Attention itself is a crucial element of memory. If you don´t see something, how can you remember it? When you focus on something and process that information well, you make it easier to remember.

Elaboration and repetition are the most common ways of creating that personal interaction. Elaboration involves creating a rich context for the experience by adding together visual, auditory, and other information about the fact. By weaving a web of information around that fact, you create multiple access points to that piece of information. On the other hand, repetition drills in the same pathway over and over until it is a well-worn path that you can easily find.

One common technique used by students, is actually, not that helpful. Mnemonic techniques of using the first letter of each word in a series won't help you remember the actual words. That will make it easier to remember the order of words you know. The phrase My Very Energetic Mother Just Screamed Utter Nonsense can help you remember the order the planets in our solar system, but it won't help you recall the individual planet names: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

These techniques do help you improve your memory on a behavioral level, but not on a fundamental brain structure level. The main reason it gets harder for you to learn and remember new things as you age is that your brain's processing speed slows down as you get older. It becomes harder to do more than one thing at the same time, so it's easier to get confused. Your mental energies may become too rigid, making it harder to alternate learning techniques in mid-stream. All these things mean it becomes harder to focus. Until now, there is little one can do to significantly improve processing speed, but there are ways to improve learning performance, even when processing speed slows.

Focus

Alertness, focus, concentration, motivation, and heightened awareness are largely a matter of attitude. Focus takes effort. In fact, most memory complaints have nothing to do with the actual ability of the brain to remember things. They come from a failure to focus properly on the task at hand.

If you want to learn or remember something, concentrate on just that one thing. Tune out everything else. The harder the task, the more important it is to tune out distractions. (If someone tells you they can do their homework better with the TV or radio on, don't believe it. Any speech or speech-like sounds automatically use up part of your brain's attention capacity, whether you are aware of it or not.) In other words, it can be hard to do more than one thing at once, and it naturally gets harder as you get older. What will help is to make sure you don´t get distracted until you've finished what you have to do.

Strategy: When you learn something new, take breaks so that the facts won't interfere with one another as you study them. Have you been to a movie double feature recently? then you´ll know that it is hard to remember the plot and details of the first movie immediately after seeing the second. Interference also works the other way. Sometimes when your friend gets a new telephone number, the old one will still be so familiar to you that it's hard to remember the new one.

Engage

Your brain remembers things by their meaning. If you spend a little effort extra up front to create meaning, you'll need less effort later to recall it. When you read or hear a word you don't already know - for example, "phocine" - your brain has to work harder. First, you have to remember how to spell it long enough to look it up in a dictionary. There, you'll see it means "seal-like" and it's pronounced "fo-sine." Now picture a seal in your mind and repeat the word aloud. Even say "Fo! Fo! Fo!" aloud like a seal barking. The sound of the word, its spelling, the image of a seal, and the barking all work together to form memory links. The more links the better to help you trigger the word later on, when you want to use it to describe, say, a sunbather in a black one-piece.

Strategy: Say you're on vacation in Maui, staying at a beachfront hotel in room #386. How do you remember that? Method number one: Pause for a minute to take a mental snapshot of your room door viewed from an outside vantage point. Then, when you return to that same vantage point, you'll know which door is yours. Method number two: Stop and think for a minute. You're on the third floor, which is the top floor of the hotel, so the number 3 is easy. Now for the 8 and the 6. The expression "to eighty-six" comes to mind - as in to get rid of, do away with, or throw out. As in what your boss will do to you if you decide to spend an extra week in Maui. Done.

Copyright (c) 2007 SharpBrains

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