Has this ever happened to you before as a student?
You have an exam the next week and you haven’t read anything on the subject. So you panic and proceed to cram a whole 200+ paged textbook into your brain, and then you start to feel really good. Then the day of the exam rolls around and you enter the examination hall and see the questions; they all look familiar, like something you read, the next words out of your mouth are “should be a piece of cake, I’m definitely going to ace this exam”.
Next, you start with Question 1, you try to remember where in your memory that specific folder was kept, but it seems as though the entire rack of knowledge for that subject mysteriously vanished. You get out of the exam hall disappointed but most of all confused because “I should have aced that exam, I thought I read 🤔😥”
It’s the most terrible feeling one can get. And that drives us to our topic to day which is
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There are numerous times that I’ve been made to read my books, being a student and all. And sometimes, in a bid to learn something new, I would check YouTube for videos on “How to Memorize More Effectively” and “Keys to a Retentive Memory”, you get the gist. I wanted to learn how to memorize easier and faster because there just had to be a way. I’m going to share of them with you today.
Turn It Into A Rhyme or Song
I find that this method of memorization is the most intriguing. It's so much fun because once the song is embedded in your memory, it’s there forever. Whenever you need to retrieve some information, all you have to do is sing the song!
Our teachers back in secondary school used this method on us and it worked like magic. The chemistry teacher got us to learn the legendary first 20 elements using the tune to the song “Silent Night”. Our biology teacher taught us a rhyme that saved my behind numerous times in the exam hall, even after I graduated.
Then there is the one that virtually everybody uses to check the number of days present in a month.
“30 days hath September, April June and November, all the rest hath 31 days except February...”
The Empty Room
The best one though, out of all of them that I use till this day, is the empty room. In order to remember something, you basically visualize an empty space and then put the thing you want to remember into it.
For instance I was interested in learning about the equipment used for immunizations, which included cold rooms, refrigerators, freezers, cold boxes, vaccine carriers, ice packs, thermometers, and vial monitors.
So the first thing I did was to visualize a cold room, like the one SpongeBob uses to store his Krabby patties, except this one was empty. Then I placed a refrigerator and freezer in a corner of the room, followed by a cold box. I then stacked a vaccine carrier on top of the cold box, opened it, and placed some ice packs and a thermometer inside. All of this was imaginary of course.
After doing this, for some reason, I have never forgotten about my little cold room filled with vaccine equipment 😅😅.
Make It So Absurd It's Hard To Forget
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This applies to any and every thing you want to remember. Make up a very crazy scenario in your head; so crazy that you will not forget it anytime soon. Get animated with your imaginations. Let them run wild, as ridiculous possible would do the trick. Some may even make you laugh until you pee your pants.
These are the three that come to mind as at now but I’m sure there are loads more of them. Never give up learning. Make it fun so it doesn’t feel like work.
I invite @wongi to participate in this contest.