Psychological tips for enhancing your memory.

Lets face it we all desire a good memory. In this era of education and competition, everyone wants a memory that can allow them to think of anything and store that memory in any place or any time. But for most of us that's not as easy as it seems.

Most of us can't even think of what we ate in last supper.

But is there a way that we can improve our memory? Yes there are many ways for us to improve our memory. Some of them are very tiresome and time taking, like you have to solve difficult puzzles, make memory palaces, try to remember the pattern of deck of cards. All this helps trust me. But we need something and efficient. Well by following the below tips you can boost your memory to be able to remember anything, literally anything.

1. Sleep after learning(consolidate)

Right after you learn something, its fresh in your memory and you can remember it fair vividly. Its there as long as you don't try to overwrite it with something new. So a question may arise in your mind, "How do we permanently store that information in our brain?".

Well its quite easy, just go to sleep. Yeah, simple as that. We all know that consolidation takes place on neural level without us doing anything, and this does strengthen our memories. And, recent research supports that the idea of consolidation is particularly strong during sleep. So, when you learn something new, throw away your books and worries away and go to sleep, so write that information into your brain.

2. Chunk

Chunking is essentially just breaking up a long stream of information into manageable ‘chunks’. Let’s consider the 14-digit number string 1-9-6-9-4-8-1-2-1-6-1-0-6-6. At first sight this might seem fairly meaningless, but if I rewrite it as 1969 – 4,8,12,16 – 1066 suddenly it becomes pretty easy to remember. Instead of remembering 14 separate pieces of information all you have to remember now is: 1) moon landing; 2) multiples of 4; and 3) the Battle of Hastings. Most information strings will not be this easy to reduce, but you get the idea.

The picture below can also give an idea about how chunking works.

3. Take breaks

This relates with the first point. After learning something take a little break, for about few minutes, then get back to studying.

Don't cram!!!

Students when their exams are literally tomorrow, they'll spend the whole night cramming the subject, which is not only bad for their health but it is also bad for their academic performance. So do a little work and take a break.

4. Generate yourself and test yourself

Only you can judge yourself, and test yourself. So make questions for yourself and try to answer them.
Making up questions yourself and then testing yourself on them (not immediately) involves active involvement with the material and actually strengthens the encoding of material to be learnt. Even just reading text with the idea of making up questions based on what you have read is beneficial. What a lot of students don’t realize is that self-testing is possibly even more important than simply reviewing information. Self-testing gives you an idea of what you know and increases your ability to remember it.

Following these tips will surely help you with memorizing stuff, they're pretty simple but they're effective and will show you some result after sometimes.