Memory techniques and Brain effectiveness

Tony Buzan has written several books on helping people with memory techniques. The premise is based on a coding system for the brain. Almost anyone can accomplish great feats of memory if they learn the technique. Some will claim that there is no such thing as a photographic memory, just people with great memory techniques. The techniques also encompass attaching meaningful experiences or connections to information that one wishes to memorize.

Grouping and categorizing information can be most helpful. Information should be grouped into subgroups to break it down into smaller bits of information. Visualizing the information can also be helpful. This technique works well if you can visualize yourself doing something unusual or funny. If you park your car on the fourth floor in section L, you can picture your four children whom you love. You will remember the information. These are called mnemonics. Mnemonics have long been used to categorize and remember information.

Harvard researchers have tested subjects through the scanning with MRIs. The researchers found that the two lobes that showed the most activity when memory was needed were the frontal lobe and the temporal lobes. The subjects were shown a list of words. The words that caused more of the brain activity in these lobes were the words that had more meaning to the subjects. Thus, offering evidence that the more meaningful the information is for subjects the likelihood for remembering it is increased.

If you were given a list of 30 items to write down, you would remember the beginning of the list, the end of the list, anything that was unusual and anything that was repeated, I say anything that was repeated. If you wanted to take in a body of information and you studied diligently for one hour, you would have one primacy and one recency.

If you were to break the hour up into two sessions of thirty minutes each, that gives you two primacies and two recencies. Furthermore, if you broke the hour up into three sessions of twenty minutes each that would give you three primacies and three recencies.

In order to obtain the primacies and the recencies, it requires that you take short breaks of about five minutes for each break. The one thing that you do when you take the break and return to studying is to review the material. This does not mean rereading all the material, it means reviewing the information that you have highlighted as important whether it be physical highlighting or mental highlighting.

Awareness of the brain is key to helping you remember and to functioning at your very best. Humans have many rhythms that keep the body functioning. Biorhythms are among those that can hinder or help you if you understand how they function. Biorhythms may be thought of as dips and peaks in our brain awareness. Dips occur at varying stages when we sleep and when we are awake. When you are awake and you daydream, this can be thought of as a dip period. At times we perform when we are at a dip stage. For example, we may write a letter or an email in a dip period. If we wait and reexamine the letter or email at a later time, we will realize that we wish to edit the letter or email to make it more effective in regards to what we wished to communicate.

Improving the Depths of Processing

The more you relate information with your past knowledge, the more you elaborate, the deeper your memory will be.

1. Imagination – anything that sparks the imagination that is funny or bizarre will help to improve memory

2. Actions – visualizing people in action will help with memory

3. Rhyming – any rhyming words help the brain to remember information

4. Locations – visualizing the rooms in your house or a building and make connections to rooms that you have a strong memory of; place items in your rooms in bizarre situations; you need toilet paper so you recall someone papering your bathroom fixtures; placing items in rooms is a good technique to memorize items backwards

5. Structure – organization or chunking of information; memorize numbers of items such as one is lemons – visualize one lemon on a skewer; two shoes – visualize two shoes on each arm; three dogs – visualize three dogs one with each of the three stooges, etc.

Read more about the brain