A student comes out of a good class. Everything made sense. By the evening, half is gone. After three days, almost nothing is left. Does this happen to you too?
It is not because you are weak. It is because nobody taught you what to do in the ten minutes after a lesson. In Memory Power, I give two key techniques to speed up learning. They are reinforcing and reviewing.
How your brain keeps something
The book describes three stages. First is acquisition. New information enters the brain, and the key at this stage is concentration. If you do not focus, it goes in one ear and out of the other. That is why teachers always nag students to pay attention.
Second is consolidation. If you concentrated well, the brain sends a signal to store the information as long term memory. This is easier when the new thing is related to something you already know, or when it stirs an emotion.
Third is retrieval. When you need it, the brain uses the same pattern of nerve cells it used to store it. The more often you need something, the easier it is to bring it back.
Reinforcing and reviewing support the second and third stages.
Reinforcing: five to ten minutes after the lesson
Five to ten minutes after you learn something, write down what you just learnt. If you do not, the lesson will fade quickly. You will not forget everything, but you will not remember anywhere near as much.
You do not have to write an encyclopedia. Sometimes one word is enough. Here is my advice. Ask yourself which part of the lesson was hard. Which part will you have trouble remembering? Write that down.
Do not worry about being one hundred percent accurate. If you learnt something but cannot recall it exactly, write it as best you can. You can fix it later. Writing something wrong is better than writing nothing at all, because a wrong note can be corrected, and a blank page cannot.
Reviewing: skim your notes on a schedule
Skim your notes from time to time. How often is for you to decide. I find that once a week works well for me.
The better you know a subject, the less often you need to review it. Something from a year ago may only need a look every three months. A hard chapter you learnt only yesterday may need a review every day until it starts making sense.
Also review right before the next lesson. If you are like me, you spend the first five to ten minutes of any class trying to remember where you stopped last time. A quick look beforehand lets you start fast, and you do not waste the lesson catching up.
Where to keep your notes
The book compares two simple tools. A paper notebook is the simplest, so use a page for each subject. You cannot edit or search it, but it is still a good option, especially if you have no computer. A word processor, even notepad, lets you edit and search. The drawback is that files get scattered, or one file becomes very long. Pick whichever you will actually use.
Repetition is attention
People ask me if repetition is bad. No. Look closely at what you do when you repeat something. You force yourself to pay attention, and that is one of the most important steps in memory. We forget most things because we did not really take them in at the start.
So the techniques in this book do not replace repetition. They make your first attention stronger. And the review brings it back at the right times.
A plan for this week
- After each class, take two minutes and write three lines from memory.
- Circle the one point that you struggled with.
- Pick one evening a week for a fifteen minute review of all your notes.
- Look at tomorrow's subject for five minutes, just before the class.
Keep it for a month. Your marks, and your confidence, will tell you the rest.
This is one idea from my book Memory Power.
