It can be hard to remember names, numbers, speeches and study material, particularly when you are reading what you have learned over and over again.The good news is that psychology tricks to remember anything can make learning easier and more effective. These techniques are based on basic concepts about the way the brain retains and retrieval information.
Whether it's the Memory Palace, chunking, spacing or retrieval practice, each of these approaches provides your brain with a new connection to new information. They aren't memory champion tools for memory champions. These are easy, simple memory exercises that can help you remember important information for longer with regular practice.
Better Than Reading It Again
No matter what a memory course salesman may claim, nothing goes directly into your head in a second. Psychology provides a variety of methods that surpass re-reading and underlining, some of which researchers have studied for more than a hundred years. Memory champions employ some of the more intricate variations to memorize a shuffled deck of cards in less than a minute, but for the rest of us, they are often less spectacular.
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The Memory Palace
To remember an entire speech effectively, Greek and Roman orators would mentally walk through the well-known rooms of a house, leaving a striking image at each specific spot along the way. It's all detailed in the Rhetorica and Herennium, which dates back to about 80 B.C.
Today, memory champions still use this technique, because the brain remembers places much more easily than it remembers words.
Spacing
Spreading out your study sessions for the same total amount of time across multiple days proves to be the most time-efficient strategy for the learner.
If you find yourself immersing in your studies for 40 minutes in a single sitting, you'll likely achieve better results by dividing that time into two separate sessions of 20 minutes each, spaced apart by a day or more. This spacing technique allows your brain to "forget just a little," but not excessively, which aids in retention.
Retrieval Practice
Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke had students study passages, and while one set reread the text, the second took practice tests. After a week, the tested students retained a lot more, although rereading in the moment seemed more fruitful.
The most reliable study method in the literature by far is to close the book and write down whatever you come up with.
Pretesting
It's like engaging in dozens of prep tests when you guess wrong, you see the right answer, and then by guessing wrong again and seeing the right answer again, you find that it causes the question to stick in your mind more easily than just experiencing the latter half of that process alone. That dead wrong question somehow creates a little insertion slot for the correct answer to fit in.
Chunking
In 1956, George Miller proposed that our short-term capacity typically hovers around seven pieces of information, give or take a few. Chunking skillfully evades that cognitive limit by treating the numbers as a singular chunk—this explains why we usually write phone numbers in relatively short chunks instead of presenting them in a brute-force format.
One of Anders Ericsson's dedicated trainees broke the digit span record by reaching an impressive 80, thanks to interpreting the numbers as race times.
The Major System
Digits present a tough image, so a mnemonic maps each one to a consonant, then strings the consonants together to form memorable words. The number 32 represents two consonants, which might be the specific consonants that combine to create the word "moon."
A moon is easy for everyone to visualize, a fact all of us know, and when the number transforms into a picture, it fits into a memory palace just like everything else does.
The Keyword Method
Foreign words maintain their presence when there exists an English equivalent somewhere within the phrase, and then you might consider thinking about the two issues collectively in a single scene. Richard Atkinson employed this approach with Russian college students in the Seventies, and his college students consistently outperformed the groups that continued with simple translations.
The Russian word zvonok translates to bell and captures the sound of oak, so students visualized a bell that hangs from an oak tree.
The Baker-Baker Paradox
Say a stranger's name is Baker, and that name vanishes in a matter of minutes. Say the stranger works as a baker, and that lasts, because a profession is associated with aprons and ovens, while a name is associated with nothing at all.
Names require something to cling to, which in this case would be something such as the vivid image that you create in your mind as you go, and never utter aloud.
Spaced Name Repetition
Repeat one of the names, then give it a new name when you're introduced; do this again a minute later, and yet again before you leave the gathering. A notable study from 1978 by researcher Peter Morris discovered that this expanding schedule of name repetition trumped simple repetition of a single name.
Every successful repetition extends the length of time that the name remains accessible in your memory, and accomplishing three repetitions within five minutes is completely free.
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The Generation Effect
Notes require far more effort when you ask questions while you are providing the answers, rather than when you simply read the answers from the page.
In 1978, Slamecka and Graf proved that the words you generate yourself stick in memory, whereas the words you just read off a page tend to fade away. Filling in a blank proves helpful even when the answer seems too obvious to bother writing it down.
FAQs
1. What is the best psychology trick for remembering information?
Retrieval practice is one of the most effective methods. Instead of reading information repeatedly, close the book and try to recall what you learned.
2. How does the Memory Palace technique work?
The Memory Palace technique connects information with familiar places. You imagine walking through a known location and placing memorable images at different spots.
3. Does spacing help improve memory?
Yes. Spacing study sessions across different days gives your brain repeated opportunities to recall information and can improve long-term retention.
4. What is chunking in memory?
Chunking means grouping smaller pieces of information into meaningful units. For example, a long number can be divided into smaller groups that are easier to remember.
5. Can psychology tricks help remember people's names?
Yes. Repeating someone's name naturally during a conversation and connecting the name with a memorable image or detail can make it easier to recall later.
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