitting in front of the television cannot stimulate your brain as much as a book, a good conversation or a Sudoku puzzle can. If you have mastered a particular game, take it up a notch and go to more advanced levels so as to always challenge your brain and not let it be on rest mode
Associations
One of the most tried and tested memory strategy is to associate facts and figures with important events, pictures or other things so that you remember the association even if you don’t remember the actual event. For instance if you always forget your daughter’s wedding anniversary, associate the day with a holiday. Say she got married the day after Thanksgiving or a week before Easter; try to rely on the association as a memory strategy that will keep you up to date.
Visual Clues
If you want to remember something in the short term and do not have a piece of paper handy, try doing something unusual which when you’ll see that will remind you of the original thing. For instance, if you have to remember to buy eggs on your way home from work, put a piece of candy or rubber band or any odd thing in your wallet. When you open your wallet to take out your train card or pay toll, you’ll remember the eggs by seeing the piece of candy in an unusual place.
Improve Memory Skills
August 20th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
It seems like a blessing if someone has the capacity to recall information quickly and correctly. It is truly priceless in being successful in the professional as well as academic world. Although a lack in this ability doesn’t imply that the individual cannot have any success in his life, rather there are plenty of options available that one can use to enhance the memory skills. The important point to improve memory skills is to implement the rightly designed tools in a well-structured fashion.
There is practically a wide variety of mind tools available for enhancing one’s memory skills quite extensively. With these fabulous mind tools, one needs to spend time practicing these techniques to get wonderful results. With an honest effort and sufficient practice, any one can be able to acquire a good memory. Even if someone doesn’t have sufficient time to specifically employ on practicing, these techniques are found useful in daily lives.
Mnemonics
Mnemonics refer to the technique to remember information that is not so easy remembering in normal situations. It is based on the idea of encoding difficult-to-remember information in a special way that is pretty easier-to-remember. A very simple example is VIBGYOR for remembering the colors in the rainbow. It is an excellent mind tool that can be used in various real life situations, especially at the time of an exam, in order to take advantage of effective implementation of memory skills.
Using the Whole Mind
The effective memory skills are the ability to encode information by using benefits of the whole mind. The key idea is to encode information using vibrant mental images that not only store information but also store the structure of information. This helps a lot in improving memory skills and it is a very successful feature to make mnemonics more reliable.
In order to do that, one may count on visualizing positive, pleasant images. It is mainly because sometimes the brain simply blocks the unpleasant memories. The mental images should contain brilliant colors as they are easier to remember comparing to the dull images. A three-dimensional visual image can be encoded faster than two-dimensional images.
Designing of Mnemonics
The three essential components governing the use of mnemonics include imagination, association, and position. Adding all three components in the mind, one is able to design powerful mnemonics in order to improve memory skills. Imagination is crucial to create and strengthen the links essential to design effective mnemonics. The more one can imagine, the more he can visualize, the more he can recall objects and events.
Association is the method to link between one or more objects together. It helps in improving the ability to recall. Position offers two facets; a coherent context enables in positioning particular information in a specific segment of mind, while the other facet enables in differentiating between two or more mnemonics. By using all three components, effective mnemonics can be designed.
Facts Worth Knowing Related To Why A Person Suffers From Memory Loss
August 20th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
You would be surprised to learn that there are a number of factors that can be considered as being the cause behind memory loss, and among them, depression ranks very high, because with it, a person loses his/her ability to perform mental processes properly and thus lose their memory in the process. Furthermore, this condition can only get worse when it is left untreated, especially if its cause was depression, while another cause that is very similar to depression is stress.
Stress Too, Can Cause A Loss Of Memory
It has been found that people under a great deal of stress tend to lose their memory, and that once they get over their stressful conditions, their memory shows signs of improvement once more. Even medication can induce this lapse, or it could also occur due to side effects of drugs such as barbiturates or even benzodiazepines, which requires giving up these drugs to stop further memory loss.
Another factor that plays a part in inducing memory loss is Alzheimer’s disease and in fact this disease is a major cause of memory loss, and it is characterized by much loss of memory though in different degrees, which of course depends on the stage of the disease. It has been found that in the initial stages of Alzheimer’s disease, there is frequent loss of memory and towards the end; it even becomes difficult for the patient to remember their own family members.
Aging too is an important reason why persons suffer from memory loss, though according to recent studies, it was found that people as old as ninety and beyond were not greatly bothered by memory loss, and even that with age, mental processes could in fact improve. If a person is an alcoholic, it could lead to memory loss since the alcohol will destroy nerves and even otherwise, alcohol is bad for the nervous system and it will adversely affect the mental processes; besides the memory, and to not lose your memory in this way, obviously, you will need to consume little or no alcohol.
Memory loss also comes about due to many other reasons including seizures, strokes, injuries to the head, brain tumors and also infections in the brain, and to determine whether you have memory loss, it may require undergoing temporal brain surgery. No doubt, there are many causes of memory loss that are preventable, though others will occur in any case, and what causes your memory loss will ultimately determine the speed at which you suffer from this condition. To treat the condition, it may be a good idea to consume ginkgo biloba, and there are other drugs available in the market as well.
Some Of The Different Methods Used For Memory Improvement
August 20th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
Today, there is a lot of research being undertaken to better understand memory that includes finding out the locations of memory, and this is something that is of special interest to those with inquiring minds. The earlier knowledge that we had concerning memory showed us that the location of memory was on the brain and brain stem and also above our spinal cords. However, with present day technology such as Magnetic Resonance Imagery (MRI) as well as Electro encephalogram or EEG, the location of memory is more exactly established especially with regard to the exact location on the brain and brain stem.
Learn Online
By studying the brain in so much detail, it has shown us that there is a lot of scope to understand how memory improvement can be achieved, and all it needs is to apply the right memory techniques that can range from the very simple to the very sophisticated. You can easily learn the training steps that can even are learnt by studying training material, and there is even online training software available in this regard.
The first method you can use in memory improvement is basic mnemonics that anyone can apply absolutely immediately; though, it is also a good idea to first practice them, and the different mnemonics are based on association and elaborations, and it may be noted that elaboration gives more meaning to words, while in the case of association, two words should be linked together in your memory.
Another very simple method that can be applied with regard to memory improvement is Peg mnemonics, and in this form of memory improvement, peg words are associated with any of the digits starting from one and ending with ten. Among the common Peg mnemonics are rhyming Peg system, shape Peg system and alphabet Peg system as too calendar peg system.
You can also use advanced mnemonics for memory improvement though this method takes up more time and a minimum of two hours along with time for regularly practicing is required. However, with this method of memory improvement, the payback is considerable and thus well worth putting in extra effort, and with these methods, you can easily then remember lists with more than hundred items on them. Another better known such memory improvement method is the one known as Phonetic Mnemonic that is applicable for numbers starting with zero and ending with one hundred, and even higher.
The Fun of Memory Games
August 20th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed
We all want to improve our memory; it is simply because we all know how valuable memory is in our regular lives. In fact, a majority of life successes actually depend on the capacity of memory encoding and retrieval skills. There is a great variety of serious techniques available in the market for enhancing memory skills. But people can also enjoy the time while enhancing their memory capability by simply getting engaged into various memory games as well. Let us explore a few popular memory games that can be played either individually or in a group setting.
Story Telling
When we need to remember a phone number, we simply repeat it few times before dialing. But some times after dialing, many of us simply forget the number. This is because we didn’t simply put the number into the segment of our long term memory. So we are unable to remember it later in time.
Story telling is a good memory game that focuses on the critical aspects of long term memory. The idea here is to simply connect the facts or items one needs to remember. When a story is told in a group, it enables the player to visualize a strong mental image of the incidences happening inside the story. This, in turn, helps in encoding the data to an image so that it can be stored in long term memory.
Matching Pairs
It is another wonderful memory game that involves matching pairs from a large bunch of playing cards. This game can be played either individually or in pairs. The game can be started by laying out 24 cards containing 12 matched pairs. The player must not know the exact location of any single card in the bulk. The player must turn one card at a time, and look at the image on the card, and then the player turns its face down once again. The player needs to repeat this process till the image in the card matches with the card opened earlier. Now the objective is to find the pair by recalling its location from earlier drawings.
Remembering Names
This type of memory game is played in group of 10 to 12 people. In this game, the players may decide between themselves about the category of names to play with. Say, it is decided that the category will be ‘country’. The players can sit together by forming a circle.
Now the first player will say the name of one country, say, Italy, for example. The second player needs to mention the name already told by the first player in addition to maintain the right order and then add the name of the country he wants to say. If the second player likes to say, ‘Germany’, then following the game’s rule, he must say, ‘Italy, Germany’. The next player will say, ‘Italy, Germany, France’, where France is the name the third player wants to include in the list. It will be repeated in the same fashion for every one in the group. When someone will make a mistake in either recalling a name or maintaining the accurate order, he will be eliminated from the group.
