How to remember everything without being hard working

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Are you overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge that you are expected to remember every day? The Digital Age can leave us feeling like we are in a constant state of information overload. We have so many things competing for our attention, that it can be hard to stay focused. Your memory is one of the first things to suffer in the communications bombardment. Luckily, there are a few strategies that you can adopt to improve your memory without having to turn into a supercomputer.

Hack your brain’s storage system by understanding the basics of memory

Our brains have an incredible capacity for storing data. If we defined the limits of our minds in technological terms, we can store about 2.5 million gigabytes of information in our heads. [1] If this is true, then why do so many of us routinely forget why we walked into a room or what we had for breakfast? We can store loads of information, but if we want to improve our memory we have to maximize our brain’s filing system.

Short-Term Memory

If you’ve ever had to recall items that you need to pick up from the store without writing them out, you’ve likely forgotten a few things on your mental list. This is because your brain routed your shopping list to your short-term memory. The short-term memory can hold seven to nine items for a period of about thirty seconds. [2]

Long-term Memory

Your brain can hang on to some memories for an extended period of time. Not all long-term memories are created equally – some last for several hours or days, and you carry others with you for a lifetime. The clarity of the memory depends on your level of alertness at the time in which your brain was encoding the event. [3]

Working Memory

If your brain stored everything you ever saw or heard with equal importance, it would have lots of information clogging its filing system. The memory that you use to process and reflect on your world is your working memory. [4] Your brain is like a giant hard-drive, and your working memory consists of the files open on your desktop. Just like the files on your computer, items in your long-term memory can change when we access them through our working memory.

4 Useful Memory Boosting Techniques to Try

As busy and productive people, we are constantly working to improve our recall and get things to move into our long-term memory so that we can easily retrieve them. Here are some excellent ways to help your brain encode information.

Give Up All-Nighters and Rely on Spaced Repetition

When we need to memorize large quantities of information before an exam or presentation, it can be tempting to review all of it in a cram session. This technique is ineffective for two reasons. If you want to remember more, you need to give your brain time to process, and since your brain doesn’t assign equal importance to all data, you won’t be effective by treating all your information the same way.

When you space out your study intervals over several days or weeks, you can commit more information to memory with fewer repetitions. [5]

You can use flashcards to take advantage of spaced repetition. Quiz yourself, and separate cards into piles related to how well you know the material. If you know the information well, you’ll need to review that card less frequently. You’ll have to look at cards with challenging concepts more often. Ultimately, you’ll spend more time reviewing challenging cards and less time on ones that you know. [6]

Understand That You Can Memorize Different Information in Concentration Mode and Diffused Mode

When we store information in concentration mode (sometimes known as focus mode), we set the stage for expanding our knowledge. [7] In concentration mode, you build a memory framework by actively working to make sense of concepts.

You can’t stay in that state of intense concentration forever, but that doesn’t mean that you have to stop learning. In diffused mode, your brain continues to take in information in a casual manner. If you are trying to figure out a novel solution to a research question, you’ll begin your work in concentration mode, but you’ll likely come up with your answer in diffused mode.

For example, when you begin to study a foreign langue, you’ll have to spend time learning the grammatical structures and vocabulary in concentration mode. You may repeat phrases out loud or rewrite sentences and constructions until you have developed a framework for your understanding.

If you are immersed in the language, you’ll continue to take in information and build connections in diffused mode. Eventually, you will not only be able to understand and reply to people using phrases you memorized, but you’ll learn how to string together new phrases.

Use the Chunking Technique to Make Concepts Meaningful

Using this technique allows you to commit many items to memory by assigning them to meaningful groups. [8] You can establish chunks of information by creating mnemonic devices such as acronyms or phrases.

It is much easier to recall the time periods in Greek history (Neolithic Period, Bronze Age, Dark Age, Archaic Period, Classical Period, Hellenistic Period) by remembering a simple phrase such as “Never Be Discouraged About Calling Home.” In this case, the first letter of each word corresponds to the first letter of a time period. Schoolchildren are commonly taught the acronym, “ROY G. BIV,” to help them remember the colors of the rainbow.

This brain hack works because you can assign meaning to things for which you may not have a strong sensory memory or emotional connection. By associating terms to the preexisting framework of your own language, you make it much easier to recall these items later.

Access Digital Mind to Enhance Your Memory Capacity

The Digital Age has inundated us with information, but it has also offered us tools for coping with this influx of data. Apps which allow you to make notes, such as Evernote can help you connect ideas and improve recall.

You may be thinking, “I could use a sticky note or an old-fashioned planner for that.” You certainly could, but in Evernote, you can add tags to your notes to help you track down the thing that you want to remember. [9] When you add multiple tags to your note, you build connections and increase the likelihood that you will be able to recover the information you want. No more misplaced sticky notes for you!

Evernote is just one example in a sea of productivity apps that can improve your memory. Flashcard apps can allow you to take the concept of spaced repetition into the digital sphere. Dropbox and cloud servers make it possible for you to capture information in one place and access it later in another location. Each time we retrieve the information, we increase the likelihood of it becoming part of our long-term memory.

You don’t need a photographic memory

It would be nice if we could look at something once and remember it, but only a small percentage of us have brains that work like that. [10] That’s no reason to despair, though. By using memory techniques and tools, you can unlock your own potential and harness your brain’s power.

Rote memorising, i.e. to remember by repeating as many times as possible, is out.

Putting facts to memory by brute force will not make you gain the most important result from studying, which is, comprehension.

And to be honest, it will be pretty damn boring.

Studying should be fun – all about thoughtful exploration and discovering new things. Rote memorising does not have any of that, simply paving a path of instant recall without any context to the information – the hows and whys are important!

So how do we prevent those facts from falling into a black hole once we enter the exam hall? Wei Li from iPrice has come up with six powerful ways to help you study better:

1. Spaced repetition

Review material over and over again over incremental time intervals;

According to 19th-century psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus, instant recall has a 100 percent information retention. But as little as an hour later, you can only recall a mere 44 percent of what you have read.

To counter this, use spaced repetition. Review your materials intermittently to slow down the deterioration of your memory as time passes.

This means making notes right after lecture ends, write down any questions you have and asking your lecturer ASAP. Just before exams, make flashcards and review them every few days, instead of the last 24 hours!

2. Active reiteration

To really embed the facts you are reading into your mind, teach them to someone else.

By teaching, you are forced to summarise, condense, investigate, draw conclusions – promoting a deeper personal understanding. This is great for university study which focuses on analysis, as compared to pre-university, which are usually more fact-driven.

Use the Feynman Technique i.e. explain concepts in the simplest terms possible to anyone who would listen, a fellow classmate, roommate or to empty beer cans.

3. Directed note-taking

Go in for the kill – ask yourself what you don’t understand about a certain topic. Really get to the root of the problem and dig your way out of it.

First, spot the problem areas. Second, design a question which addresses this area. Third, answer your question. Use all your lecture notes, library books, and even Google Search. Don’t move on until you are confident with your answer and rest assured, you will understand the concepts better by going through this route.

Don’t move on until you are confident with your answer and rest assured, you will understand the concepts better by going through this route.

4. Reading on paper

94% of university students polled said they preferred studying using paper as it was easier to focus and the freedom to highlight, annotate and write on the margins. And unlike computer screens, reading on paper also helps with spatial memory – you can recall a certain bit of information by where it was placed on a book.

On top of these, paper removes one of the top factors for students losing focus: distraction. Without the Internet, there won’t be an infinite number of websites tempting our eyes away from much-needed study time and breaking our focus, which is crucial to retaining memory.

5. Sleep and exercise

Our brain absorbs information best right before sleep or right after exercise.

Research have shown that those who study before sleeping or napping have higher memory recall or higher activity in the hippocampus, the part of the brain which forms new memories.

Exercise has have been found to stimulate the production of a protein called BDNF (Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor), which preps the brain for optimum learning and creative thinking. You are likelier to form creative connections between ideas, and thus, retaining this better.

So, time your sleep and work out accordingly to maximise your study sessions.

6. Use the Italian tomato clock

If you have to cram, do it smartly. Set 25-30 minute chunks of intense study and rest for five minutes after.

Modelled after the Pomodoro Technique which uses the Italian Tomato Clock, this method will minimise distraction and boost productivity.

After all, our ability to retain information tapers after 30 minutes anyway. So, take a well-deserved rest after half an hour with some healthy snacks or light stretching which will do much more for your memory than forcing your brain to study more.

College may be hard and comes with a never-ending list of reading materials. But if you know how the brain works, and take on some of the methods proposed above, you can make that study time more fruitful. Good luck!

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Human memory is notoriously unreliable — even when you think you’ve got the details right, it can still fail you when you need it most.

We rely on both our short-term/ working memory and long-term memory for almost everything, but our memory isn’t as consistent as we’d like to believe. It’s very limited and gets worse with time.

Human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget much of what we read, watch, think, and encounter directly in the world.

Research shows that within just one hour if nothing is done with new the information you learn or come across, you will forget about 50% of that new knowledge. After 24 hours, this amount increases to 70%, and if a week passes without that information being used, up to 90% of it could be lost.

But sometimes the brain forgets on purpose. Our brains are used to sorting out what’s important and ignoring the rest. It may sound counterintuitive, but forgetting is important for the active functioning of the brain and memory.

Most forgetting is part of healthy memory functioning. Research suggests that forgetting plays a positive role in the function of the brain. It can actually increase long-term retention, information retrieval and performance.

In the late 19th century, Herman Ebbinghaus, a psychologist, was the first to systematically tackle the analysis of memory.

His forgetting curve, which explains the decline of memory retention in time, contributed to the field of memory science by recording how the brain stores information

Memories can change spontaneously over time. You are probably familiar with the phenomenon of learning something and forgetting about it a few hours after spending quality time on it.

“Without forgetting, we would have no memory at all,” says Oliver Hardt, who studies memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montreal.

“Forgetting serves as a filter,” he said. “It filters out the stuff that the brain deems unimportant.”

The good news is, you can change the shape of the curve! You can intercept the forgetting curve to retain more of what you learn.

The trick to doing that (especially when you are acquiring a new skill or knowledge) lies in convincing your brain that the information matters.

In a University of Waterloo report that looks at how we forget, the authors argue that when you deliberately remember something you’ve learned or seen not long ago, you send a big signal to your brain to hold onto that information.

They explain, “When the same thing is repeated, your brain says, ‘Oh — there it is again, I better keep that.’ When you are exposed to the same information repeatedly, it takes less and less time to ‘activate’ the information in your long-term memory and it becomes easier for you to retrieve the information when you need it.”

Reviewing what you want to keep a couple of times should give you a good start at overcoming the forgetting curve.

When you quickly revisit the material a number of times, the pieces of information you retain strengthen, instead of quickly fading away.

Leverage the spacing effect

One method that can significantly improve retention of information is spaced repetition — repeating intake of what you are trying to retain over a period of time.

For example, when you read a book and really enjoy it, instead of putting it away, reread it again after a month, then again after three months, then again after six months, and then again after a year.

Spaced repetition leverages the spacing effect, a memory phenomenon that describes how our brains learn better when we separate out information.

“Information that is spaced over time is better remembered than the same amount of information massed together,” write researchers who conducted a study on Neurogenesis and the spacing effect.

Learning something new drives out old information if you don’t allow sufficient time for the new neural connection to solidify.

Herman Ebbinghaus once said, “With any considerable number of repetitions, a suitable distribution of them over a space of time is decidedly more advantageous than the massing of them at a single time.”

Spending time each day to remember information will greatly decrease the effects of the forgetting curve. It’s a conscious effort that reminds your brain that you want to commit that knowledge to your long-term memory.

Use the 50/50 rule

Another approach to overcoming the forgetting curve is the 50/50 rule. Dedicate 50% of your time to learning anything new and the rest of your time to sharing or explaining what you have learned to others.

Research shows that explaining a concept to someone else is the best way to learn it yourself. The 50/50 rule is a better way to learn, process, retain, and remember information.

For example, instead of completing a book, aim to read half, and try recalling, sharing, or writing down the key ideas you have learned before proceeding. Or better still, share that new knowledge with your audience.

Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re consistently exposed to facts, pseudo-facts, notifications, and rumor, all posing as information.

Information overload means we are processing more data than ever before.

And the brain is consistently in the business of sorting what to keep and what to forget. If you want to improve your retention rate, take control of the process and reinforce the new information deliberately.

This article originally appeared in Medium.

Whether you’ve been transferred to a new department or you’re dealing with a difficult boss, workplace challenges are unavoidable. And the biggest challenges are the ones you have little control over.

The one thing you can always control, however, is how you respond to these challenges. The way you think about your circumstances affects your mental strength.

If you tell yourself you can’t handle a hardship or you shouldn’t have to deal with one more stressful situation, you’ll struggle to perform well. If, however, you take charge of your inner monologue and talk to yourself in a healthy way, you’ll find that you’re much more resilient to any hardship you face.

Here are 10 helpful things you can tell yourself when it seems like everything is going wrong:

1. “I’ve Survived Tougher Challenges”

No matter how difficult your workplace challenge is, you’ve likely endured something more difficult in the past. Whether you’ve lost a loved one or you overcame a learning disability as a child, don’t trivialize your ability to bounce back.

Recalling your past successes can remind you how mentally strong you really are. Being confident in your ability to get through difficult times can help you face challenges head-on.

2. “I Can Handle This”

Stress is inevitable when dealing with tough times. So knowing you can survive feeling uncomfortable is key to getting through anything.

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While feelings of disappointment, sadness, anger, and anxiety aren’t pleasant, these emotions are tolerable. Remind yourself that you have the ability to cope with discomfort, and you’ll be able to handle any tough situation thrown at you.

3. “Tough Times Don’t Last Forever”

It’s easy to feel like rough patches are going to last forever. But before convincing yourself that your career is over or that you’ll never succeed, remind yourself that workplace challenges don’t last.

Few problems are unfixable. But even if you can’t make things better, you aren’t going to feel bad forever. Reminding yourself that there’s light at the end of the tunnel can help you push through a little longer.

4. “I Have Some Control Over This”

Don’t waste your energy trying to control other people or circumstances you can’t change. You’ll burn yourself out focusing on all the wrong things.

Instead, focus on the things you can control. Keep in mind that sometimes the only thing you have control over is your own reaction. So put your energy into managing your effort and attitude, and you’ll see progress.

5. “Some Things Are Going Right”

When times are tough, you’ll feel bad. And when you feel this way, you’ll start thinking everything is bad. You’ll screen out anything that’s good because you’re only focused on the bad.

Take time to purposely look for positive things at work, regardless of how small. Whether this means reminding yourself of the co-workers you like or thinking about parts of your job you enjoy, these reminders can counteract the negative thoughts that might come up naturally when you’re struggling.

6. “It’s OK To Ask For Help”

Asking for help is tough. Yet a helping hand might be just what you need to get through a hardship.

Don’t be embarrassed to call on coworkers for advice or to ask friends and family for a little support. Tell your trusted confidants what you are going through. They may be able to give you the specific advice you were missing.

7. “Something Good Might Come Out Of This”

No matter how bad a situation is, there’s always the possibility that something good will come out of it.

Remind yourself that even in the worst-case scenario, you might at least learn a life lesson. You can always move on from a bad situation and find something better for yourself.

8. “Five Years From Now This Won’t Matter So Much”

The fact is that the majority of problems you worry about today won’t even matter five years from now.

Remind yourself that whatever is going wrong now is only a small fraction of your actual life. Even if you’re dealing with a major setback, many good things are likely to happen within the next few years, and the problem you’re struggling with now might not even be an issue.

9. “I Can Accept What’s Out Of My Control”

You can’t change the past, another person’s behavior, or a coworker’s issues. Trying to do so only wastes your resources and drains you of the mental strength you need to be your best.

Remind yourself that you can accept things for what they are. This doesn’t mean you have to agree with everyone, but it does mean you can choose not to engage in wishful thinking or unproductive activities.

10. “I Can Choose To Take Care of Myself”

The most important thing to remember when everything else is going wrong is to take care of yourself. Get plenty of rest, eat healthy, exercise, and spend some time doing leisure activities.

Taking care of yourself is key to helping you stay as strong as possible. And you will likely need all the mental strength you can muster to get through tough times.

Build Your Mental Muscles

The way you think greatly affects your mental strength. Reminding yourself that you can get through tough times will not only drown out the negative thoughts, it can also boost your confidence and motivate you to take positive action. So gain control over your inner dialogue and help yourself stay strong during tough times.

Amy Morin is a psychotherapist and the international bestselling author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do and 13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don’t Do. Her…

Note: This post is written by Jonathan Emmen

We all love a great novel. And when we finish it, we remember the plot, the characters, and most details. Why is that? Because we are totally focused and absorbed in what we are reading as we read it. Contrast that with a textbook – dry, non-fiction content that we are consciously trying very hard to read and remember, without much enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is probably the single most important factor in reading fast and remembering what we have read. And it is the factor that we all must try to overcome when we read non-fiction material that is not so exciting. Students, content marketers, and business professionals have to absorb a lot of content, and without solid strategies to read faster and remember more, they are committing a great deal of time to an arduous task, often having to take copious notes as they read so that they can review it later and remember.

There are strategies to fix this problem, although they are not the strategies that any of us were taught in elementary school. In fact, the strategies we learned in school probably hamper our efforts. Here is how to read faster and remember more.

1. Turn Off the Monologue of Making Sounds

This is how you were taught to read – to sound out letter combinations and put those together to form words. We continue to do this as adults, when our eyes can actually capture words and sentences and send them to our brains much faster.

This new strategy requires mindfulness, a contemporary buzzword that means many things, but is most often defined as focus. Focus not on sounding words out but rather on your eyes moving across the page. When you do find something that really interests you, you can turn that monologue back on and enjoy. But focusing on what the eye is seeing can increase your speed up to three times.

2. Scan for Those Important Words

This is another strategy that goes against what we were taught in grade school – to read every word in a sentence or paragraph. It is totally unnecessary to get the information. Verb, adverbs, articles, and many adjectives only add fluff. You want the nouns and some of the adjectives and you only need to really read 50% of what is in a sentence. Your mind can fill in the gaps of the less important words.

Example: “Certainly, the dog was happy that his owner fed him but was even happier that he was given some attention with a game of catch.”

Let’s break it down.

“The dog was happy” – your eyes can see this as a chunk, not as four separate words.

“fed by owner” – another chunk

“happier … attention … game of catch”

The sentence has 25 words in it. You can get the meaning by scanning and picking up only 11 words – less than 50% of the total.

This takes practice, but once you get it, you will read everything this way (except that novel where you want to savor every word). And, if there is a paragraph you read that you don’t get this way, you can always go back and read it again. But if you do get it, you are onto the next paragraph quickly.

3. Read First and Last Sentences of Paragraphs First

The reason for doing this is two-fold. First, if you read the first sentence and it is introducing something you already know, why read the rest of the paragraph? Second, non-fiction is generally poorly written. It is long-winded, often repetitive, certainly wordy, and with more examples than are necessary.

Try reading just the first and last sentence of a paragraph in a textbook. Do you get the gist of what is being said? Is this something you have heard about before? Then move on. If, on the other hand, a first sentence piques your interest or if it is introducing content that is foreign to you, read the whole paragraph.

4. Relate New Information to Stuff You Already Know

When we read and take in information, our brains actually store everything – most of it in our subconscious. We don’t know it is there. So, when we try to recall what we have read, it may be hard to do. But it is there – it just needs a context that will spark the retrieval. You can spark that retrieval by relating something new to something you already know, preferably a personal experience.

If you are reading a book on psychology, for example, and you come across the term “cognitive behavioral therapy,” which is then explained, read the full explanation. After all, this is new stuff. Now relate it to a personal experience.

The theory is that what we think about ourselves determines all of our behaviors, and to change behaviors we must first change our thinking. Think of a time when you didn’t take a chance on something because you were afraid of failure. That’s cognitive behavior in action. Now you’ll remember it always.

5. Do Get Some Stuff in Writing

There is a very tiny percentage of humans who remember absolutely everything they read, see, or hear. Their “condition” is called hyperthymestic syndrome. For the rest of us, our memory is not that good. Sometimes we have to write things down so we don’t forget.

When you finish a piece of non-fiction, go back and make some notes, maybe from parts you highlighted as you read. Then type up a 150-word summary of the piece and list the important point you took from it. Save it in a database. You only need to do this with information that is really important to you. Ten years from now, when the memory of that book is a bit vague, you have that database to look it up, and the rest will be retrieved for you.

Reading faster and remembering more is not a magical, mysterious thing. It is discarding the strategies that we were taught in elementary school, adopting these new ones, and practicing them.

Jonathan Emmen – student and a passionate blogger from Copenhagen and regular contributor for different educational and entertainment blogs such a ProCustomWriting writing service. You can follow him on @JonnyEmmen or you can also follow him on Kinja.

We remember most of the songs we had heard, aren’t we? but when it comes to studying we can’t. We feel boredness while studying which causes us to remember very less of what we studied.

So here we have collected 5 best memory techniques on how to remember everything you study that will help you to learn anything faster and remember more.

How to Remember Everything You Read?

#1 Repeat Information

You might have noticed that the advertising that plays, again and again, fits in your mind, and when you go to the market you notice that products faster than other. This is a psychology technique that the advertisers use to make us remember the product and this theory used by advertisers can be used by us as well for remembering things for a long time.

A German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus did deep research on this topic and made a graph called the “forgetting curve graph“. According to that forgetting curve graph humans remember 100% when they are studying, 60% after 20 minutes, 44% after 1 hour, 33% after 1 day, 25% after 6 days, and only 21% after 31 days.

There is a saying in the Latin language “repetitio est mater studiorum”, which means repetition is the mother of learning. When we listen to anything repeatedly our mind captures it for a long time and with help of that, we can change the forgetting curve.

But repetition should be done in the right way because “hard work in the wrong direction gives wrong results and sometimes no results“. So the best way to repeat something is by a technique called “spaced interval repetition“.

What is the example of a Perfect Spaced Intervals of repetition?

First review: Immediately
Second review: 24 hours later
Third review: one week later
Fourth review: one month later
Fifth review: 3 months later
(You can customize these intervals if it is not suitable for you.)

#2 Study It Loud

Some researchers researched a variety of people. They gave some words to a group of people and said them to remember those words without making any sound, and gave the same words to another group of people and said them to remember those words by saying them loudly.

After this experiment, researchers found that people that were said to remember by saying loudly remembered more than that said to remember silently.

Why is reading out loud important?

We make a visual connection with what we study and try to remember it, but when we study loudly we make visual as well as audio connections in our mind. Studying loudly will benefit you more when you read important points loudly as compared to the other less important points.

#3 Method of LOCI

Guinness world record maker memory champion Dominic O’Brien used the LOCI technique to remember 2808 playing cards in sequence.

Our mind works more effectively when our senses are involved in the work.
For example, you want to remember a grocery list that has tomatoes, bread, shaving cream, apples, and a pen. So here you can visualize this as you went into a house made of the tomato where doors were made from bread and shaving cream was used by apples to shave their beard with the help of a pen.

By visualizing technique you can remember and learn anything faster and with the sequence like the memory champion. And I have a tip here for you – try visualizing in a funny way like the above example, this will make your mind remember that thing more quickly and you will remember that for a long time.

#4 Chunking

What is the chunking technique?

The chunking technique is a technique where you have to separate things in different chunks that will help you to remember anything faster.

Assume that, you want to remember a list of animals – rabbit, cat, elephant, tuna, pigeon, octopus, warthog, shark, dolphin, peacock, hippo, crow, dog, giraffe, and crocodile. I think you forgot the majority of animals while reading, isn’t it?

So here you can use the technique of chunking to remember everything. In the chunking technique, you’ve to divide things into different chunks. Like here-
Pets- Rabbit, Cat, Dog.
Water- Tuna, Shark, Dolphin.
Birds- Crow, Pigeon, Peacock.
Ugly- Warthog, Crocodile, Octopus.
Huge- Elephant, Giraffe, Hippo.

Now try to remember pets and when you get 70-80% confidence about your remembering move to the next and follow this until you reach the last chunk. And I’m guaranteeing you that you’ll surely remember all the names.

#5 Mnemonics

What are the types of mnemonics?

There are three types of mnemonics:-
Acronyms– use the only first letter to remember anything, for example- ROYGBIV or Roy G. Biv for rainbows colors.
Acrostics– make meaningful lines from the first letters, for example- to remember the names of all planets of the universe in the sequence you can make a sentence like- “My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets” where the first letters of all words are starting of planet names.
Rhymes– make rhymes to remember.

How To Remember Everything You Read Conclusion

Start using the above tips and your confidence and expertise will boost like a rocket. Now you got the answer to the question – how to remember everything you read or study then make sure you read How to Read Faster and Remember More.

I highly recommend you start doing meditation of 15 to 20 minutes before you start studying because meditation will help you to increase your focus and concentration which is the need of studying.

Always try to study in the morning time whenever possible because we have the least thoughts in our mind in the morning time.

From where you parked your car to the password for your Facebook account, the sheer number of things you have to remember each day is pretty astounding.

So if you are having trouble keeping some of these details sharp, chances are you’re not alone.

But there is a group of people whose main goal is to make what you see and hear stick. These “memory athletes” travel the world to showcase their skills — and a group of them is set to compete this June 24-26 in San Diego, California as part of an event called the Extreme Memory Tournament.

But these memory champions also have some great advice for the rest of us. Here are five simple strategies for remembering things you’ve learned.

1. Create a memory palace.

The memory palace is based on the idea that our spatial memories are much stronger than our memories for specific words or objects. You can probably easily recall, for example, where in your home you store your holiday decorations or your office supplies, says World Memory Champion Alex Mullen. And you can apply this innate ability to other harder-to-recall things, like a list of groceries.

Try it: Take your list (let’s say it includes apples, paper towels, bread, and milk) and, as you walk through your home in your mind, create a scene of each grocery item in each space. In the living room, for example, you might imagine a group of kids bobbing for apples, while in the dining area you picture each furniture item covered in rolls of paper towels. Next you approach your bedroom, where you picture a giant laying on your bed while snacking on loaves of bread. In the bathroom, you see the sink and bathtub overflowing with milk.

2. Think of a scene.

We form visual memories much like how a camera records an image: What we see gets imprinted, kind of like a photograph, in a specific set of brain cells in our hippocampus, deep inside the brain. This process is called encoding.

The reason we misplace things like our keys, wallet, phone, or car so often is because we store so many similar versions of those memories. Think of how many times you’ve parked your car or tossed your keys somewhere. Your brain has encoded thousands of those memories. Over time, they begin to blur.

To improve your memory, you have to be able to keep those recollections apart. Next time you set down your keys, try creating a precise scene in your head, suggests US Memory Champion Joshua Foer. Take note of the surface on which you’re resting it. Is it wood, steel, or concrete? Red or blue? Is there a photograph or an object nearby that you can keep in mind?

3. Establish an emotional connection.

aving a sense of connection with an object or a place can help us remember details about it.

In a recent review, Harvard and MIT scientists compared how well people could remember photographs against how well they could recall the color of a few simple squares. Overall, people were far better at remembering details about the photos than they were at recalling details about the squares. Researchers think this discrepancy has to do with people’s ability to link things in the photos with their own feelings or memories, and therby keep the memory sharper.

4. Try a mnemonic.

If you’re trying to remember words in a particular order, try making an word out of each of the item’s first letters. One infamous example is using the name Roy G. Biv to remember the colors of the spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).

“Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se, but for creating mental structures that make it easier to retrieve what you have learned,” write Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, in the book “Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.”

5. Connect the new thing to older things.

Someone told to recall a man who is a baker is more likely to hold on to that memory than someone told to remember a person with the last name Baker, Foer says in a TED talk.

Because “the name Baker doesn’t actually mean anything to you,” Foer says. “It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. But the common noun baker, we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their hands.”

“The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to prior knowledge,” the authors of “Make It Stick” write, “the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later.”

You’ll become skilled not just in medicine, but in waitressing, technology, mediation, and more.

1. Your schedule sounds great on paper, but it’s way more work than it looks like. People swear nurses have the best schedule ever. For most nurses in hospitals, it’s advertised as just three days a week for 12 hours. But when you factor in the time it takes for you to report on your patients to the oncoming nurse and vice versa (not to mention your commute), your day looks a lot more like 15 hours — and it starts before the sun comes up. Oh, and three days a week? Hilarious! Be prepared to regularly receive calls at 5 a.m. begging you to come in on your “day off” because the team is short-staffed. And you’ll go in, because you were begging people yesterday for the same.

2. Being a nurse is not only medical care. It’s being a patient advocate, a waitress, housekeeper, electrician, technology expert, mediator between families and doctors and families and families. You will be shocked by how many times a day someone asks you what channel NBC is or to reheat their food while you get them the Wi-Fi password. And if you thought illness brings families together, think again: I’ve seen everything from siblings who haven’t spoken in years fighting over their mother’s treatment to divorced parents that need assigned visiting hours because they can’t be at the hospital at the same time.

3. If you don’t have a good memory, you better come up with a system to help you remember everything. You need to remember more than anyone else — the doctors you work with will count on you to have answers about all your patients, including every disease process, every medication and time it needs to be administered, lab results, vital signs, urine output, lab schedule, and all new orders for the day. Be prepared to write down every single thing that you do.

4. Mistakes happen. Your first mistake is the worst, but they never get easier. You will never forget them and never make them again. If the mistake you made doesn’t have immediate ramifications, you’ll constantly worry about it until you’re positive everything is OK with the patient. Medication errors are the hardest mistakes to cope with. You 100 percent will cry (just when you are alone, in a closet where no one can see you).

5. Nursing school will never prepare you for your first or 20th or last death. I’ve seen more deaths than I can count now. You will wish someone told you what to say to the mother who’s showing you videos of their dying child before she got sick. You also wish someone told you what it was like for the 80-year-old man to tell you he’s ready to go because he’s lived a long full life. Each death affects you in a different way.

6. If you don’t have a sick sense of humor already, you will develop one quickly. You will joke about anything and everything you’ve seen. Anyone else who heard your conversations with your coworkers would probably think you are terrible people, but it’s truly a helpful a coping mechanism. You need one to be able to go on with your day and help all your patients even though you’re so stressed.

7. You’ll be on the phone even more than you were when you were a teenager. I wish someone told me how much time you spend on the phone with other departments in the hospital to get things accomplished. Pharmacy, laboratory, central supply, respiratory, social work, nutrition, case management: plan to call them each day multiple times. Start practicing your nice phone voice now, because impatience will get you nowhere.

8. Your body will hurt. Your body will age quickly. Standing and walking for 12-plus hours, holding your bladder, lifting patients who weigh more than 250 pounds: these are just a few of the physical feats you’ll do each day. Many nurses develop back problems, so learn to use proper body mechanics early and buy a great heating pad. Crossfit has nothing on you.

9. You will get calls, texts, pictures, and emails from all your friends and family asking you for medical advice. People will always want to tell you a story about their health, like you don’t see this all day, every single day. It can get annoying, but you love these people, so you will try to find them answers. If I get a text like this at work, I get the entire team of nurses evaluating your problem.

10. You’ll feel underpaid, but nursing is one career that does offer extra opportunities for more money. We should be paid more money for our base work, as we monitor our patients more closely than anyone else. And while unfortunately you don’t have a ton of control over your base salary, nursing is one career where you can always make extra cash by picking up more shifts at night, on the weekend, or overtime.

11. You may not always work five days a week, but you’ll still miss out on a lot of your social life. No matter how many times you explain your schedule to your friends and family, they still won’t understand why you have to work on weekends and holidays. Be prepared to miss birthday parties, holidays, beach weekends, happy hours, and more.

12. Your coworkers will truly feel like family. You will grow closer to the people you work with faster than any other friend or significant other you’ve met; you love them and you hate them, just like “real” family. You now celebrate holidays with them. They understand your stress and love of work more than anyone else in your life.

13. Eat breakfast on your commute, because it may be the only meal you get to eat all day. Some days you walk in and you may not leave just one patient’s room for three or four hours depending on how sick he or she is. I can’t count the number of lunch breaks I’ve missed or the grab-and-go lunches I’ve stuffed in my mouth — I highly recommend learning how to eat a lunch in two minutes.

14. Make sure this is really what you want to do. This is a very thankless, underappreciated job. You do this every day for yourself alone, so your heart has to be in it. You will have the biggest love-hate relationship with your career; while people in many industries feel this way, lives literally depend on you. There are days you leave work and you cry your whole ride home after the death of a patient you grew close with, but there are also days you walk out tall and proud of your job because you helped save someone’s life. So on your hardest, most frustrating days, try to remember the good ones, because those make you the best nurse.

remember what you study + Feel Confident your study strategies will lead to success

Are you frustrated because you are putting in regular study time and yet still don’t know how to remember what you study?

You’re not alone.

So many of my students share they are putting in the time, working hard to go through their learning materials, and still coming up short at exam time, struggling to remember what they studied. It’s frustrating, embarrassing, and sucks the motivation out of you.

The good news is this big problem has a very simple solution and it has a major impact on how quickly you are able to do on your exams.

The Problem With Only Working Forward

You have been studying every single day for three weeks, working on your textbook reading. There is an exam coming up covering the readings from the past three weeks. You start working on the practice tests and realize you don’t remember most of this material. WTF? You did the readings. You even took notes. Why can’t you just remember what you studied?

You may not only be able to imagine this, but you may also be living it. And if so, you are in the right place, my friend!

I feel your pain, I’ve lived your pain, and unfortunately, this is the way most of us study. We stay focused on the next task in front of us, always working on the next and new information. This keeps us on schedule to complete assignments but doesn’t do a good job of preparing us for exams. When you are learning new material (aka, going to college) it is unrealistic to expect that you can read it once and it will stick in your memory.

Unrealistic, but somehow we all think it should work this way. 🙂

And that’s why you were just Googling how to remember what you study, no?

Here’s the truth: we only learn something new through repetition and practice.

How many times did you have to practice a song on the piano to play it effortlessly? How many times do you use a new app or program before you remember how it works?

I did a little research, er, Googling, trying to understand how many times we need to see a new fact to remember it. It depends. Factors like our previous knowledge and the ways we embed information have a big impact. This also backs up why the four steps to master memorization are so effective because they embed information in different ways. This article suggests you need to see a fact at least seven times to remember it.

how to remember what you study

To remember what you study you need spaced repetition, which is simply saying you need to revisit the material many times. You know I like an easy-to-implement system, so here is what I suggest:

1. Study new material and take awesome notes. You want to focus 90% of your efforts on moving forward and learning new material
2. Put 10% of your effort towards looking back at what you have previously studied. This means:
   1. Schedule a 15-minute cumulative review each day.
   2. Schedule it at the same time to help the habit stick.
   3. During your cumulative review, look at your notes from all of the previous material. Don’t forget to close your eyes and recall what’s on the page to challenge yourself to recall it and not just recognize it (which is what we do when we read something over and over).
   4. Taking effective notes is the key to doing this review quickly, and remember to always refine your notes.

By practice this simple 15-minute review practice you see amazing results in what you are able to remember over the course of a week. This small daily commitment is going to add up as well. When it is exam time you find much of the information is already in memory. Whatever details are left you haven’t yet memorized can quickly be added so you are ready to slay the test.