Memory helps you remember items to buy at the grocery store and material studied for an exam. However, you may find yourself forgetting one or two items from your long shopping list or some of the material you studied in preparation for your exam. Some techniques may improve your memory.
Use Memory Tricks
Memory tricks include using mnemonic devices and silly rhymes or analogies. Mnemonic devices supply clues to help you remember information by associating the information you want to remember with an image, sentence or word. For example, if you want to remember the solar system's orbital order—Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto—remember the sentence "Mary's Violet Eyes Made John Stay Up Nights Pacing." The sentence uses the first letter of each to trigger your memory.
Active Learning
Involving your entire body in the learning process improves the likelihood of remembering the information learned, according to Virginia Tech's Cook Counseling Center. Stand up and talk out loud while studying and use your eyes, ears, voice, arms and legs. This technique works well when trying to remember processes. As you study the steps for completing a process, involve your entire body by physically going through the motions. This puts energy into the learning process and makes studying less boring. Making learning visual also helps improve your memory by making learning an active process. Use your imagination and associate visual images with information you learn.
Number-Rhyme Technique
The number-rhyme technique helps you visualize things in your mind using the numbers 1 through 10 and words rhyming with the numbers. According to the Academic Tips website, the typical rhyming scheme pairs one with bun, two with shoe, three with tree, four with door, five with hive, six with bricks, seven with heaven, eight with skate, nine with line and 10 with hen. Link the rhyming words to the material you need to remember through visualization.
For example, if you need to remember a grocery list of jam, eggs and cheese, you would visualize those items associated with the words rhyming with numbers. You might use the following associations: 1. A BUN layered thick with strawberry JAM; 2. A foot placed in a SHOE breaks an EGG that was hidden there; and 3. A TREE with CHEESE growing on its branches instead of fruit. Using the number-rhymes will help you remember which image needs visualizing and the visualization will help you remember the items.
Overlearn
Short-term memory has a limited storage capacity, according to Virginia Tech's Cook Counseling Center. To increase the chance of information being recalled at a later date, you must move information from short-term to long-term memory. You should rehearse and "overlearn" information. Review information the same day that you learn it and then review the information periodically until it becomes easily recalled. This "overlearning" will help commit the information to long-term memory, which improves your recall ability.
