6 best ways to improve your memory

Introduction

Your brain grows and changes every day, giving you an opportunity to harness its power and ability to transform. A good memory can make your college life easy and help you a lot, especially with theoretical subjects where you have to learn a lot of things. Needless to say, good memory is beneficial for everyone in regular life as well, because it saves you from wasting time on trying to recollect important things. There is no such thing as a "bad memory", and everyone can improve their memory, as long as you are not suffering from memory loss as a medical condition.

Here, we have mentioned practical and effective ways to improve memory over time. Read on:

Use association to remember facts

Associate  a fact with some image so that every time you think about it, you have that figure in your mind. This will sharpen your memory and help you retain a lot of information which gets lost due to By creating a visual, your brain can fixate on a single, easy-to-identify piece of information. When you recall that single symbol, you can also recall the larger strand of information you assigned to it. For example, as you place your car keys in your purse, imagine your purse suddenly growing wheels and speeding away. Since the image is such a strange one, you're more likely to remember it later, which will also help you remember that your car keys are inside it. The more unique or unusual the image is, the easier it will be for your brain to remember it

Associate numbers with images

Forgetting roll numbers or phone numbers is common in college. When you associate numbers with images, you can easily recollect them as and when required. For example, you roll number is Let's say the number is 12757510. Find a way to make these numbers meaningful. Let's say '12' happens to be your house number, '75' happens to be your grandmother's age, and the number '10' is Sachiin Tendulkar's jersey number. Here's what you can visualize to remember the number: Picture your house with two copies of your grandmother standing to the right, showing that the house comes first. Then imagine Sachin Tendulkar standing to the right of your grandmothers. There you have it - 12 (your house), 7575 (two times the age of your grandmom) and 10, the cricket star.

Try Chunking

Chunking involves taking long strings of information, like numbers or letters, and grouping (or chunking) them into smaller, more manageable bits of information. You probably won't remember 17761812184818651898, but try putting a space after every fourth number. Now you can see that those numbers are years, and you can pick key events from each year to help you remember the string of numbers. You can do the same with objects as well. For example, you are going for grocery shopping and need to buy a lot of things, what you can do to remember them is, grouping them together. For example, you need to pick up eggs, bread, bacon, coffee, and cheese from the grocery store, remember one E, two B's, and two C's. As long as you remember the correct numbers, you should be able to recall the items in each letter group.

Use rhyming

Make a poem out of everything you find hard to remember. You won't believe how much a silly sounding rhyme can help you remember things. For example:

1. In fourteen-hundred ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

2. A child can learn the alphabet by singing it to the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," which makes the letters rhyme.

Use acronyms

An abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word. You can use this trick to remember things easily. For example:

HOMES. This one is used for remembering the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.

VIBGYOR. This will help you remember the colors of the rainbow:  Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow , Orange, Red.

FANBOYS. This acronym can help you remember simple coordinating conjunctions: For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So.

Use acrostic

An acrostic is similar to acronym. The only difference between the two is that an acrostic requires a poem, word puzzle, or other composition in which certain letters in each line form a word or words.

For example:

Every Good Boy Does Fine. This is used for memorizing the lines on the treble music staff: EGBDF.

Never Eat Sour Watermelons. This is used for remembering the points of a compass in clockwise order: North, East, South, and West. Another good example is Never Eat Shredded Wheat which also rhymes too.

King Philip Can Only Find His Green Slippers. Use this to memorize the order of the classification system: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species.

Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. Use this to remember the order of operations in mathematics: Parenthesis, Exponents, Multiplication, Division, Addition, Subtraction.

Conclusion

Memorizing those formulas and definitions is not that difficult after all. All you need is knowledge about the way your brain functions and will as well as intent to work on your memory.