Improve Your Memory

University of Pennsylvania professor and best-selling author Adam Grant offered guidance for improving memory skills.  Grant claims that memory is a learned skill, but most of us don’t use the right techniques to improve it.

What Does Not Work

• Cramming
• Re-reading
• Highlighting

What Does Work

• Taking time to rest your mind, and consolidate and store information
• Quizzing yourself on the information you want to retain or engaging in another active exercise
• Explaining what you want to remember 

Grant explained that after students listened to a story and took a test of how much they remembered an hour after hearing the story, recall increased by 10 to 30 percent for those who were randomly assigned to sit and do nothing in a dark, quiet room a few minutes after hearing the story.  The reason is that your brain needs rest and space in order to consolidate and store information. The same experiment was conducted with stroke victims and others with neurological injuries.  Those who had time to rest and consolidate improved recall from 7 percent to 79 percent. 

Taking practice tests with information that you want to retain is the best technique to improve memory. By practicing, your brain knowns where to retrieve that information and it will also identify where your gaps in memory exist. 

Telling others the information that you want to retain is another powerful technique to improve memory skills.  Grant referenced a recent experiment where people learned about sound waves.  At the end of the lesson, participants were randomly assigned to teach what they learned using notes or without notes. Those who winged it did better, because the best way to learn something is to teach it - not because explaining it helps you understand it, but the act of retrieving it helps you to remember, Grant said.