Lately I've been asking myself a lot the question “Why am I forgetting some things?”. While researching about this topic I found the answer and even better, I learned how memory works and what I must do to keep important information in it.
From the beginning of our lives, we human beings are in constant learning, whether through studies, techniques or experiences that help us acquire skills and knowledge for our education and personal development.
To learn we need to memorize certain types of information, which we must understand, analyze and synthesize.
Learning, being a modification of behaviour that is inhibited by experience, leads to a change in the physical structure of the brain. These experiences are related to memory, shaping the brain and creating variability between individuals.
Memory is in charge of storing, retaining and evoking information about experiences of all kinds.
It is to it that we pay the most attention and to what we demand the most effort on a daily basis, since our life exists thanks to our memory.
Without memory, we would be incapable of learning, thinking or, even worse, we couldn’t have a personal identity.
Although we have the ability to store a lot of information, there is some of it that we just forget about.
Why we forget things?
The brain is like a hard disk, space is limited and therefore to protect itself from the overload of information it deletes irrelevant information, that information that you do not need or that you do not use frequently.
Although this may sound negative to you, it's actually perfectly normal, and that's how all humans work.
Our minds are not designed to remember every fact, word or image we experience throughout our lives.
According to the research of the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus we have that according to the forgetting curve, only one hour after learning something new, we forget more than half of the information learned, after nine hours we will have forgotten approximately 60% of the information until, finally, after 24 hours, we will reach two thirds of "forgetting".
How to remember everything?
To maintain as much information as possible over a long period of time, this information must be stored in long-term memory.
Before going deeper into the types of memory, we must understand what are the methods and percentages of learning for us, human beings; you can see that in the image of the learning pyramid shown below:
It is the one in charge of recording information coming from the external environment through the senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste). This memory mechanism has a great capacity to process a high amount of information at the same time for a very short time (1 second).
Short-term memory
Also known as operational memory, it is responsible for organizing and analyzing information and interpreting our experiences; that is, it is recorded from the interaction with the environment. Its temporary duration is short, 18 to 20 seconds.
Long-term memory
Long-term memory is like a living storehouse of information, it has unlimited capacity. When we refer to memory in general, we talk about it.
This memory contains our knowledge of the physical world, in it are stored the experiences and memories lived, what we know about the world, concepts, strategies of life, etc., basically, everything we know resides there. Its duration is a permanent storage structure, but its contents are kept for a few minutes, several years or the whole life of the individual.
Procedural or implicit memory
It is the one that refers to our unconscious, it develops when we perform some physical movement unconsciously, we would say that it happens when we can "put our body into automatic" to do something that we are so accustomed to doing that our memory can repeat the movement almost without realizing it.
Tips for quicker memorization
Try to understand what you are learning because if you learn only by memorizing the words, you will be more likely to forget some of the information and not be able to remember the rest because you only memorized the order of the words and not the actual meaning.
Use keywords. The goal of this technique is to nail one thing learned into another. This technique will help you associate a keyword with all the information about it.
Write down everything you want to memorize; it's proven that handwriting helps you fix the information.
Learn the most needed information, learn by priorities. Concentrate on the key words of what you need to memorize and then if you still have time to study, learn the less important things.
Learn opposite things, as opposites are memorized. This way you will create a connection between these two things in your mind and when you forget one of these words, the other will help you remember it.
Use a recorder, this will allow you to record the information you are learning and then listen to it several times.
Rest every 15 or 20 minutes, as this is the period when attention is at its best and people are no longer attentive. That is why it is recommended that you pause and focus on doing a completely different activity.
I hope you like this information and that you find these memorization techniques useful. Comment freely.
