Our minds are really powerful. However, we are far from understanding how to use their full capacity.
There are many mental games you can play to train the capacity of your mind. One of the most useful things you can train is your memory.
When you train your memory you are exercising your mind just like if you would exercise your body. It’s healthy.
But there are also many tricks and techniques you can learn to improve your memory immediately. This will allow you to reach higher levels training it.
If you have seen people with tremendous capacity to remember, don’t think that all of them are somehow more special than you, they just know few tricks like these that we are going to share in this article.
So if you are someone who is interested in improving this memory this article will be of great benefit to you.
The 3 Tricks for Better Memory:
1. Chunk it.
When you try to remember a list of items it’s much harder to go by each item and try to remember all of them than chunking it down.
And you might think what is chunking, how to chunk it? You can read a chunking psychology definition if you want, but it’s quite easy to do actually.
This is a really simple trick you can do. Just read the first letters of the list and make a word out of it.
If it’s some grocery list or 3 things you want to talk with your friend, just remember the first letter, or the first word.
So if the grocery list is hum, meat, fish, toilet paper, just remember HMFT from their first letters.
The word makes no sense but when you say it to yourself you can unpack each of the letters and remind yourself of the item much easier.
It’s like a zip file that it’s easy to carry around, it does not take much memory but you can unpack its contents at any time you need them.
This is one of the easiest techniques you can try immediately that will drastically improve the capacity to memorize things.
You can do it with a list of topics too. Just remember one word instead of the letters and you will be reminded of the sentences or topics linked to each.
2. Make a narrative.
Another great technique is to create a small narrative around the list of items.
Let’s say you need to remember a sequence of numbers. You can give each number a meaning and a symbol for the narrative.
And you can tell something like two kids met for lunch and the one ordered salad to take for home.
This is the narrative to remember the sequence 2 3 1 4 9 where 2 means two, lunch means 3 because let’s say you associate it with 3pm when lunch is usually eaten, 1 means one, salad is 4 because for example you put 4 ingredients in a salad and home is 9.
It’s easier for the human mind to remember a narrative than meaningless numbers.
So if you give the mind a sense of narrative you are giving it a sense of meaning it can follow.
You are making its job easier to remember because every time you remind yourself of the narrative you can decode the message you should remember.
3. Train it.
Your memory is like a muscle. You need to train it daily if you want to improve it.
Technology allowed us to be organized and to write things down. It enabled us to increase productivity.
But every time you use tools to supplement your memory your memory muscle becomes weaker.
So having a habit to train your memory is extremely helpful. And you can do it by choosing not so important things you need to remember and keeping them in your mind.
See for how long you can memorize things. How long you can keep that in your active memory.
There are also many apps you can find that give you tests and games to train your memory. The type of training you choose it’s not as important as training your working memory itself. And the more you train the stronger it becomes and the more you can use it.