https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=BA890X5fFSA
increase memory
_
s a 95-year-old psychologist, Brenda Milner still remembers the bad old days of fr
ontal lobotomies as a treatment for psychosis. In fact, her research provided so
me of the first evidence showing why such invasive brain operations could be har
mful.
Milner, who teaches and conducts research at the Montreal Neurological Institute
at McGill University in Quebec, is perhaps most known for her work with Henry M
olaison, a patient formerly known as H.M.
Molaison had epilepsy and was treated by having specific regions of both his tem
poral lobes the parts of the brain we now know are responsible for memory removed in
1953 by William Beecher Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital. The oper
ation helped Molaison s epilepsy but gave him anterograde amnesia, meaning he coul
d not form memories of new events, though his working memory was unaffected.
Milner in 1965 (left) and today. (Courtesy of Brenda Milner and Meera Paleja)
Through her studies on H.M., Milner found that he could learn new motor tasks, b
ut he had no memory of having done so. For example, he was able to draw a reflec
ted image of a star by looking in a mirror, but he couldn t remember practicing th
e skill over the course of days.
This discovery, as well as Milner s future work, led to a greater scientific under
standing of different types of memory
I talked with Milner by phone last week. What follows is a lightly edited transc
ript of our conversation.
How would you describe the field of neuropsychology?
I suppose it's the idea that as a psychologist, I'm a student of behavior, the s
cientific study of behavior. That s my definition of experimental psychology. Wher
e you make the leap into neuropsychology is by thinking that you should try to c
orrelate these behavioral phenomena, such as memory or perception, with what is
going on in the brain. And of course, before we knew so much about the brain, it
was just speculation. But the more we found out about the brain, the more reaso
nable this approach seemed to be.
In World War II, you spent some time performing aptitude tests on fighter pilots
and bomber pilots. What was that like?
In World War II, scientists in the U.K. were a reserved occupation; they couldn t
be drafted into the army. If I had gone into the arts, I would have been in unif
orm and maybe been in France. But scientists were considered brains that could b
e used at home, so I was in Cambridge. I had just completed my bachelor's degree
in 1939 when war broke out. I had a scholarship from my college for two years r
esearch.
If I had gone into the arts, I would have been in uniform and maybe been in Fran
ce.
In Cambridge, we were very near a lot of airfields where planes were taking off
and landing. It became very natural that our department was working on research
that was relevant to the Airforce. What I had been interested to study, even bef
ore the war, was perception and what you do when you get conflicting information
from different senses. Or what happens if you get sensations as you re flying a p
lane that disagree with what your instruments are telling you. What we were doin
g in Cambridge we were working with the Airforce to try to decide which of the inc
oming airmen who were going to be pilots, which of them should be directed to fl

y in bomber planes and which should be directed to fly in fighter planes.

Everybody had to trust their instruments, but there were many different tasks ..
. we were looking over the whole array of what these potential pilots had done o
n various tests. And of course it all depended on the needs of the moment. At th
e Battle of Britain, we needed fighter pilots, but later in the war, the emphasi
s was on bombing German cities. They were exciting years.
Did you face any sexism early in your career?
No, I ve never seen any sexism. I didn't find it difficult. The Montreal Neurologi
cal Institute, when I went there, was a very authoritarian place. Dr. Penfield w
as a very dominant figure when you were young and new there, you didn t speak out o
f turn. It was hierarchical, but it was not sex discrimination.
I enjoy men as companions. I work well with men.
The only gender discrimination I discovered was a structural one: When I was in
high school, I decided I wanted to go to Cambridge University. There were very f
ew women students at Oxford or Cambridge, and back then the women couldn t go to t
he men s colleges. In 1936, across the whole university and all three years it too
k to get your B.A., there couldn't be more than 400 women, and there were thousa
nds of men. To get into one of these women s colleges, there were very few places.
And I had to get scholarships because I had no money. The situation that was co
mpetitive was structural in that there were so few women s [places].
But [sexism] isn t something I m interested in as a topic. I enjoy men as companions
. I work well with men.
How did you come to start working with H.M., the patient who suffered the memory
loss?
I was working here with Dr. Wilder Penfield, who founded the Montreal Neurologic
al Institute. In those days, we did not have MRIs. We had no way of looking into
the brain, so the surgeon did not know what he was going to find until he opene
d up the brain.
We were undertaking planned removals of different parts of the brain for the tre
atment of epilepsy. The removal of part of one temporal lobe of the brain has no
w become a standard treatment for temporal lobe epilepsy worldwide. But the whol
e assumption is that the temporal lobe on the opposite side of the brain is func
tioning. You can get along with one kidney, one eye, one temporal lobe but you c
an t lose both sides because then you ll have a handicap of some sort.
These patients with operations on the left hemisphere were having trouble rememb
ering names or the gist of a story, which is a nuisance, but not a serious handi
cap. In patients that had operations on the right temporal lobe, they would be p
oor at remembering faces and places. This was the work I did for my PhD.
A year or two later, we encountered two patients who had a severe memory impairm
ent after a unilateral removal a type of removal that we thought was safe.
So we had these two unacceptable results. You have to understand that operating
on someone to control epilepsy is intended to improve their quality of life; it'
s not acceptable to make the quality of life worse. We said, how can we account f
or this?
It's tricky bringing an amnesic patient with seizures across the border.
We speculated that these two patients had damage on the unoperated side. So when
Dr. Penfield made his removal on the left side, he was depriving the patient of
the function of those structures in both hemispheres. Twelve years later, one o

f these patients died and we got the brain and confirmed that hypothesis.
We
3,
d,
ou
ar

reported that finding at the American Neurological Association meeting in 195

and in the audience, there was the surgeon, Dr. William Scoville from Hartfor
Conn. He read the abstracts, he called Dr. Penfield and said, "I think what y
and Dr. Milner are describing is what I've seen in my patient who had a simil
operation."

That patient was H.M. Dr. Scoville invited me down to Hartford to study that pat
ient because Dr. Penfield and I had made so much of this memory disorder.
I started going down to MIT and studying H.M. down there. It was easier to bring
him to Boston than to Montreal. We got H.M. to Montreal just once. It's tricky
bringing an amnesic patient with seizures across the border.
So what was H.M. s problem, specifically?
Temporal lobes create memories. (Wikimedia Commons)
He had epilepsy, and it had been resistant to all medication. He did not have te
mporal lobe epilepsy. Dr. Scoville had been doing surgery on the brains of patie
nts within the bad old days of frontal lobotomy for psychosis. He was disenchant
ed with it, he didn t like the effects. But then he read that maybe if he did surg
ery on the temporal lobe, instead of the frontal lobe, maybe that would help. Bu
t the difference here was that he was deliberately operating on both hemispheres
. We were doing unilateral procedures.
Then, H.M. was this patient who had had these seizures from an early age, he d bee
n treated with every kind of medication that was available in the day. Dr. Scovi
lle thought maybe this operation [on both sides of the brain] would be useful in
this desperate case of H.M. And he agreed to it, and the operation was carried
out. And after that, though, there was this huge memory impairment.
You mentioned that he could learn how to do something perfectly, but he could ne
ver remember having done it.
He couldn t learn a poem or something like that or the route to the bathroom, but
he could improve a motor skill. In this case, it was trying to follow the outlin
e of a star on a piece of paper when it s reflected in a mirror. If you only see y
our hand in the mirror, you really make a mess of it at first. We all do. That s n
ormal. The beautiful thing was that H.M. showed this improvement toward the end.
He was doing this drawing on the table, and he did this beautiful drawing, and
he said, that s funny, it looks like it would be difficult, but it looks as though
I ve done it quite well.
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He was so amazed because he had absolutely no recollection of the 30 trials of t
his he d done over three days. So the motor learning systems were still intact in
him. When you have a patient who doesn t remember anything, the challenge isn t to s
how if he s forgetful that s obvious. The challenge is to show if he can learn anythin
g at all.
The most exciting moment in my research was that. I had not predicted this.
How did your peers react to that discovery?
This was the early 1950s, and people were doing research on animals or with grad
uate student volunteer subjects.

So some said, "Well this is one peculiar case, who knows what else is going on i
n this person's brain? You re claiming that these structures are so important for
memory, and we don t have an animal model.
The important thing was to get an animal model, from monkeys ideally, in whom th
ese temporal lobe structures had been damaged and then you could show a comparab
le equivalent impairment.
And it took about 17 years before there was an animal model, and then once we ha
d that, everyone was really excited about the human findings.
What do you think is your most enduring breakthrough?
In terms of what has attracted attention and continues to, I suppose this eviden
ce of the importance of the hippocampus [a structure in the temporal lobe] in me
mory processes. And in terms of all the work it's generated all over the world,
that s the most important thing.
It's really important to be ready to make a bold change.
When I began this work, memory was not a fashionable topic in psychology. I didn
't go into neuropsychology with the intention of working on memory. But when you
have a patient in their 20s complaining of memory problems, you feel that this
is something you have to investigate. It was a long time before these findings b
ecame accepted, and after that people became interested in memory.
Now, people are living to much older ages than they used to. As you live longer,
your memory does get worse. It s an older population, so people are now talking a
bout these things as things they experience themselves.
What is your advice to other scientists or young academics?
Don't be afraid to change your field. It's very hard, you get enthusiasms growin
g up, and you think it's something you want to do. I really wanted to do mathema
tics, but I wasn t a great mathematician. Don't be afraid to change fields, even v
ery radically. I changed very radically. I think sometimes people feel very frig
htened and they get caught doing something they don t enjoy or they re not particula
rly good at. It's really important to be ready to make a bold change.
_
he way most students study makes no sense.
That's the conclusion of Washington University in St. Louis psychologists Henry
Roediger and Mark McDaniel who've spent a combined 80 years studying learning an
d memory, and recently distilled their findings with novelist Peter Brown in the
book Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.
"using active learning strategies is most effective"
The majority of students study by re-reading notes and textbooks
but the psychol
ogists' research, both in lab experiments and of actual students in classes, sho
ws this is a terrible way to learn material. Using active learning strategies
li
ke flashcards, diagramming, and quizzing yourself is much more effective, as is
spacing out studying over time and mixing different topics together.
McDaniel spoke with me about the eight key tips he'd share with students and tea
chers from his body of research.
1) Don't just re-read your notes and readings
167068424
Photofusion/UIG via Getty Images

"We know from surveys that a majority of students, when they study, they typical
ly re-read assignments and notes. Most students say this is their number one goto strategy.
"when students re-read a textbook chapter, they show no improvement in learning"
"We know, however, from a lot of research, that this kind of repetitive recyclin
g of information is not an especially good way to learn or create more permanent
memories. Our studies of Washington University students, for instance, show tha
t when they re-read a textbook chapter, they have absolutely no improvement in l
earning over those who just read it once.
"On your first reading of something, you extract a lot of understanding. But whe
n you do the second reading, you read with a sense of 'I know this, I know this.
' So basically, you're not processing it deeply, or picking more out of it. Ofte
n, the re-reading is cursory
and it's insidious, because this gives you the illu
sion that you know the material very well, when in fact there are gaps."
2) Ask yourself lots of questions
457326795
Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe via Getty Images
"One good technique to use instead is to read once, then quiz yourself, either u
sing questions at the back of a textbook chapter, or making up your own question
s. Retrieving that information is what actually produces more robust learning an
d memory.
"retrieving information is what produces more robust learning and memory"
"And even when you can't retrieve it
when you get the questions wrong
it gives y
ou an accurate diagnostic on what you don't know, and this tells you what you sh
ould go back and study. This helps guide your studying more effectively.
"Asking questions also helps you understand more deeply. Say you're learning abo
ut world history, and how ancient Rome and Greece were trading partners. Stop an
d ask yourself why they became trading partners. Why did they become shipbuilder
s, and learn to navigate the seas? It doesn't always have to be why you can ask
how, or what.
"In asking these questions, you're trying to explain, and in doing this, you cre
ate a better understanding, which leads to better memory and learning. So instea
d of just reading and skimming, stop and ask yourself things to make yourself un
derstand the material."
3) Connect new information to something you already know
"Another strategy is, during a second reading, to try relating the principles in
the text to something you already know about. Relate new information to prior i
nformation for better learning.
"One example is if you were learning about how the neuron transmits electricity.
One of the things we know if that if you have a fatty sheath surround the neuro
n, called a myelin sheath, it helps the neuron transmit electricity more quickly
.
"So you could liken this, say, to water running through a hose. The water runs q
uickly through it, but if you puncture the hose, it's going to leak, and you won
't get the same flow. And that's essentially what happens when we age the myelin
sheaths break down, and transmissions become slower."

Screen_shot_2014-06-19_at_11.29.27_am
(Quasar/Wikimedia Commons)
4) Draw out the information in a visual form
"A great strategy is making diagrams, or visual models, or flowcharts. In a begi
nning psychology course, you could diagram the flow of classical conditioning. S
ure, you can read about classical conditioning, but to truly understand it and b
e able to write down and describe the different aspects of it on a test later on
condition, stimulus, and so on
it's a good idea to see if you can put it in a f
lowchart.
"Anything that creates active learning generating understanding on your own
is v
ery effective in retention. It basically means the learner needs to become more
involved and more engaged, and less passive."
5) Use flashcards
4838276667_8d92568682_o
Deb Stgo
"Flashcards are another good way of doing this. And one key to using them is act
ually re-testing yourself on the ones you got right.
"keeping a correct card in the deck and encountering it again is more useful"
"A lot of students will answer the question on a flashcard, and take it out of t
he deck if they get it right. But it turns out this isn't a good idea repeating
the act of memory retrieval is important. Studies show that keeping the correct
item in the deck and encountering it again is useful. You might want to practice
the incorrect items a little more, but repeated exposure to the ones you get ri
ght is important too.
"It's not that repetition as a whole is bad. It's that mindless repetition is ba
d."
6) Don't cram space out your studying
129722306
Johannes Simon/Getty Images
"A lot of students cram
they wait until the last minute, then in one evening, th
ey repeat the information again and again. But research shows this isn't good fo
r long term memory. It may allow you to do okay on that test the next day, but t
hen on the final, you won't retain as much information, and then the next year,
when you need the information for the next level course, it won't be there.
"practice a little bit one day, then two days later"
"This often happens in statistics. Students come back for the next year, and it
seems like they've forgotten everything, because they crammed for their tests.
"The better idea is to space repetition. Practice a little bit one day, then put
your flashcards away, then take them out the next day, then two days later. Stu
dy after study shows that spacing is really important."
7) Teachers should space out and mix up their lessons too
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Andy Cross/The Denver Post via Getty Images

"Our book also has information for teachers. And our educational system tends to
promote massed presentation of information as well.
"In a typical college course, you cover one topic one day, then on the second da
y, another topic, then on the third day, another topic. This is massed presentat
ion. You never go back and recycle or reconsider the material.
"But the key, for teachers, is to put the material back in front of a student da
ys or weeks later. There are several ways they can do this. Here at Washington U
niversity, there are some instructors who give weekly quizzes, and used to just
put material from that week's classes on the quiz. Now, they're bringing back mo
re material from two to three weeks ago. One psychology lecturer explicitly take
s time, during each lecture, to bring back material from days or weeks beforehan
d.
"the key, for teachers, is to put the material back in front of a student days o
r weeks later"
"This can be done in homework too. It's typical, in statistics courses, to give
homework in which all of the problems are all in the same category. After correl
ations are taught, a student's homework, say, is problem after problem on correl
ation. Then the next week, T tests are taught, and all the problems are on T tes
ts. But we've found that sprinkling in questions on stuff that was covered two o
r three weeks ago is really good for retention.
"And this can be built into the content of lessons themselves. Let's say you're
taking an art history class. When I took it, I learned about Gauguin, then I saw
lots of his paintings, then I moved on to Matisse, and saw lots of paintings by
him. Students and instructors both think that this is a good way of learning th
e painting styles of these different artists.
"But experimental studies show that's not the case at all. It's better to give s
tudents an example of one artist, then move to another, then another, then recyc
le back around. That interspersing, or mixing, produces much better learning tha
t can be transferred to paintings you haven't seen
letting students accurately i
dentify the creators of paintings, say, on a test.
"And this works for all sorts of problems. Let's go back to statistics. In upper
level classes, and the real world, you're not going to be told what sort of sta
tistical problem you're encountering you're going to have to figure out the meth
od you need to use. And you can't learn how to do that unless you have experienc
e dealing with a mix of different types of problems, and diagnosing which requir
es which type of approach."
8) There's no such thing as a "math person"
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Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
"There's some really interesting work by Carol Dweck, at Stanford. She's shown t
hat students tend to have one of two mindsets about learning.
"it turns out that mindsets predict how well students end up doing"
"One is a fixed learning model. It says, 'I have a certain amount of talent for
this topic say, chemistry or physics
and I'll do well until I hit that limit. Pa
st that, it's too hard for me, and I'm not going to do well.' The other mindset
is a growth mindset. It says that learning involves using effective strategies,

putting aside time to do the work, and engaging in the process, all of which hel
p you gradually increase your capacity for a topic.
"It turns out that the mindsets predict how well students end up doing. Students
with growth mindsets tend to stick with it, tend to persevere in the face of di
fficulty, and tend to be successful in challenging classes. Students with the fi
xed mindset tend not to.
"So for teachers, the lesson is that if you can talk to students and suggest tha
t a growth mindset really is the more accurate model
and it is
then students ten
d to be more open to trying new strategies, and sticking with the course, and wo
rking in ways that are going to promote learning. Ability, intelligence, and lea
rning have to do with how you approach it
working smarter, we like to say."
_
Improving your memory doesn t have to be a difficult process. It is more about le
arning how your brain works best, and using this knowledge to your advantage tha
n changing your brain s memory systems. To get you started, here are 10 powerful m
emory improvement tips:
Pay attention to what you want to remember. For anything you see, hear, smel
l, feel, or touch to actually become a memory, you have to pay attention to it.
The most important reason why people cannot remember other people s names is that
they don t pay enough attention to the name during an introduction. The same appli
es to forgetting whether you have locked the door. You were likely doing it on aut
opilot and your brain was occupied with some thoughts about the future or past.
So, whether you want to remember a name, an action, or any other information, ma
ke a conscious effort to pay attention, and you will be amazed how reliable your
memory actually is.
Avoid multitasking whenever possible: Multitasking may be a hallmark of mode
rn times, and you may find it necessary to talk on the phone while switching off
that stove, or driving to work. Studies however have shown that 98% of the peop
le can really only pay attention to one activity at a time. By multitasking you
are essentially switching your attention between different activities and are bo
und to lose some information. The more you switch, the more you lose.
Get your blood flowing and oxygen to your brain: For most of human history,
we made our most important decisions while being upright and in motion. Whether
people were hunting for food or trying to avoid becoming food, they likely did i
t while moving or standing. Unfortunately, evolution is not that fast, and our b
rain and body have not yet become accustomed to out sedentary lifestyle. Your br
ain needs good blood flow and oxygen to function well, and the best way to get t
his is by moving. Aim for at least twenty minutes of moderate aerobic exercise p
er day.
Get enough sleep. A multitude of research has shown that sleeping improves m
emory and insight.
Relax: It is natural to be a bit concerned about an upcoming exam, interview
or date. After all it matters to us, so we want to be at our best. The good new
s is that short term, moderate stress actually boosts memory. However, when stre
ss becomes intensive or goes on for too long, it inhibits the formation of new m
emories and recall of information we already know. Constant stress, worries, and
pressure are memory killers, so when you feel stressed out, don t try to do more
of the same. Go for a walk and relax.
Visualize things you want to remember: To memorize new information, we have
to connect it to information we already know, or in other words, we have to make
associations. Visualization is a very powerful way to create these associations
.
Here is an example: You have been instructed by your wife/husband to ask you
r friend Jim for a book on gardening when you meet him. Now you need to create a
n association between your friend (cue) and the book, reminding you to ask him w
hen you see him. Visualize meeting Jim, having a big book and some carrots in hi
s mouth. You say hello to him, but he, having his mouth full, only mumbles somet

hing. The next time you see Jim, his face will most likely remind you of the car
rots and the book in his mouth. Ah
I needed to ask for this book on gardening. T
ry the Number Rhymes to practice visualization and at the same time learn a very
effective and practical memory system.
Think about the meaning of things you want to remember, and add information
to make them meaningful: Again you want to create effective associations between
new information and what is already stored in your memory. Here is an example:
You are introduced to a person called Bronislaw . (Bronislaw is a popular Polish fi
rst name). Ask yourself, what does the name mean to me? Bron is law looks (and sou
nds a bit) like brown is law . In Thailand, policemen s uniforms tend to be brown
brow
n is law
Bronislaw.
Learn mnemonic techniques if you need to memorize a larger number of facts,
names, or other information fast. Mnemonics range from simple techniques to memo
rize names, dates, or definitions to complete mental filing systems such as the
Method of Loci, allowing you to memorize hundreds of things in order. Besides be
ing highly effective they really are great fun to learn. A great tool to learn f
oreign language vocabulary is the Keyword method.
Practice recall by self testing: To keep information you have memorized, yo
u have to tell your brain that it is important to you. This strengthens the conn
ections between all the different brain cells involved in a particular memory. P
robably the most powerful and versatile technique to achieve this is practicing
recall by self-testing. Let s say you want to remember the important parts of an a
rticle or book you are currently reading. Prepare a short list of questions you
are going to use to test yourself. If else fails, turn paragraph headings into q
uestions. After you have completed your reading, take a short break and then ans
wer the questions from memory. You can further improve on this by answering the
questions again the next day, then two days later Adaptive spaced repetition soft
ware can help you to automatically keep track of what you know and what you have
to practice more.
Make use of external cues and reminders: Remembering things you need to do i
n the future, and appointments you need to keep poses two challenges: You need t
o remember what you wanted to do, and you need to remember when you wanted to do
it. To keep your dentist appointment, I recommend you simply set an alarm in yo
ur mobile phone, or make an entry in your calendar. Some tasks are triggered by
events rather than time. Under the tip visualize things you already learned a tech
nique for connecting events with things you need to do. If a task involves an ob
ject you already have, the easiest way is to visibly put that object in a place
you are going to come across at the time of the event. For example, to remind yo
u to take your medicine after dinner, put it visibly on the dinner table right w
hen you form the intention. To remember to take your books back to the library,
put them right next to your car keys.
I recommend you start by taking 2 or 3 of the these memory improvement tips and
practice them in your daily life. You likely already know where your memory fails
you the most. Pick the strategies you feel are closest to your need, start apply
ing them, and you will surprise yourself, by how much your memory is going to im
prove.
_
Number Rhymes are an easy, yet amazingly powerful memory technique. They belong
to a group of techniques known as mnemonic peg systems. You can use Number Rhyme
s to memorize a list of 10 items in order by connecting the pegs with the items
you want to remember. With a little bit of practice, you can expect to memorize
any list of 10 items in one to two minutes. What s more, the memory for the list t
ends to be a lot stronger than if you had used rote learning
I use the Number Rhymes to capture those fleeting ideas I have. I also use them
to memorize things I have to do. The great advantage of using a mnemonic filing
system such as the Number Rhymes is that you don t need a pen and a paper to take
notes. You can use them when you have no hands free, to capture important though
ts just before going to sleep, when you don t want others to see that you are taki

ng notes, etc.
The possibilities are endless.
Learning the Number Rhymes
Your first step is to memorize the Number Rhymes from the table below, and visua
lize each of the objects as vividly as possible.
Start by saying one-sun . Next imagine a bright yellow sun in the sky. How does
your sun look like? Can you feel the warmth?
Continue with two-shoe . What kind of shoe do you see? Again, make it as vivid
as possible, and also use your other senses. Do you smell the leather of the sho
e?
Continue in this way for each of the number rhymes in the table below. If yo
u don t like one of the pegs, just choose from the alternatives or even make up yo
ur own rhyme.
#

Peg
Image
Alternatives
1
One
Sun
Sun-Number-Rhymes
Gun, bun
2
Two
Shoe
Shoe-Number-Rhymes
Glue, zoo
3
Three

Tree
Tree-Number-Rhymes
Bee, sea
4
Four
Door
Door-Number-Rhymes
Store
5
Five
Knife
Knife-Number-Rhymes
Wife, hive
6
Six
Pigs
Pigs-Number-Rhymes
Bricks, sticks
7
Seven
Heaven
Heaven-Number-Rhymes
8
Eight
Gate
Gate-Number-Rhymes
Plate, skate
9

Nine
Wine
Wine-Number-Rhymes
Mine, sign, stein
10
Ten
Hen
Hen-Number-Rhymes
Pen
Recall the Number Rhymes to Make Sure You Remember Them
Your second step is to recall the number rhymes in order to make sure that you h
ave memorized all your pegs.
Again, start with one. One was a

..? Can you see the object?

Let s Apply the Number Rhymes

Here is a list of ten items to be memorized:
Egg
Motorbike
Plate
Shirt
Book
coconut
Mobile phone
Ice cream
Mirror
Umbrella
Use visualization to connect each of the items with the corresponding number rhy
me. It is important that your peg and the item you want to remember interact wit
h each other. Try to create each of the following images in your mind s eye:
You are frying an egg on a hot stone using the rays of the sun until it beco
mes white.
A motorbike drives over your shoes. They are flat and full of brown dirt.
Plates are hanging from a tree like apples do. This is a special tree giving
plate-fruits.
You are stuffing a shirt under your room door, so the mosquitoes cannot come
in.
A big knife is stuck in your English book. Your brother got angry because he
couldn t remember the words.
You are throwing coconuts at your neighbors pigs because they always wake yo
u up in the morning with their grunting. A coconut hits a black pig. It grunts a
ngrily and runs away.
God from heaven is calling you on your mobile phone. God is asking you on th
e phone: Have you done your homework?

An ice-cream cone is stuck in the gate of your house. You put it there becau
se you don t want your mom to know you are eating ice cream again.
A crazy person is cleaning his mirror with red wine. The whole mirror become
s red. Everyone who looks in the mirror is red as well.
A white hen is running around with a big umbrella in her beak. It is raining
and she doesn t want her feathers to become wet.
Recall the item connected to the first peg by asking yourself: One was a sun and
what happened there?
In the same manner, recall the items connected to each of the 10 pegs.
How are you doing?
I suggest you take a 10-minutes break now and do something completely different.
After 10 minutes, try to recall all 10 items in order.
Why does this work?
You are connecting new information to something
ry. You first learn rhyming words, and then connect
s.
For each item you create an image where the new
er rhyme.
It is easy to recall the items in order because
mber rhymes which in turn are connected to numbers.
the order of the numbers.

you already had in your memo

the new items to those rhyme
item interacts with the numb
they are connected to the nu
Obviously, you already know

Summary:
Connect new information to something you already know.
Use visualization: Create an image where the pieces of information you want
to remember interact with each other.
You can also create a short story to connect information.
_
OneNote is part of Microsoft s office suite, and an extremely versatile note takin
g and outlining application. It allows you to create rich notes which may includ
e text, tables, formulas (OneNote 2010), tags, images, audio, and video recordin
gs. You take your notes on pages in a OneNote notebook and your notes can be any
where on a page as on a sheet of paper. The pages in your notebook can be organi
zed in section groups and sections. You can tag items (sentences, images, paragr
aphs etc.) in your notes to label them as questions, comments, to-do items, idea
s etc.
Two popular ways to take notes in OneNote:
Annotating documents: You can cut and paste, print, scan, or photograph almo
st any document to OneNote and then highlight it and take margin notes (or notes
anywhere else in the document).
Outline note taking: You can use OneNote as a folding outlining application
(Outliner) and create collapsible hierarchical summaries.
Printed document highlighted and annotated in OneNote:
Note-Taking-OneNote
USING ONENOTE AS A FOLDING OUTLINER
Outline note taking (Outlining) is very similar to creating a table of content f
or a document and a very powerful note taking technique, as well as a prewriting
activity to create the scaffolding for a book, research paper, blog post etc.

What is an outline? An outline contains the main topics in a logical arrangement

, leaving out the details. It can be flat, that is a list of topics, or hierarch
ical with headings, subheadings and so on. Because many texts are organized in a
hierarchical fashion, including chapters, sections, and paragraphs, hierarchica
l outlines can be very effectively used to summarize them while reading.
In OneNote, information subsumed under headings and subheadings can be collapsed
and thus hidden (e.g. by putting the cursor in front of a heading with indented
text below, and double-clicking). This way, you can easily summarize a whole bo
ok or book chapter in one hierarchical outline. Once you are done with summarizi
ng a paragraph, subsection, section or chapter, you just hide its summary under
its heading. Collapsed headings, together with tags can be used very efficiently
as cues to review and test your recall.
A book chapter outline in OneNote: Let s take a look at an example outline for a b
ook chapter: A few months ago, I read the book Discover Your Inner Economist by Ty
ler Cowen. The following is my outline for the chapter How to Control the World,
the Basics :
Outlining-OneNote-1
Notice the + symbol in front of each of the headings. It shows something is hidd
en under a particular heading. By double clicking on this symbol you can expand
the heading. An expanded heading can be collapsed, by double clicking once more.
Before reading any further, ask yourself: When would you give money as an incent
ive to a person?
Now let s expand the heading:
Outlining-OneNote-2
In this way, you can use an expandable outline to test your memory. The heading
areful has subheadings which you again can expand and collapse:

Outlining-OneNote-3
In essence, you can use this approach to browse through your summary at differen
t levels, or to test yourself on different levels, using headings and subheading
s as cues. OneNote Tags provide a good way to keep track of your progress, as we
ll as outstanding questions and ideas that might come to mind: Outline-Note-Taki
ng-Tags-OneNoteFor more information on OneNote Tags, please also read Using OneN
ote Tags.
The information you can use in a OneNote outline is not limited to text. Other i
tems, such as videos, images, formulas, tables or a combination thereof can also
be hidden under a heading as can be seen in the following snippet from an outli
ne on economics:
Outlining-OneNote-4
HOW CAN YOU CREATE YOUR OWN OUTLINE?
Let s say, you are reading a book chapter: Start by surveying the chapter to get a
n overview. Next follow these steps:
Recreate the complete chapter hierarchy in OneNote using the section heading
s (and if available sub section headings).
Read each paragraph and distill its main idea. Then use your own words to no
te down this main idea under the corresponding section heading.
Depending on the purpose of your reading, write down the most important supp

orting details under the paragraph s main idea.

Having extracted the main idea for each of the paragraphs of a given section
, you should have a pretty good idea about the main idea(s) of a section.
You may find some paragraphs purpose is mainly to emphasize a point already m
ade, illustrate a point, or pure entertainment. Use this knowledge to combine th
e main idea statements for different paragraphs and eliminate redundant ideas.
As a final step, formulate a main idea for the section in form of a sentence
and write underneath the section heading.
This 6-step guideline is only one way to go about outline note taking. As you be
come more experienced, you will intuitively combine across paragraphs and sectio
ns.
What if your document doesn t have any headings? If your document doesn t contain se
ction and subsection headings, you can still note down the main idea for each pa
ragraph. Create your own sections and subsections as you see fit, and thus build
a hierarchical outline.
How to create headings and subheadings in OneNote?
Start by typing you first heading and choose the numbering or bullet style f
rom the Home ribbon:Sample-Outline-OneNote-1
To create a subheading, just press the Tab key. This indents the text and cr
eates a sub heading. OneNote automatically chooses a different numbering format/
respectively bullet format (which you can change of course):Sample-Outline-OneN
ote-2
To move back from a subheading to a heading, use Shift-Tab:Sample-Outline-On
eNote-3
To collapse all information under a heading, double click in front of the he
ading. To expand the information again, double click once more:Sample-Outline-On
eNote-4Sample-Outline-OneNote-5
I hope, I could encourage you to try outline note taking, and to try OneNote. If
, for some reason, you cannot or don t want to use OneNote, a multitude of alterna
tive applications for all kinds of platforms is available. Outline note taking i
s a powerful technique no matter which application or platform you choose.
_
Chances are, you have heard this somewhat mystical word before. But, what are mn
emonics? Simply put, they are techniques and strategies that aid memory. These a
mazing techniques allow mere humans like you and me to vastly improve our memory
power, and reliably memorize a large number of facts or other information fastThe word mnemonic is derived from Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory who al
so happened to be the mother of the nine muses. (The father was Zeus)
The Method of Loci:
Indeed, the Greeks and Romans made wide use of mnemonic techniques to give speec
hes lasting for many hours completely from memory. They achieved this remarkable
feat by mentally placing the key points of their speech in locations along a fa
miliar route through their city or palace. To remember a key point, they represe
nted it by an item they could visualize, and imagined this item being connected
to, or somehow interacting with a particular location. While giving their speech
, they just mentally walked along their journey and retrieved the key points fro
m these locations. This technique is called the Method of Loci and to this day w
idely used by students preparing for exams, sales people giving a presentation,
and memory performers doing amazing things like memorizing 100-digit numbers and
complete decks of cards.
How do mnemonics work?
Are they magic? Yes, somehow they are. Are they artificial or even harmful? Noth
ing could be further from the truth. They just rely on the basic principles of o

ur memory and make very effective use of them:

They add meaning to information and thus connect it to things we already kno
w.
Most mnemonics also organize information allowing us to recall it in a syste
matic manner. Mental filing systems do this in such an efficient way, that they
can be used to memorize and recall hundreds, if not thousands of items in order.
Visual mnemonics (like the Method of Loci) exploit the fact that we tend to
remember images much better than words. A large part of our brain is reserved fo
r processing visual information and visual mnemonics tap into this resource. Her
e is an article to learn the Method of Loci. The Keyword Method is another examp
le of a visual mnemonic. It allows you to learn foreign language vocabulary and
its meaning, terminology, and facts.
Let me introduce you to Roy G. Biv. Say it loud, Roy G. Biv. Do you remember the
name? Well, it is actually an acronym, a very simple mnemonic, and allows you t
o recall the colors of the visual spectrum (=the colors of the rainbow) red, ora
nge, green, blue, indigo, and violet in the order of their wave length.
How long would it take you to get all 7 colors in the right order by rote memori
zation?
By making acronyms, you are creating words, phrases, or even sentences to impose
an order on a list of items you want to remember. I recommend memorizing lists
of items in order, even if the order doesn t matter! That way you know exactly how
many items you need to remember and when you have recalled all of them.
Here are 6 reasons why you should learn mnemonics:
They allow you to reliably memorize large amounts of information fast.
Many things we have to memorize (e.g. definitions, foreign language vocabula
ry etc.) initially don t have any meaning and are difficult to remember.
They make it easy to remember lists of items in order.
You can give a 1-hour speech or presentation completely from memory
Remembering the important parts of a book, articles, and procedures becomes
a breeze.
By learning and using mnemonics systems, you can vastly improve your memory
for names, numbers, passwords, appointments etc.
Mnemonics are easy to learn, highly effective, and fun. Taking some time to lear
n them will open a completely new world for you.
_
Children should do Sudoku and crosswords in school to boost their brain power, e
xperts say.
Doing Sudoku puzzles improves memory and doing crosswords improves verbal fluenc
y and word games are great for learning vocabulary, University of Cambridge rese
archers have found.
Their report, Puzzles in Education, presents the results of an extensive review
into the use of puzzles in schools.
Children should do Sudoku and crosswords in school to boost their brain power, e
xperts say
+1
Children should do Sudoku and crosswords in school to boost their brain power, e
xperts say
Although 75 per cent of teachers use puzzles in some form in their lessons, they
are often seen as ways to engage children rather than improve learning.
But the research suggests that puzzles have far wider psychological and cognitiv

e benefits for pupils including those at the Key Stage Two level, aged seven to
11 years old.
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The games were found to be most useful in learning terminology and vocabulary, a
bstract reasoning and memorising data.
Sudoku, the popular Japanese logic-based puzzle, is especially useful in teachin
g maths and science, if it is adapted.
For instance, using chemical symbols instead of numbers.
THE RISE OF iPADS AND TABLETS: TODDLERS TAUGHT WEB SAFETY
Internet safety: More children are using tablets
Internet safety: More children are using tablets
Nursery school age children are being taught internet safety because of the soar
ing use of iPads and tablets.
About 28 per cent of three-and four-year-olds use a tablet computer at home, acc
ording to Ofcom, and many nurseries have iPads for children.
The charity ChildNet, which helps schools hold classes on the web, said it is in
creasingly being invited in to pre-school establishments to hold online safety l
essons.
The toddlers are given simple messages not taught about specific dangers, such a
s online bullying or the risks of being groomed.
This is the age where children are starting to interact with technology,
f executive Will Gardner.

said chie

The message is: If something goes wrong, tell someone.

Touch screens have enabled access to technology to go right down the age range.
Word searches are recommended for learning about specific topics, particularly w
here a knowledge of terminology or vocabulary is needed.
And crosswords help verbal fluency, improve memory and general problem-solving s
kills. Generally, all puzzles were found to support the National Curriculum.
The study, compiled by the university s Faculty of Education, was commissioned by

Puzzler Media.
This research reveals the clear value of puzzles within educational practice, said
Kath Donovan, director of primary at the learning company Pearson. They can be e
ngaging... but they are not used enough.
_
m around a lot of studying. When I walk through the lobby of the Psychology buil
ding at Texas, I often see a few students on benches reading over their notes. A
trip to the library requires navigating a sea of students at tables and carrels
deep in study. Then, when I go home, I have three teens who are usually engaged
in some kind of studying.
One thing you can say about studying. It sure is quiet.
Now, there are good practical reasons to want to be quiet while studying. If you
're in a public place, it would be disruptive to the people around you to start
talking. Plus, if you are talking to yourself, that would look more than a littl
e odd. Even at home, you may begin to think you have lost your marbles if you st
art muttering to yourself while studying.
A paper by Colin MacLeod, Nigel Gopie, Kathleen Hourihan, Karen Neary, and Jason
Ozubko in the May, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learni
ng, Memory, and Cognition, suggests that every once in a while, it might not be
a bad idea if you talked a bit while studying.
In this paper, these researchers document what they call the production effect.
They looked at people's memory for items like a list of words. They found that i
f people studied the list by reading half of the words silently and the other ha
lf by saying the words out loud, that he words spoken aloud were remembered much
better than those that were read silently.
Face TalkingNow, it isn't that just reading things aloud helps, because people w
ho read all of the items on the list aloud were no better at remembering the ite
ms than the people who read them all silently. And both of these groups remember
ed the words more poorly than the words that were read aloud by the people who d
id half the list silently and the other half aloud.
So, what is going on here?
One of the things that is known to help memory is distinctiveness. We tend to re
member oddballs pretty well. An experimental example of this idea is the Von Res
torff effect. If you study a list of words where all but one are birds and the r
emaining item is a sport, you are much more likely to remember the oddball than
to remember any particular one of the birds. More commonly, when you meet up yea
rs later with friends from grade school, everyone remembers the names of the kid
s who were different from the crowd in some way. (If you discover that everyone
from grade school remembers you, then you were probably the one who was differen
t.)
The production effect works because it makes part of the list of items more dist
inctive. The words you speak aloud are now translated into speech and you have k
nowledge of producing the items as well as a memory of hearing them. All of this
information makes your memory for the spoken items more distinct from the rest
of the items that were read silently.
This result suggests that if you are studying material, you might want to identi
fy those bits of information that are most important to remember and to speak th
ose bits aloud while studying. Even a whisper will help to make those items more
memorable.
_

Libraries are quiet places because people are often concentrating intensely, but
according to a recent paper, muttering to yourself and talking about things out
loud helps improve your memory and the knowledge that you retain.
Photo by Richard Lawrence Cohen.
You may look a little odd talking to yourself, but studying out loud improves in
formation retention by differentiating bits of knowledge. According to the artic
le:
In this paper, these researchers document what they call the production effe
ct. They looked at people's memory for items like a list of words. They found th
at if people studied the list by reading half of the words silently and the othe
r half by saying the words out loud, that [the] words spoken aloud were remember
ed much better than those that were read silently.
The production effect works because it makes part of the list of items more
distinctive. The words you speak aloud are now translated into speech and you ha
ve knowledge of producing the items as well as a memory of hearing them. All of
this information makes your memory for the spoken items more distinct from the r
est of the items that were read silently.
Sounds like a good enough reason to start vocalizing a bit more to us.
_
Looking for some new ways to study? Tired of the typical Reward yourself! and Get a
good night s rest! advice you regularly get? We are too. Everyone knows that you s
hould eat well and keep yourself healthy during exams, but did you know about th
ese methods to make studying less painful and more effective?
1. Write things out longhand.
By writing, you use your hand to form letters, which engages the brain in the pr
ocess. With typing, you re just pressing on identical keys. Writing may take longe
r than typing, but the extra time you put in will help the material stick better
.
2. Imitate your idol.
Who inspires you? Think about
s they keep. This could be as
our mind like Charles Darwin,
track on repeat while sitting
l like Hermione Granger.

how they go about their daily lives, or what habit

serious as taking several walks a day to refresh y
or as silly as listening to the Harry Potter sound
in the North Reading Room because it makes you fee

3. Build a memory palace.

Humans have spatial memories, which means that you re more likely to remember a pa
th you take every day or a specific room than a random object or idea. The techn
ique is to imagine a space you know well this could be your home growing up, or
the route you take to class every morning. Assign things in this space as pegs and
remember the order they are in. Then, put each idea you need to remember on a pe
g. Each association needs to be as wild and silly as possible for you to remembe
r it for example, to remember that the first item on your grocery list is cheese
, imagine your door (the first peg ) made of cheese. Read about this method in more
detail here.
4. Talk it out.

You ve probably already heard that you should teach someone the material, but you ll
probably be hard pressed to find someone who is willing to be a student for a d
ay, when everyone has finals of their own to worry about. Instead, ask someone t
o listen to you talk about the material you just learned for just 3-5 minutes (t
hey can even just pretend to listen). As you speak, you ll notice where you fumble
, and where you have to pause to remember facts. This will help you recognize wh
ich material you need to review again.
5. Engage your senses.
Spray a new smell, listen to lectures, draw mind maps or change your location. C
hanging up the way you study will help you remember things
any time you do somet
hing different, it forces your brain to make new associations with the same mate
rials, making the memory stronger.
_
young doctor-in-training examines a new patient. Should she draw information for
the diagnosis from her E-memory electronic memory, the kind that s available on a com
puter? Or should she dip into her O-memory organic memory, the old-fashioned sort th
at resides in the brain?
Research shows that apprentice doctors are increasingly relying on E-memory, oft
en in the form of a digital resource called UpToDate. This is an electronic refe
rence tool, accessible on physicians laptops or mobile phones; tap in the patient s
symptoms, and up comes a potential diagnosis and a recommended course of treatm
ent. A recent study found that 89 percent of medical residents regard UpToDate a
s their first choice for answering clinical questions.
Like many of us, doctors are shifting their stores of knowledge from O-memory to
E-memory. That s not to say that they, or we, are doing so consciously. Electroni
c memory tools are now so convenient and omnipresent that we often aren t even awa
re that we re using them as extensions of our organic memory. But some thinkers incl
uding Robert W. Clowes, a philosopher from the New University of Lisbon in Portu
gal who proposed the E and O terminology argue that it s important to recognize the
two types of memory, and the differences between them.
O-memory endows recollections with meaning.
Making this distinction leads to several useful insights. The first is exemplifi
ed by young doctors use of UpToDate. E-memory is suited for targeted searches, wh
ile O-memory is best for building a broad, deep base of knowledge.
As even their critics acknowledge, E-memory resources like UpToDate are remarkab
ly efficient tools. Like Google and the other search engines the rest of us use,
they offer instant access to the bits and pieces of information we need in the
moment. That s their value to novice doctors and that s what has some more senior doct
ors and medical professors concerned. They lament that this kind of just-in-time,
j
ust-enough learning is shallow and fragmented. Medical residents are, or should b
e, in the process of becoming experts, and that process involves building a rich
and interconnected database of knowledge in one s own mind. Research in cognitive
science and psychology demonstrates that the ability to make quick and accurate
judgments depends on the possession of extensive factual knowledge stored in me
mory in internal, organic memory, that is, and not in a device.
Such mental databases used to take shape as a byproduct of reading through medic
al journals, notes Jerome P. Kassirer, a professor of medicine at Tufts Universi
ty. It was exactly the un-directedness of that kind of reading that led to an im
portant kind of incidental learning. In medicine, writes Kassirer in an essay in

the British Medical Journal, we don t always know what we need to know, and search
es that are constrained to information we need at a given moment may not generat
e information that may be critically useful later.
Precisely because they only return the results we ask for, search tools don t intr
oduce us to a wide, unfiltered array of information. For that, says Kassirer, we
need to browse. Browsing, as another physician put it in a commentary on Kassir
er s essay, is an open-ended exploratory strategy that is driven by curiosity and c
reates the conditions needed for serendipity.
Kassirer offers an example from his own experience: From the beginning of my thir
d year at medical school I subscribed to two general medical journals, and I sco
ured each issue. Then, during my first week of internship, I was asked to examin
e a patient with hypotension, flushing, diarrhea, and hepatomegaly. About a year
earlier a report on the carcinoid syndrome had caught my eye in one of the jour
nals because of its unique metabolic characteristics. I correctly made the diagn
osis because the article I had found in browsing had evoked the diagnosis.
When they rely on what Kassirer calls quick and dirty summaries, medical residents
no longer give themselves opportunities to enrich their memories with unlookedfor facts.
The second insight that emerges from a close look at electronic and organic memo
ry is that E-memory is good for invariant storage, while O-memory is good for el
aborated connections. If we make note of an upcoming appointment in our smartpho
ne, its digital calendar won t misremember the date or time, as our all-too-fallib
le brains are apt to do. On the other hand, if we enter the germ of an idea in o
ur phone s note-taking app, we won t return after a busy weekend or a good night s sle
ep to find that the idea has grown new connections and layers of meaning, as an
idea planted in our organic memory is likely to do. (Although, as Clowes points
out, even E-memory repositories increasingly transform and augment what they hold ;
with the growing sophistication of tagging, indexing and A.I. systems, Clowes w
rites, we can expect E-memory systems to not merely store and re-present informat
ion, but restructure it. )
The third insight into E-memory and O-memory is that electronic memory is useful
for checking the accuracy of our impressions, while organic memory is valuable
for the self-knowledge it can foster. Think of the life-blogging and quantifiedself data-keeping that many of us now engage in from snapping cellphone pictures o
f the meals we eat, to tracking the number of steps we take each day with a Fitb
it monitor. We employ these forms of E-memory as a check on the distortions ende
mic to organic memory; soon after our vacation is over, the details of what we d
ined on may have grown fuzzy, while it s all too easy to remember having been more a
ctive than we actually were. E-memory acts as a check on O-memory. But only O-me
mory endows recollections with meaning. Food photos and step counts matter only
insofar as they complement our sense of ourselves, our past experiences and our
future goals, and these things are the province of the organic kind of memory.
With our computers, we can search, store, and check. With our minds, we can brow
se, elaborate and reflect. These insights can be shared with students as they ma
ke daily decisions about using their memories: Commit facts to memory, or assume
that they will always be a click away? Search for discrete pieces of informatio
n, or absorb knowledge more diffusely? We can help students become intelligent u
sers of memory in our connected world: masters of their own minds, who combine t
he best of E-memory and O-memory and who know what they re up to as they do it.
_
We ve scoured our brains and the internet for the best study hacks to help your br
ain remember information quicker and easier and ultimately help you do better in
your exams.
1. Walk Before An Exam

It s been proven that exercise can boost your memory and brain power. Research con
ducted by Dr. Chuck Hillman of the University of Illinois provides evidence that
about 20 minutes exercise before an exam can improve performance.
Study Hacks: Walk Before Exam
2. Speak Out Loud Instead of Simply Reading
Although this may make you look a little crazy, give it a go! You will be surpri
sed how much more you can remember when you ve said it out loud. Warning: Don t try
this in a crowded library!
Study Hack: Speak Out Loud
3. Reward Yourself With A Treat
There are many ways to integrate a reward system into your study habits. Here s a
simple way to motivate yourself to study with Gummy Bears:
Study Hacks Reward System
4. Teach What You Have Learned
The best way to test if you really understand something is to try to teach it to
someone else. If you can t get anyone to listen to you explain the Pythagorean Th
eorem, why not teach a class of stuffed animals!
Study Hacks: Teach What You've Learned
5. Create Mental Associations
The ability to make connections is not only an easier way to remember informatio
n, but it s the fuel of creativity and intelligence. Steve Jobs famously said Creat
ivity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did somet
hing, they feel a little guilty because they didn t really do it, they just saw so
mething .
Mind Maps are an easy way to connect ideas by creating a visual overview of diff
erent connections. Read more about the benefits of using Mind Maps to learn here
.
Study Hacks: Create Mental Associations
6. Draw Diagrams
Drawing diagrams will help you to visualise information which would be hard to d
escribe. This creates a visual memory in your mind which can be recalled in an e
xam. You may even be asked to draw or label diagrams such as the human heart in
your exam so get practicing!
drawing the human heart
7. Times New Roman is the Fastest Font to Read
Simply put
ations!

there s a reason why Times New Roman is the default font on most applic

Study Hacks: Times New Roman Font

8. Use Apps to Block Distracting Sites
The SelfControl app helps you to avoid distractions by blocking websites for a c
ertain amount of time. Discover more student apps to make student life easier in
our blog post 12 Student Apps You Don t Want to Miss! .
Study Hacks: Student Apps

9. Watch a Documentary on the Topic

Documentaries are an entertaining way of compacting an entire story into a short
timeframe. This will help you remember key details from a story plus you may ev
en get extra credit for mentioning that you took the initiative and watched a fi
lm about the topic!
Check out the infographic in this blog post which helps you decide which documen
tary to watch.
10. Search Google Like a Pro
Save time when researching sources online by mastering the biggest search engine
in the world; Google. Follow the tips in this image to find what you need at yo
ur fingertips:
Study Hacks: Search Google Like a Pro
11. Create Flashcards for Quick Memory Buzz
Quickly test your knowledge of key concepts, definitions, quotes and formulas wi
th flashcards. Sign up to GoConqr now to create your first Flashcard deck like t
he one below now!
12. Take Regular Study Breaks
When your brain is working, you need to take regular study breaks to help your b
rain absorb more information but also to keep you motivated and focused when you
are working. Take a short break after 45-50 minutes study as your focus and con
centration will become impaired after this period, anything new after 1 hour 30
minutes does not get assimilated.
Study Hacks: Take Study Breaks
13. Listen to the Correct Type of Music
In our blog post Music for Studying: 10 Tips to Pick the Best Study Music we looke
d into the area of how the correct types of music can lead to more productive st
udying by elevating your mood. Have you made your Mozart Spotify playlist yet?
Study Hacks: Listen to Study Music
14. Make Your Study Space Portable
We may be creatures of habit with favourite seats in the library but information
retention actually improves when you vary the places where you study. Check out
this Buzzfeed video for more study hacks:
15. Practice, Practice, Practice
Practicing sample answers to past exam questions can help train your brain to re
trieve information. Create realistic, exam-like condition and test your understa
nding by using our new Quiz tool. Try our general Knowledge Quiz below:
16. Don t Stay Up All Night Before an Exam
Make sure to get adequate rest the nights leading up to your exams. When you sle
ep, your brain assimilates the information you have learned when studying so get
ting a good night s sleep will help you remember those pesky maths formulas you ne
ed for your exam!
Don t make this your sleep schedule:
Study Hacks: Sleep Schedule

17. Discover News Ways to Learn

Trying new methods of studying can help you find what really works for you. Use
technology to your advantage by watching educational TED Talks or downloading us
eful dictionary apps for example. Read more about the benefits of using technolo
gy to study.
18. Use Scents or Gum to Jog Your Memory
This may seem a bit random but spraying an unfamiliar scent while you re studying
can help jog your memory when you spray it again just before an exam. Chewing a
strange kind of gum will work the same way.
Study Hacks: Unfamilar Scents
19. Study in a Group
Studying in a group can help you collect new insights to enhance your learning e
xperience. The ExamTime Groups tool is an innovative spin on the traditional stu
dy group formula. Our Groups tool helps you share resources, discuss ideas and i
nteract with members of your team or group project. Sign up here to get started!
study hacks study in a group
20. Meditate
Studies say that meditation can help students stay focused when studying. Not on
ly will meditation help you concentrate when studying but it will help reduce pr
e-exam stress as it improves both mental and physical health.
Check out this Meditation Education infographic on Edutopia which details the ed
ucational benefits of meditating:
Study Hacks: Meditation
Our final piece of advice for those of you sitting exams is to stay positive. It s
amazing how a positive attitude can impact on your exam results or motivate you
to complete that assignment when all you want to do is go to bed!
Got any other study hacks? Let us know if any other study hacks have worked for
you in the comments section below.
+
We all know someone who is outstandingly brilliant at learning.
They are the Stephen Hawking or Marissa Mayer of your class and you re probably sc
ratching your head wondering why you can t do it too, am I right? Many students lo
se motivation when someone else is thriving and you feel as though you re lagging
behind. This is not uncommon but if you re thinking their learning ability is simp
ly due to good genetics, you re wrong. It s more likely that they are using better s
tudy strategies than you.
good study habits
There s a bunch of good habits for students high-achievers are already following t
hat may surprise you. Follow these learning tips to take the lead! Top students
learn by:
1. Creating a Study Plan
This seems like a complete no-brainer but top students never fail to properly pl
an their future success. If you are feeling over-whelmed with the amount of work
you have on your plate, a clear and balanced study plan will boost your motivat
ion when you tick a task as complete and reduce stress by focusing on one piece
of the puzzle at a time. Check out ExamTime s Study planner tool here.

2. Taking Study Breaks

Does this study tip surprise you? Many students think they can cram a lot of inf
ormation into their heads by sitting down and learning straight for a few hours.
However, your ability to learn reduces the more time you spend staring at your
books. Use that break time wisely and take a walk to boost your brain activity f
urther, here s the proof:
Taking Study Breaks
3. Building Their Own Study Notes
Our philosophy has always been in support of active learning by encouraging stud
ents to build their own set of study notes using Mind Maps, Flashcards and other
effective methods. Countless users have shared their success stories with us sa
ying that creating their own online notes has helped them discover a unique way
to learn and enabled them to maintain exceptional grades which illustrates how p
owerful active learning can be.
4. Getting Enough Sleep
Exhaustion is the enemy of the elite. Here s why sleep is important; when you prop
erly rest, your brain strengthens the knowledge you have learned during the day
by assimilating information so the better you sleep, the better you learn. The r
elationship between sleeping and learning is often disregarded by busy students
but those at the top know the importance of this essential element of the learni
ng process.
5. Asking Questions
Instead of passively sitting in lectures absorbing what s going on, have you notic
ed what the top performing students are doing? They are engaging in the learning
experience by asking questions, striking up a conversation with the lecturer an
d getting involved in their learning. Of course, you don t want to be the one to p
ut your hand up but it doesn t mean you should not question what you are studying.
Always ask why, it s a big question for a small word!
6. Testing Themselves Regularly
Cramming doesn t even enter the mind of a top student. Reviewing material in regul
ar bursts ensures that information is stored in the memory over the long-term, e
xtending the learning experience beyond the test. Many top students use the spac
ed-repetition concept to optimise learning by systematically reviewing notes to
embed knowledge in the brain. Creating practice quizzes is another way to regula
rly engage your mind.
7. Enhancing their Learning based on Mistakes
If you want to build good habits into your study routine, you should start at wh
ere you are right now. Take a look back at your recent marks and review where an
d why you missed the correct answer. Whether it s a question they answered incorre
ctly in class or a grade from a pop quiz, top students always analyse their mist
akes to build on their learning.
8. Practicing Under Test Conditions
The number one way high-achievers ensure they reach their target grades is by pr
eparing for tests in the way that they will sit the real thing. This means a cer
tain amount of dedication will need to be demonstrated by setting a timer, putti
ng your books away and answering questions to put your brain to work. Online qui
zzes are an ideal way to easily create exam-like conditions and put your knowled
ge to the test.
Try the timed quiz below (don t worry it s general knowledge!) to get a feeling for
this technique:

9. Applying Learning to Real-life

Top students recognise that acquiring skills is critical for the challenges face
d in life. Learning is not about studying for a test and getting good grades, it s
about understanding knowledge and what you can do with that knowledge. During t
he deeper learning process, students take ownership of their learning by applyin
g core academic skills to real-life situations. Find out more about developing y
our deeper learning skills here.
10. Following What They Love
Those students you admire are passionate about what they are learning. They have
the drive to develop their learning further based on their love of what they ar
e discovering. This may not always be the case and is often unavoidable but if y
ou follow what interests you and cultivate a curiosity of this area, your motiva
tion to learn will thrive.
Not every student is the same and many top students don t follow the status quo. T
he best way to create good habits for students is to try a variety of techniques
and figure out what works for you.
_
Your brain has to deal with a lot of information every moment of every day and r
emembering it all would be next to impossible. In fact, instantly forgetting inf
ormation is an important skill. But as a result, you need a way to inform your b
rain about information that you need to keep.
Spaced repetition is exactly that
a way to tell your brain to enter information
into your long-term memory. It works by showing you the same information at incr
easingly long intervals, for example:
You might see a Flashcard for the first time
Then see it again after 1 minute
If you remember it after 1 minute, don t look at it again for another 10 minut
es
And then for an entire day, week, month and so on .
Every time you remember the information correctly, the gap will increase
Until you don t see that card for months or years
But you remember it
You can use spaced repetition with a whole deck (or virtual deck) of facts that
you need to learn. This is a particularly popular method for language learning.
Use Mnemonics
mnemonics-for-memory
Trying to remember arbitrary facts and figures can be a nightmare
and the reason
is often because these words and numbers don t mean anything to you. To make them
mean something, simply attach each word, or even letter, to a different symbol
in your mind.
This can be literal
for instance, remembering the famous nurse Florence s surname
by imagining an armoured knight battling through heavy wind
or you can replace e
ach word with another, more memorable word with the same first letter. Learn mor
e about using mnemonic rules by reading study tip 8 in our popular article How to
Study: 10 Study Tips to Improve Your Learning .
Be Positive
The more that you tell yourself and everyone around you that your memory is bad,
the longer you ll continue to have a bad memory . Many experts believe that memory i
s actually like a muscle if you train, it will get stronger, unless there s someth
ing deeply wrong. So stop making excuses and start training! Adopt a positive mi

ndset and you ll be surprised at what you can achieve.

Take a Deep Breath
This is a little technical, so bear with us, but if you switch your breathing pa
ttern to a slow, deep rhythm, you ll actually make your brain change to Theta wave
s something that usually happens during a hypnagogic sleep. These waves make you
more receptive to new information, so it ll be easier for you to remember things
that you learn during this state.
Do Some Exercise
Improve Your Memory with Exercise
Regular workouts aren t just beneficial for your body. Studies have shown that aer
obic exercise can improve circulation (see above image), which means a more effi
cient brain and prevention of age-induced memory loss. You don t need to be an ath
lete to implement these changes, though a daily half-hour walk will help to impr
ove your memory.
Grow Some Rosemary
rosemary-for-memory
Gardening is often lauded as a worthwhile pursuit which is beneficial to the hea
lth of both body and mind. However, if you plant some rosemary, you ll be doing yo
urself an even bigger favour. The scent of rosemary is said to help aid memory
a
nd as it s been used to boost recall since the ancient Greeks, we reckon there mus
t be something in it.
Build Yourself A Mind Palace
Mind palaces have been popular recently thanks to their use on the program Sherlo
ck in which the famous detective uses a mind palace to remember virtually everyth
ing he ever sees or hears.
Mind palaces actually are real and although they don t work in exactly the same wa
y that Sherlock s does, they are similar and very effective. Building your first p
alace takes some work and there is a lot to think about, so if you re interested,
here is a complete guide.

Above all else, keep practicing all of these methods and tips and over time your
memory will improve and you will get better at using the various techniques qui
ckly and more effectively.
_
We ve looked at a few different strategies to help remember the names of people yo
u meet on the Buffer blog before, but there s lots to say about memory.
It turns out that science is continually finding new connections between simple
things we can do every day and an improvement in our general memory capacity.
Memory is a complicated process that s made up of a few different brain activities
. Here s a simplified version to help us understand how the process takes place:
1. Creating a memory
Our brain sends signals in a particular pattern associated with the event we re ex
periencing and creates connections between our neurons, called synapses.
2. Consolidating the memory
If we didn t do anything further, that memory would fall right out of our heads ag
ain. Consolidation is the process of committing it to long-term memory so we can
recall it later. A lot of this process happens while we re sleeping, as our brain

s recreate that same pattern of brain activity to strengthen the synapses we cre
ated earlier.
3. Recalling the memory
This is what most of us think of when we talk about memory, or especially memory
loss. Recalling the memory is easier if it s been strengthened over time, and eac
h time we do so, we run through that same pattern of brain activity again, makin
g it a little stronger.
Memory loss is a normal part of aging, but that doesn t mean we can t take action to
slow it down a little. Let s take a look at some of the ways research has found t
o keep our memories around as long as possible.
1. Meditate to improve your working memory
Working memory, which is a bit like the brain s notepad, is where new information
is held temporarily. When you learn someone s name or hear the address of a place
you re going to, you hang on to those details in working memory until you re done wi
th them. If they re not useful anymore, you let go of them entirely. If they are,
you commit them to long-term memory where they can be strengthened and recalled
later.
Working memory is something we use every day, and it makes our lives a lot easie
r when it s stronger. For most adults, the maximum we can hold in our working memo
ry is about seven items, but if you re not quite using your working memory to its
max capacity, meditation is one thing you can try to strengthen it.
Research has shown that participants with no experience in mindfulness meditatio
n can improve their memory recall in just eight weeks. Meditation, with its powe
r to help us concentrate, has also been shown to improve improve standardized te
st scores and working memory abilities after just two weeks.
Why does meditation benefit memory? It s somewhat counterintuitive. During meditat
ion, our brains stop processing information as actively as they normally would.
In the image below you can see how the beta waves (shown in bright colors on the
left), which indicate that our brains are processing information, are dramatica
lly reduced during meditation (on the right).
2. Drink coffee to improve your memory consolidation
Whether caffeine can improve memory if taken before learning something new is de
batable. Most research has found little-to-no effect from ingesting caffeine pri
or to creating new memories. One recent study, however, found that taking a caff
eine pill after a learning task actually improved memory recall up to 24 hours l
ater.
Participants memorized a set of images, and were later tested by viewing the sam
e images (targets), similar images (lures) and completely different images (foil
s). The task was to pick out which were the exact pictures they had memorized, w
ithout being tricked by the lures which were very similar. This is a process cal
led pattern separation, which, according to the researchers, reflects a deeper le
vel of memory retention.
caffeine memory test
The researchers in this study focused on the effects of caffeine on memory conso
lidation: the process of strengthening the memories we ve created. This is why the
y believe there were effects when caffeine was ingested after the learning task,
rather than before.
3. Eat berries for better long-term memory

Another diet-related effect on memory is the mounting research that eating berri
es can help to stave off memory decline.
A study from the
at supplementing
mance on spatial
nd continued for

University of Reading and the Peninsula Medical School found th

a normal diet with blueberries for twelve weeks improved perfor
working memory tasks. The effects started just three weeks in a
the length of the study.

A long-term berry study that tested the memory of female nurses who were over 70
years old found that those who had regularly eaten at least two servings of str
awberries or blueberries each week had a moderate reduction in memory decline. (
The effects of strawberries might be debatable, though, since that study was par
tly funded by the California Strawberry Commission and another study focusing on
strawberries suggested that you d need to eat roughly 10 pounds of strawberries p
er day to see any effect).
More research is needed in this area, but
ding how berries might affect our brains.
or being high in flavanoids, which appear
the brain. That could explain why they re
4. Exercise to improve your memory recall

science is getting closer to understan

In particular, blueberries are known f
to strengthen existing connections in
beneficial for long-term memory.

Studies in both rat and human brains have shown that regular exercise can improv
e memory recall. Fitness in older adults has even been proven to slow the declin
e of memory without the aid of continued regular exercise.
In particular, studies shown that regular exercise can improve spatial memory, s
o it s not necessarily a way to improve all kinds of memory recall.
Of course, the benefits of exercise are numerous, but for the brain in particula
r, regular exercise has been shown to improve cognitive abilities beyond memory.
So if you re looking for a way to stay sharp mentally, taking a walk could be the
answer. See how a quick walk ignites the brain in the scan below:
5. Chew gum to make stronger memories
Another easy method to try that could improve your memory is chewing gum while y
ou learn new things. There s been some contradictory research around this topic, s
o it s not a solid bet, but a study published last year showed that participants w
ho completed a memory recall task were more accurate and had higher reaction tim
es if they chewed gum during the study.
One reason that chewing gum might affect our memory recall is that it increases
activity in the hippocampus, an important area of the brain for memory. It s still
unclear why this happens, though.
hippocampus
Another theory focuses on the increase of oxygen from chewing gum, which can hel
p with focus and attention. This could mean we re creating stronger connections in
the brain as we learn new things while chewing gum. One study found that partic
ipants who chewed gum during learning and memory tests had higher heart rate lev
els than control groups, which can also lead to more oxygen flowing to the brain
.
6. Sleep more to consolidate your memories
Sleep has proven to be one of the most important elements in having a good memor
y. Since sleep is when most of our memory consolidation process occurs, it makes
sense that without enough sleep we re going to struggle to remember the things we v

e learned. Even a short nap can improve your memory recall.

In one study, participants memorized illustrated cards to test their memory stre
ngth. After memorizing a set of cards, they had a 40-minute break wherein one gr
oup napped, and the other stayed awake. After the break, both groups were tested
on their memory of the cards
the group who had napped performed better:
Much to the surprise of the researchers, the sleep group performed significa
ntly better, retaining on average 85 percent of the patterns, compared to 60 per
cent for those who had remained awake.
how naps affect your brain - memory
Apparently, napping actually helps our brain to solidify memories:
Research indicates that when memory is first recorded in the brain in the hipp
ocampus, to be specific it s still fragile and easily forgotten, especially if the bra
in is asked to memorize more things. Napping, it seems, pushes memories to the n
eocortex, the brain s more permanent storage, preventing them from being overwritten.
Not only is sleep after learning a critical part of the memory creation process,
but sleep before learning something new is important as well. Research has foun
d that sleep deprivation can affect our ability to commit new things to memory a
nd consolidate any new memories we create.
_
Here's a little secret you might never have guessed: The people who can accompli
sh incredible mnemonic feats like memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of car
ds or hundreds of random numbers in minutes don't have photographic memories. Th
ey have normal brains like you and, yes, me. This past weekend I competed in the
15th annual USA Memory Championship an olympiad of sorts where "mental athletes"
test their power of recall. Lucky for me, I learned a few tricks from the reigni
ng champ for the second year in a row, Nelson Dellis. Here are the techniques Ne
lson taught me that you can start incorporating into your everyday life to make
your memory stronger.
Memory Techniques Anyone Can Learn
Although my memory is fine in general, I have to admit, I'm horrible with names.
I am so bad that I forget a person's name before he even finishes saying it it's
like I don't even want to hear it. After one conversation/training session with
Nelson, however, I was able to remember dozens of strangers' names in a couple o
f minutes.
Nelson, a 28-year-old former software developer turned "mnemonic mountaineer," w
as an average student in school with, he says, an average memory. When his grand
mother Josephine started losing her memory and memory of him to Alzheimer's disease,
he was prompted to learn more about improving memory. Now he has two national m
emory competition wins under his belt and the record for memorizing 303 random n
umbers in five minutes (beating his record last year of 248 numbers). His messag
e is that anyone can do it. It's all in the training and technique.
My Memory Training Boot Camp
My boot camp for this event started two weeks before the competition. I received
two bottles of brainstrong DHA supplements (from the event's sponsors), a t-shi
rt, a training manual, and a list of the events, which included: a 15-minute mem
orization of 117 names and faces, 5-minute memorization of 500 numbers, 15-minut
e memorization of a 50-line unpublished poem, and 5-minute memorization of a shu
ffled deck of cards. I seriously had no idea what I was getting into.
"How's your memory?" Nelson asked, at the start of our training conversation. Um
, ok. I guess?

When I flipped to this frightening grid of the 500 random digits (there are 25 r
ows of 20 numbers), which I was supposed to be able to memorize in 5 minutes, I
nearly fell off my chair:
How to Train Your Brain and Boost Your Memory Like a USA Memory Champion
Make a Picture and Anchor It Somewhere
That grid of numbers was the most intimidating part, but in my training session
with Nelson he taught me how to look at it so it was slightly less intimidating.
(I have to admit, I only decided to do the numbers event at the last minute, on
a whim.) There are two steps, basically, for all memory challenges, whether you
're in a strange mental sport/hobby or trying to remember where you parked your
car:
Turn abstract, boring things that the brain doesn't like to remember and can
't really latch onto (like names and numbers) into more visual ones.
Find a place to store or anchor mental images where you're more likely to re
member them in your "memory palace," a.k.a., in the journey method.
So, for example, for remembering names and faces, he said to take a name like Ne
lson and try to turn it into a picture by associating it with a famous person li
ke Nelson Mandela (step 1). Then for step 2, find a prominent place on that pers
on to anchor it, for example on his biggish nose so imagine Nelson Mandela crawled
up inside his nose. The more vivid, grotesque, sexual, or unusual, the better.
For the name, don't look at how the name is spelled, but how it sounds. Break it
up into syllables and turn it into pictures. (If you didn't know a Nelson, you
could think Nel is like kneeling and son is like the sun, so someone kneeling or
a knee pointing at the sun.)
A prominent place (or peg or anchor) could be a piece of clothing, an eye, musta
che, or whatever stands out to you on that person.
During the competition, one of the photos had a guy named Neil with sunglasses o
n and I thought of Neil Gaiman, the science fiction/fantasy/graphic artist, so I
drew skulls on his sunglasses, which helped me remember his name. In another ph
oto there was a girl named Laurie, like the snotty-nosed one I knew in grade sch
ool, so I imagined a tissue box underneath her nose. I think I got those two nam
es right, at least.
My brainstrong Boot Camp manual suggests Joe might be Sloppy Joe for the image a
nd if the person Joe's anchor is a mole on his face you could imagine licking a
Sloppy Joe off of Joe's mole. Gross.
In truth, the more exaggerated and absurd the better (I had to tap into my inner
, secret, lurid side sometimes.) And the more personal the associations, the bet
ter, too.
In sum: When you meet someone: Catch and say her name, make a picture out of the
syllables of her name and place that picture onto whatever anchor/feature you'v
e chosen for that person. The next time you see that person, you'll see that ima
ge in that feature and remember her name, instantly. (Just don't blurt out what
prominent feature you've chosen to remember her by or the image you've made up,
and try not to stare at the feature!)
Kevin Spacey Fencing Doughnuts with a Sneaker on My Couch
For remembering lots of digits and random cards, the same fundamental techniques
(make abstract things more visual and anchor it somewhere) still apply, but str
onger techniques and systems are also needed.

The technique everyone used is the Dominic System, invented by memory champ Domi
nic O'Brien, which basically translates numbers to letters. We turn digits into
two-letter initials for people and associated actions and objects, so we can bet
ter visualize them. So, for example, the number 0, because it is round, is an O,
and since it's at the start gets the two-letter translation OO. Many people use
Ozzy Osbourne as their person for that number 0, the action could be biting the
head off a bat, and the object a bat. It's easier to remember Ozzy Osbourne bit
ing the head off a bat than a 0 in a sea of numbers.
But for the system to work, you have to make it personal, so for memorizing the
deck of cards, for each of the 52 cards I had to create a person with an action
and object. The Jack of Hearts became my husband frying eggs and the object was
eggs in a pan. The King of Spades (KS) was Kevin Spacey (which I thought worked
out well initials-wise), lighting a cigarette, and the object was a lighter. Edw
ard Scissorhands (ES) was trimming hedges, and the object was hedges.
And then you need to find a familiar place to store the information. We've noted
how previous memory champions have built a memory palace to peg information in
familiar places or loci. It's the same technique Nelson taught me. In my memory
palace, I walked through my house, starting at my front door, and placed these f
amiliar people or numbers on my furniture.
Drastically Improve Your Memory by Building a Memory Palace
U.S.-record-holding memory champ Joshua Foer explains how anyone with an average
memory can
Read more
The system enables you to memorize three cards at a time quickly. Imagine the pe
rson of the first card doing the action of the person on the second card with th
e object of the person on the third card. Flipping three cards up, I saw Audrey
Hepburn (Queen of Diamonds) taking a bath (5 of Hearts) with a pirate sword (Jac
k of Spades) on my couch. Scooby Doo (Six of Diamonds) playing the cello (6 of S
pades) with a dumbbell (Ace of Spades) on my kitchen counter. And Nicholas Cage
(9 of Clubs) yodeling (3 of Diamonds) with Batman's grapple gun (4 of Clubs) on
my entertainment center. Ok, that's not so weird.
It takes a heck of a time to set up and practice, but it also stretches your bra
in and when you practice putting the cards together, it really does make you thi
nk creatively (Kevin Spacey trimming hedges with Edward Scissorhands knife-hands
and a hobbit ring?). I was impressed with how fast the memory champs could go t
hrough a deck of cards (Nelson has the record for remembering the order of a dec
k in a minute and three seconds.)
Your Memory Training Boot Camp
For everyday use, the memory palace is helpful for remembering a list or sequenc
e of things. Start a journey beginning at a place you're very familiar with, say
, your home, starting with your doorstep. So for a grocery list, the example goe
s, imagine a container of milk overflowing on your doorstep, and when you get in
side, perhaps two giant steaks attacking you in your foyer. Continue to your liv
ing room to find pretzels dancing on your rug.
Again, the more animation, exaggerations, and senses you can put into your memor
y palace or journey, the better for your memorization. And the more you strength
en your memory and keep practicing to sharpen your brain, the better your chance
s of fighting off Alzheimer's disease.
If you don't think you're a visual person, incorporate other senses: sounds, sme
lls, touch. In everyday life, pay more attention to how things look and sound an
d feel, which might improve your visualization skills. Start looking more at thi

ngs and paying more attention. (I confess, pure lack of attention is probably wh
y I always forgot people's names and faces!)
If you really want to train like a memory champ, try this great name remembering
game, download Memoriad (Windows) competition training software (it's pretty se
rious), and lurk in the Mnemotechnics forums. And perhaps we will see you at the
memory championship next year!
Updated to add: Nelson and the other mental athletes, including a team of kickas
s high school kids from Hershey, PA, make it look easy, but becoming a memory ch
amp takes serious training and practice. Most of my hours training were spent ju
st developing the cards system and working out the numbers system, which in the
end wasn't a great one (because I was short on time, instead of coming up with 1
00 people to memorize for each digit, like I was supposed to, I used 10 characte
rs, from They Might Be Giant's Here Come The 123's videos. Bad idea. On each num
ber, I was stuck in a video loop singing in my head for too long). At home I cou
ld do about half a deck of cards in five minutes, but at the competition, dazed
and distracted, I only got about half that. I did name about a third of the face
s right, thanks to practicing with that fun name game I mentioned above obsessiv
ely. In the end, I ranked 36 out of 46 of all the mental athletes who had come t
o compete perhaps not bad for someone who would never have dreamed of entering suc
h a thing before and who had only trained for a few hours over a week. As Joshua
Foer's training-to-champ story suggests too, there's hope if you train like a wor
ld-class mental athlete.
+
ne way to learn Better: Mix yourself up. That's advice from Robert Bjork, chair
of UCLA's psychology department and a leading expert in memory and learning. Vol
unteers in his experiments exhibited superior recall when they learned informati
on in randomly ordered chunks. For example, he asked subjects in one group to me
morize five-letter sequences on a computer keyboard. First they learned one sequ
ence, then moved on to the second, and then the third. Compare that to a second
group of volunteers, who practiced the five-letter combos in a random order. Whe
n tested, the random group had much better recall something to remember when you
sit down to memorize stolen-base success rates before your next fantasy basebal
l draft.
_
Steve Carell is no dummy. In fact, the man who plays hapless half-wit Michael Sc
ott on NBC's The Office and equally hapless gumshoe Maxwell Smart in this summer
's big-screen redo of Get Smart is nothing short of a genius a genius wrapped in
a doofus, hidden by an idiot. Here's his advice on how to attain Carell-level s
marts.
Engage in Reading-Type Behavior
If we were meant to read for enjoyment, would God have created television? Read
as it was intended for exercise. The more you read, the more you expand your
wha
t's the word I'm looking for?
your stockpile of words. You must have a stockpile
of words that you can pass along to your children for their stockpile.
Appear to Listen
I've learned to appear scintillatingly intellectual by asking people questions (
"Do you like pizza?"). Then I just look at them, nodding and saying "Hmmm" and "
Um hmmm" every few seconds. Try and keep one or two things in your head to regur
gitate later. After all, what is knowledge, really, but high-resolution regurgit
ation?
Just Say Yes
I've been injecting human growth hormone into my brain for several years now, wi
th no ill effects. I feel smarter, and I often feel compelled to show people rea
lly show them
just how smart I am. HGH has also colored the way I perceive the w
orld, which is now a sort of bloodred.

Get the Abs of

A healthy body
blood flowing
a bicycle. He
ift his shirt,

Einstein
means a healthy mind. You get your heart rate up, and you get the
through your body to your brain. Look at Albert Einstein. He rode
was also an early student of Jazzercise. You never saw Einstein l
but he had a six-pack under there.

Don't Chew Your Food

I recommend tuna melts. Fish is very healthy, as is cheese, and toast. I also re
commend eating peeled baby carrots. Carrots are very good for the eyes, but they
absolutely must be baby carrots so you don't chew too much. I don't think I hav
e to explain crunchwaves to people who read wired. They already know that when y
ou chew something too hard, the vibrations fire up those crunchwaves, which shak
e the neurons in your brain. Do that too much and those brain cells shake loose
and die. I usually gulp my food, and you should, too.
Practice Thinking by Yourself
Your brain, like your tongue, is a muscle. Practicing thinking by yourself reall
y helps develop your brain, which you need throughout your day. I like to practi
ce my thinking in a darkened room, alone. I focus on one thing, such as Tree. I
think about Tree. Then, after that, I think about Cloud. Then later, as I walk o
utside, I see Tree and since I have practiced thinking, I avoid hitting it. I tr
y and have six or seven thoughts a day.
Match Your Shoes to Your Belt
If you don't look good, you don't think good.
Know Things
It's important to be well-rounded
not purely scientific and analytical. Explore
the arts: poetry, music, decoupage (a visual art form I've been developing since
the first grade). And remember, it's always better to have a cursory knowledge
of a lot of things than to actually know a lot about any one thing. This is call
ed a liberal arts education.
Act "Human"
When I go to parties, people often look stunned at how smart I am. But nobody wa
nts to talk about astrophysics at a dinner party. Hey, when I want to talk like
that, I head to the lab! Instead, I talk about "human" things they enjoy and und
erstand: midrange wines, movie trivia, and mundane subjects like family and emot
ional fulfillment. I like to end my conversations with a quote, usually somethin
g in French, like "c'est la vie," which means "down the hatch!" But don't overdo
it: Nobody likes a show-off.
Retain Your Childlike Sense of Wonder
Children are very smart, in their own stupid way. A child's brain is like a spon
ge, and you know how smart sponges are. My children are like little processors.
They pick up all kinds of things, then process that into information. And what i
s knowledge, really, but processed information? We must always strive to be over
ly processed, like our children.
_
The winter sun sets in mid-afternoon in Kolobrzeg, Poland, but the early twiligh
t does not deter people from taking their regular outdoor promenade. Bundled up
in parkas with fur-trimmed hoods, strolling hand in mittened hand along the edge
of the Baltic Sea, off-season tourists from Germany stop openmouthed when they
see a tall, well-built, nearly naked man running up and down the sand.
"Kalt? Kalt?" one of them calls out. The man gives a polite but vague answer, th
en turns and dives into the waves. After swimming back and forth in the 40-degre
e water for a few minutes, he emerges from the surf and jogs briefly along the s

hore. The
ntinue to
tells me
causes a

wind is strong, but the man makes no move to get dressed. Passersby co
comment and stare. "This is one of the reasons I prefer anonymity," he
in English. "You do something even slightly out of the ordinary and it
sensation."

Piotr Wozniak's quest for anonymity has been successful. Nobody along this strin
g of little beach resorts recognizes him as the inventor of a technique to turn
people into geniuses. A portion of this technique, embodied in a software progra
m called SuperMemo, has enthusiastic users around the world. They apply it mainl
y to learning languages, and it's popular among people for whom fluency is a nec
essity
students from Poland or other poor countries aiming to score well enough
on English-language exams to study abroad. A substantial number of them do not p
ay for it, and pirated copies are ubiquitous on software bulletin boards in Chin
a, where it competes with knockoffs like SugarMemo.
SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what
you've learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late an
d you've forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practi
ce is just at the moment you're about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is d
ifferent for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousan
ds of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing
right now. Which are they?
Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A grap
h of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downw
ard over time and then levels off. This pattern has long been known to cognitive
psychology, but it has been difficult to put to practical use. It's too complex
for us to employ with our naked brains.
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the mom
ent of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the res
ult of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and sched
ules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can
seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helpi
ng people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As
we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not mer
introspection, intuition, and c
ely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge
onscious thought but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded
in machines.
Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeli
ng different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for
top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to t
ell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember wh
at we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Compute
rs, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our
rational self-control.
The reason the inventor of SuperMemo pursues extreme anonymity, asking me to con
ceal his exact location and shunning even casual recognition by users of his sof
tware, is not because he's paranoid or a misanthrope but because he wants to avo
id random interruptions to a long-running experiment he's conducting on himself.
Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in
strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happ
iest people I've ever met.
In the late 1800s, a German scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus made up lists of
nonsense syllables and measured how long it took to forget and then relearn them
. (Here is an example of the type of list he used: bes dek fel gup huf jeik mek
meun pon daus dor gim ke4k be4p bCn hes.) In experiments of breathtaking rigor a

nd tedium, Ebbinghaus practiced and recited from memory 2.5 nonsense syllables a
second, then rested for a bit and started again. Maintaining a pace of rote men
tal athleticism that all students of foreign verb conjugation will regard with a
we, Ebbinghaus trained this way for more than a year. Then, to show that the res
ults he was getting weren't an accident, he repeated the entire set of experimen
ts three years later. Finally, in 1885, he published a monograph called Memory:
A Contribution to Experimental Psychology. The book became the founding classic
of a new discipline.
Ebbinghaus discovered many lawlike regularities of mental life. He was the first
to draw a learning curve. Among his original observations was an account of a s
trange phenomenon that would drive his successors half batty for the next centur
y: the spacing effect.
Ebbinghaus showed that it's possible to dramatically improve learning by correct
ly spacing practice sessions. On one level, this finding is trivial; all student
s have been warned not to cram. But the efficiencies created by precise spacing
are so large, and the improvement in performance so predictable, that from nearl
y the moment Ebbinghaus described the spacing effect, psychologists have been ur
ging educators to use it to accelerate human progress. After all, there is a tre
mendous amount of material we might want to know. Time is short.
How Supermemo Works
SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information you've l
earned and want to retain. For example, say you're studying Spanish. Your chance
of recalling a given word when you need it declines over time according to a pr
edictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds
you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to,
say, 90 percent. When you first learn a new vocabulary word, your chance of reca
lling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo reminds you of the word, the rat
e of forgetting levels out. The program tracks this new decline and waits longer
to quiz you the next time.
How Supermemo Works
However, this technique never caught on. The spacing effect is "one of the most
remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning," the psycho
logist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988, at the beginning of a typically sad encomiu
m published in American Psychologist under the title "The Spacing Effect: A Case
Study in the Failure to Apply the Results of Psychological Research." The sorrr
owful tone is not hard to understand. How would computer scientists feel if peop
le continued to use slide rules for engineering calculations? What if, centuries
after the invention of spectacles, people still dealt with nearsightedness by h
olding things closer to their eyes? Psychologists who studied the spacing effect
thought they possessed a solution to a problem that had frustrated humankind si
nce before written language: how to remember what's been learned. But instead, t
he spacing effect became a reminder of the impotence of laboratory psychology.
As a student at the Poznan University of Technology in western Poland in the 198
0s, Wozniak was overwhelmed by the sheer number of things he was expected to lea
rn. But that wasn't his most troubling problem. He wasn't just trying to pass hi
s exams; he was trying to learn. He couldn't help noticing that within a few mon
ths of completing a class, only a fraction of the knowledge he had so painfully
acquired remained in his mind. Wozniak knew nothing of the spacing effect, but h
e knew that the methods at hand didn't work.
The most important challenge was English. Wozniak refused to be satisfied with t
he broken, half-learned English that so many otherwise smart students were stuck
with. So he created an analog database, with each entry consisting of a questio
n and answer on a piece of paper. Every time he reviewed a word, phrase, or fact

, he meticulously noted the date and marked whether he had forgotten it. At the
end of the session, he tallied the number of remembered and forgotten items. By
1984, a century after Ebbinghaus finished his second series of experiments on no
nsense syllables, Wozniak's database contained 3,000 English words and phrases a
nd 1,400 facts culled from biology, each with a complete repetition history. He
was now prepared to ask himself an important question: How long would it take hi
m to master the things he wanted to know?
The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long. According to
Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible. The problem wasn't learnin
g the material; it was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English voc
abulary vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Usi
ng some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study
, it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain a modest
English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice t
hat time. This was impractical.
Wozniak's discouraging numbers were roughly consistent with the results that Ebb
inghaus had recorded in his own experiments and that have been confirmed by othe
r psychologists in the decades since. If students nonetheless manage to become e
xpert in a few of the things they study, it's not because they retain the materi
al from their lessons but because they specialize in a relatively narrow subfiel
d where intense practice keeps their memory fresh. When it comes to language, th
usually amounting to actual immigration
is n
e received wisdom is that immersion
ecessary to achieve fluency. On one hand, this is helpful advice. On the other h
and, it's an awful commentary on the value of countless classroom hours. Learnin
g things is easy. But remembering them this is where a certain hopelessness sets
in.
As Wozniak later wrote in describing the failure of his early learning system: "
The process of increasing the size of my databases gradually progressed at the c
ost of knowledge retention." In other words, as his list grew, so did his forget
ting. He was climbing a mountain of loose gravel and making less and less progre
ss at each step.
Photo: Patrick Voigt
The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince
ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn
words,
dates, formulas, historical and biographical details don't really matter. Facts
can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for. When it comes to learning, wh
at really matters is how things fit together. We master the stories, the schemas
, the frameworks, the paradigms; we rehearse the lingo; we swim in the episteme.
The disadvantage of this comforting notion is that it's false. "The people who c
riticize memorization
how happy would they be to spell out every letter of every
word they read?" asks Robert Bjork, chair of UCLA's psychology department and o
ne of the most eminent memory researchers. After all, Bjork notes, children lear
n to read whole words through intense practice, and every time we enter a new fi
eld we become children again. "You can't escape memorization," he says. "There i
s an initial process of learning the names of things. That's a stage we all go t
hrough. It's all the more important to go through it rapidly." The human brain i
s a marvel of associative processing, but in order to make associations, data mu
st be loaded into memory.
Once we drop the excuse that memorization is pointless, we're left with an inter
esting mystery. Much of the information does remain in our memory, though we can
not recall it. "To this day," Bjork says, "most people think about forgetting as
decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away.
But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone

because you can't recall it, but we can prove that it's still there. For instanc
e, you can still recognize a 'forgotten' item in a group. Yes, without continued
use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone."
After an ichthyologist named David Starr Jordan became the first president of St
anford University in the 1890s, he bequeathed to memory researchers one of their
favorite truisms: Every time he learned the name of a student, Jordan is said t
o have complained, he forgot the name of a fish. But the fish to which Jordan ha
d devoted his research life were still there, somewhere beneath the surface of c
onsciousness. The difficulty was in catching them.
During the years that Wozniak struggled to master English, Bjork and his collabo
rator, Elizabeth Bjork (she is also a professor of psychology; the two have been
married since 1969), were at work on a new theory of forgetting. Both were stee
ped in the history of laboratory research on memory, and one of their goals was
to get to the bottom of the spacing effect. They were also curious about the par
adoxical tendency of older memories to become stronger with the passage of time,
while more recent memories faded. Their explanation involved an elegant model w
ith deeply counterintuitive implications.
Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which
they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures
how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surfac
e of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some
memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength. Take an old
address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel that it's gone. But a
single reminder could be enough to restore it for months or years. Conversely, s
ome memories have high retrieval strength but low storage strength. Perhaps you'
ve recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this m
oment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten
in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won't do much to streng
then them at all.
The Bjorks were not the first psychologists to make this distinction, but they a
nd a series of collaborators used a broad range of experimental data to show how
these laws of memory wreak havoc on students and teachers. One of the problems
is that the amount of storage strength you gain from practice is inversely corre
lated with the current retrieval strength. In other words, the harder you have t
o work to get the right answer, the more the answer is sealed in memory. Precise
ly those things that seem to signal we're learning well
easy performance on dril
ls, fluency during a lesson, even the subjective feeling that we know something
are misleading when it comes to predicting whether we will remember it in the fu
ture. "The most motivated and innovative teachers, to the extent they take curre
nt performance as their guide, are going to do the wrong things," Robert Bjork s
ays. "It's almost sinister."
The most popular learning systems sold today for instance, foreign language soft
ware like Rosetta Stone
cheerfully defy every one of the psychologists' warnings
. With its constant feedback and easily accessible clues, Rosetta Stone brillian
tly creates a sensation of progress. "Go to Amazon and look at the reviews," say
s Greg Keim, Rosetta Stone's CTO, when I ask him what evidence he has that peopl
e are really remembering what they learn. "That is as objective as you can get i
n terms of a user's sense of achievement." The sole problem here, from the psych
ologists' perspective, is that the user's sense of achievement is exactly what w
e should most distrust.
The battle between lab-tested techniques and conventional pedagogy went on for d
ecades, and it's fair to say that the psychologists lost. All those studies of h
uman memory in the lab using nonsense syllables, random numbers, pictures, maps,
foreign vocabulary, scattered dots
had so little influence on actual practice t

hat eventually their irrelevance provoked a revolt. In the late '70s, Ulric Neis
ser, the pioneering researcher who coined the term cognitive psychology, launche
d a broad attack on the approach of Ebbinghaus and his scientific kin.
"We have established firm empirical generalizations, but most of them are so obv
ious that every 10-year-old knows them anyway," Neisser complained. "We have an
intellectually impressive group of theories, but history offers little confidenc
e that they will provide any meaningful insight into natural behavior." Neisser
encouraged psychologists to leave their labs and study memory in its natural env
ironment, in the style of ecologists. He didn't doubt that the laboratory theori
es were correct in their limited way, but he wanted results that had power to ch
ange the world.
Many psychologists followed Neisser. But others stuck to their laboratory method
s. The spacing effect was one of the proudest lab-derived discoveries, and it wa
s interesting precisely because it was not obvious, even to professional teacher
s. The same year that Neisser revolted, Robert Bjork, working with Thomas Landau
er of Bell Labs, published the results of two experiments involving nearly 700 u
ndergraduate students. Landauer and Bjork were looking for the optimal moment to
rehearse something so that it would later be remembered. Their results were imp
ressive: The best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forg
et it. And yet
as Neisser might have predicted
that insight was useless in the r
eal world. Determining the precise moment of forgetting is essentially impossibl
e in day-to-day life.
Obviously, computers were the answer, and the idea of using them was occasionall
y suggested, starting in the 1960s. But except for experimental software, nothin
g was built. The psychologists were interested mainly in theories and models. Th
e teachers were interested in immediate signs of success. The students were cram
ming to pass their exams. The payoff for genuine progress was somehow too abstra
ct, too delayed, to feed back into the system in a useful way. What was needed w
as not an academic psychologist but a tinkerer, somebody with a lot of time on h
is hands, a talent for mathematics, and a strangely literal temperament that mad
e him think he should actually recall the things he learned.
The day I first meet Wozniak, we go for a 7-mile walk down a windy beach. I'm in
my business clothes and half comatose from jet lag; he's wearing a track suit a
nd comes toward me with a gait so buoyant he seems about to take to the air. He
asks me to walk on the side away from the water. "People say that when I get exc
ited I tend to drift in their direction, so it is better that I stand closer to
the sea so I don't push you in," he says.
Wozniak takes an almost physical pleasure in reason. He loves to discuss things
with people, to get insight into their personalities, and to give them advice
es
pecially in English. One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one
language and one currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He's a
ppalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He's baffled that Americans do
not use the metric system. For two years he kept a diary in Esperanto.
Although Esperanto was the ideal expression of his universalist dreams, English
is the leading real-world implementation. Though he has never set foot in an Eng
lish-speaking country, he speaks the language fluently. "Two words that used to
give me trouble are perspicuous and perspicacious," he confessed as we drank bee
r with raspberry syrup at a tiny beachside restaurant where we were the only cus
tomers. "Then I found a mnemonic to enter in SuperMemo: clear/clever. Now I neve
r misuse them."
Wozniak's command of English is the result of a series of heroic experiments, in
the tradition of Ebbinghaus. They involved relentless sessions of careful selfanalysis, tracked over years. He began with the basic conundrum of too much to s

tudy in too little time. His first solution was based on folk wisdom. "It is a c
ommon intuition," Wozniak later wrote, "that with successive repetitions, knowle
dge should gradually become more durable and require less frequent review."
This insight had already been proven by Landauer and Bjork, but Wozniak was unaw
are of their theory of forgetting or of any of the landmark studies in laborator
y research on memory. This ignorance was probably a blessing, because it forced
him to rely on pragmatic engineering. In 1985, he divided his database into thre
e equal sets and created schedules for studying each of them. One of the sets he
studied every five days, another every 18 days, and the third at expanding inte
rvals, increasing the period between study sessions each time he got the answers
right.
This experiment proved that Wozniak's first hunch was too simple. On none of the
tests did his recall show significant improvement over the naive methods of stu
dy he normally used. But he was not discouraged and continued making ever more e
laborate investigations of study intervals, changing the second interval to two
days, then four days, then six days, and so on. Then he changed the third interv
al, then the fourth, and continued to test and measure, measure and test, for ne
arly a decade. His conviction that forgetting could be tamed by following rules
gave him the intellectual fortitude to continue searching for those rules. He do
ggedly traced a matrix of paths, like a man pacing off steps in a forest where h
e is lost.
All of his early work was done on paper. In the computer science department at t
he Poznan University of Technology, "we had a single mainframe of Polish-Russian
design, with punch cards," Wozniak recalls. "If you could stand in line long en
ough to get your cards punched, you could wait a couple of days more for the mac
hine to run your cards, and then at last you got a printout, which was your outp
ut."
The personal computer revolution was already pretty far along in the US by the t
ime Wozniak managed to get his hands on an Amstrad PC 1512, imported through qua
si-legal means from Hamburg, Germany. With this he was able to make another majo
r advance in SuperMemo
computing the difficulty of any fact or study item and ad
justing the unique shape of the predicted forgetting curve for every item and us
er. A friend of Wozniak's adapted his software to run on Atari machines, and as
access to personal computers finally spread among students, so did SuperMemo.
After the collapse of Polish communism, Wozniak and some fellow students formed
a company, SuperMemo World. By 1995, their program was one of the most successfu
l applications developed by the country's fledgling software industry, and they
were searching for funding that would allow them to relocate to Silicon Valley.
That year, at Comdex in Las Vegas, 200,000 people got a look at Sony's new DVD t
echnology, prototypes of flatscreens, and Wozniak's SuperMemo, which became the
first Polish product shown at the great geek carnival, then at the height of its
influence. In Europe, the old communist experiment in human optimization had ru
n its course. Wozniak believed that in a world of open competition, where indivi
duals are rewarded on merit, a scientific tool that accelerated learning would f
ind customers everywhere.
Wozniak's chief partner in the campaign to reprogram the world's approach to lea
rning through SuperMemo was Krzysztof Biedalak, who had been his classmate at th
e University of Technology. The two men used to run 6 miles to a nearby lake for
an icy swim. Biedalak agrees with Wozniak that winter swimming is good for ment
al health. Biedalak also agrees with Wozniak that SuperMemo produces extreme lea
rning. But Biedalak does not agree with Wozniak about everything. "I don't apply
his whole technique," he says. "In my context, his technique is inapplicable."
What Biedalak means by Wozniak's technique is the extension of algorithmic optim

ization to all dimensions of life. Biedalak is CEO of SuperMemo World, which sel
ls and licenses Wozniak's invention. Today, SuperMemo World employs just 25 peop
le. The venture capital never came through, and the company never moved to Calif
ornia. About 50,000 copies of SuperMemo were sold in 2006, most for less than $3
0. Many more are thought to have been pirated.
Biedalak and I meet and talk in a restaurant in downtown Warsaw where the shelve
s are covered in gingham and the walls are lined with jars of pickled vegetables
. He has an intelligent, somewhat hangdog expression, like a young Walter Mattha
u, and his tone is as measured as Wozniak's is impulsive. Until I let the inform
ation slip, he doesn't even know the exact location of his partner and friend.
"Piotr would never go out to promote the product, wouldn't talk to journalists,
very rarely agreed to meet with somebody," Biedalak says. "He was the driving fo
rce, but at some point I had to accept that you cannot communicate with him in t
he way you can with other people."
The problem wasn't shyness but the same intolerance for inefficient expenditure
of mental resources that led to the invention of SuperMemo in the first place. B
y the mid-'90s, with SuperMemo growing more and more popular, Wozniak felt that
his ability to rationally control his life was slipping away. "There were 80 pho
ne calls per day to handle. There was no time for learning, no time for programm
ing, no time for sleep," he recalls. In 1994, he disappeared for two weeks, leav
ing no information about where he was. The next year he was gone for 100 days. E
ach year, he has increased his time away. He doesn't own a phone. He ignores his
email for months at a time. And though he holds a PhD and has published in acad
emic journals, he never attends conferences or scientific meetings.
Instead, Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimenta
tion. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and no
w he's working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repeti
tions. Psychologists have long believed there's a correlation between sleep and
memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a
way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from
books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chu
nks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning. He s
elects a short section of what he's reading and copies it into the SuperMemo app
lication, which predicts when he'll want to read it again so it sticks in his mi
nd. He cuts and pastes completely unread material into the system, assigning it
a priority. SuperMemo shuffles all his potential knowledge into a queue and pres
ents it to him on a study screen when the time is right. Wozniak can look at a g
raph of what he's got lined up to learn and adjust the priority rankings if his
goals change.
These techniques are designed to overcome steep learning curves through automate
d steps, like stairs on a hill. He calls it incremental reading, and it has come
to dominate his intellectual life. Wozniak no longer wastes time worrying that
he hasn't gotten to some article he wants to read; once it's loaded into the sys
tem, he trusts his algorithm to apportion it to his consciousness at the appropr
iate time.
The appropriate time, that is, for him. Having turned over his mental life to a
computerized system, he refuses to be pushed around by random inputs and request
s. Naturally, this can be annoying to people whose messages tend to sift to the
bottom. "After four months," Biedalak says sadly, "you sometimes get a reply to
some sentence in an email that has been scrambled in his incremental reading pro
cess."
For Wozniak, these misfires were less a product of scrambling than of an inevita
ble clash of goals. A person who understands the exact relationship between lear

ning and time is forced to measure out his hours with a certain care. SuperMemo
was like a genie that granted Wozniak a wish: unprecedented power to remember. B
ut the value of what he remembered depended crucially on what he studied, and wh
at he studied depended on his goals, and the selection of his goals rested upon
the efficient acquisition of knowledge, in a regressive function that propelled
him relentlessly along the path he had chosen. The guarantee that he would not f
orget what he learned was both a gift and a demand, requiring him to sacrifice e
very extraneous thing.
From the business side of SuperMemo, Wozniak's priorities can sometimes look sel
fish. Janusz Murakowski, one of Wozniak's friends who worked as a manager at the
company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak's focus on his own learning has
stunted the development of his invention. "Piotr writes this software for himse
lf," says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineering at the Universit
y of Delaware. "The interface is just impossible." This is perhaps a bit unfair.
SuperMemo comes in eight flavors, some of which were coded by licensees: SuperM
emo for Windows, for Palm devices, for several cell phones, even an Internet ver
sion. It's true that Wozniak is no Steve Jobs, and his software has none of the
viral friendliness of a casual game like Brain Age for Nintendo DS. Still, it ca
n hardly be described as the world's most difficult program. After all, photogra
phers can learn to produce the most arcane effects in Photoshop. Why shouldn't m
ore people be able to master SuperMemo?
"It was never a feel-good product," Murakowski says, and here he may be getting
closer to the true conflict that lies at the heart of the struggle to optimize i
ntelligence, a conflict that transcends design and touches on some curious facts
about human nature. We are used to the idea that normal humans can perform chal
lenging feats of athleticism. We all know someone who has run a marathon or ridd
en a bike cross-country. But getting significantly smarter
that seems to be diff
erent. We associate intelligence with pure talent, and academic learning with ed
ucational experiences dating far back in life. To master a difficult language, t
o become expert in a technical field, to make a scientific contribution in a new
area
these seem like rare things. And so they are, but perhaps not for the reas
on we assume.
The failure of SuperMemo to transform learning uncannily repeats the earlier fai
lures of cognitive psychology to influence teachers and students. Our capacity t
o learn is amazingly large. But optimal learning demands a kind of rational cont
rol over ourselves that does not come easily. Even the basic demand for regulari
ty can be daunting. If you skip a few days, the spacing effect, with its steady
march of sealing knowledge in memory, begins to lose its force. Progress limps.
When it comes to increasing intelligence, our brain is up to the task and our te
chnology is up to the task. The problem lies in our temperament.
The Baltic Sea is dark as an unlit mirror. Wozniak and I walk along the shore, p
assing the wooden snack stands that won't be open until spring, and he tells me
how he manages his life. He's married, and his wife shares his lifestyle. They s
wim together in winter, and though Polish is their native language, they communi
cate in English, which she learned with SuperMemo. Wozniak's days are blocked in
to distinct periods: a creative period, a reading and studying period, an exerci
se period, an eating period, a resting period, and then a second creative period
. He doesn't get up at a regular hour and is passionate against alarm clocks. If
excitement over his research leads him to work into the night, he simply shifts
to sleeping in the day. When he sits down for a session of incremental reading,
he attends to whatever automatically appears on his computer screen, stopping t
he instant his mind begins to drift or his comprehension falls too low and then
moving on to the next item in the queue. SuperMemo graphs a distribution of prio
rities that he can adjust as he goes. When he encounters a passage that he think
s he'll need to remember, he marks it; then it goes into a pattern of spaced rep
etition, and the information it contains will stay in his brain indefinitely.

"Once you get the snippets you need," Wozniak says, "your books disappear. They
gradually evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge."
As a science fiction fan, I had always assumed that when computers supplemented
our intelligence, it would be because we outsourced some of our memory to them.
We would ask questions, and our machines would give oracular
or supremely practi
cal replies. Wozniak has discovered a different route. When he entrusts his ment
al life to a machine, it is not to throw off the burden of thought but to make h
is mind more swift. Extreme knowledge is not something for which he programs a c
omputer but for which his computer is programming him.
I've already told Wozniak that I am not optimistic about my ability to tame old
reading habits in the name of optimized knowledge. Books, for me, are not merely
sources of information I might want to load into memory but also subjective com
panions, almost substitute people, and I don't see why I would want to hold on t
o them in fragments. Still, I tell him I would like to give it a shot.
"So you believe in trying things for yourself?" he asks.
"Yes."
This provides his opening. "In that case, let's go swimming."
At the edge of the sea, I become afraid. I'm a strong swimmer, but there's somet
hing about standing on the beach in the type of minuscule bathing suit you get a
t the gift shop of a discount resort in Eastern Europe, and watching people stri
de past in their down parkas, that smacks of danger.
"I'm already happy with anticipation," Wozniak says.
"Will I have a heart attack?"
"There is less risk than on your drive here," he answers.
I realize he must be correct. Poland has few freeways, and in the rural north, l
ines of cars jockey behind communist-era farm machinery until they defy the odds
and try to pass. There are spectacular wrecks. Wozniak gives close attention to
the qualitative estimate of fatal risks. By graphing the acquisition of knowled
ge in SuperMemo, he has realized that in a single lifetime one can acquire only
a few million new items. This is the absolute limit on intellectual achievement
defined by death. So he guards his health. He rarely gets in a car. The Germans
on the beach are staring at me. I dive in.
Philosopher William James once wrote that mental life is controlled by noticing.
Climbing out of the sea and onto the windy beach, my skin purple and my mind in
a reverie provoked by shock, I find myself thinking of a checklist Wozniak wrot
e a few years ago describing how to become a genius. His advice was straightforw
ard yet strangely terrible: You must clarify your goals, gain knowledge through
spaced repetition, preserve health, work steadily, minimize stress, refuse inter
ruption, and never resist sleep when tired. This should lead to radically improv
ed intelligence and creativity. The only cost: turning your back on every conven
tion of social life. It is a severe prescription. And yet now, as I grin broadly
and wave to the gawkers, it occurs to me that the cold rationality of his appro
ach may be only a surface feature and that, when linked to genuine rewards, even
the chilliest of systems can have a certain visceral appeal. By projecting the
achievement of extreme memory back along the forgetting curve, by provably linki
ng the distant future
when we will know so much
to the few minutes we devote to
studying today, Wozniak has found a way to condition his temperament along with
his memory. He is making the future noticeable. He is trying not just to learn m

any things but to warm the process of learning itself with a draft of utopian ec
stasy.
}
Desperate to memorize a crucial fact? Look over there! (Kidding.) The trick is t
o distract yourself by studying stuff that's slightly different from whatever yo
u're trying to learn. Your brain will then work harder to permanently store the
original information. It's a tricky concept, but here's an example: In 2007, res
earchers asked UCLA students to try to memorize a set of 48 word pairs (country:
Russia, fruit: lemon, flower: lily, etc.). After studying the list, some studen
ts then had to sit through a slide show and view closely related material (flowe
r: rose). Guess what? The distracted students performed better on subsequent rec
all tests. "Distraction forces you to engage in processing," says Benjamin Storm
, a UCLA researcher who oversaw the study. Hey, up in the sky
is that a blimp?
_
Playing Brain Age
Anyone who has ever begged their parents for a videogame system knows the standa
rd lines of appeal ("You don't want me to have inferior hand-eye coordination, d
o you?"). Now kids can argue that some games may make them smarter. That's the p
romise of Nintendo's Brain Age, which claims to "help train your memory and keep
your mind sharp" through reading exercises, math puzzles, and other mental gymn
astics. After diligent effort, players routinely see their "brain age" plummet f
rom, say, a sluggish 60 to a taut 30.
But the improved performance may not be a sign of wit-sharpening. Many users sta
rt with little gaming experience, so it's not surprising that their scores impro
ve a phenomenon known as the practice effect. Sadly, there's no evidence that in
-game gains translate to the real world.
Greta Lorge
Doing Crosswords
Completing that Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle isn't just a diverting
if
usually futile pastime. It's also a great way to keep your wits about you as yo
u age. At least that's the common belief, which holds that a regular schedule of
cognitive exercise can bulk up your brain with new neurons, the same way vigoro
us weight lifting can build muscle mass. You can continue to sprout new neurons
well into adulthood, but they will be only as powerful as the neural networks th
ey're connected to. And it's not clear that puzzles help forge those connections
.
Some studies have reported that mental exercise can slow or reverse cognitive de
cline. But aging expert Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia says the
evidence is all correlational, not causal: The respondents who were most drawn
to mental exercise or pursued brain-intensive professions probably had greater c
ognitive reserves to begin with. So no, crossword puzzles probably won't fend of
f senility. What's a four-letter word for "commonly held but unproven belief"? O
h, right: myth. G.L.
Eating Fish
Herman Melville. Ernest Hemingway. Schredinger's cat. Some of our brightest minds
had a thing for seafood. That may be no coincidence. Oily fish are rich in doco
sahexaenoic acid (DHA), an omega-3 fatty acid that accounts for 40 percent of th
e makeup of brain cell membranes and which could improve neurotransmission. DHA
is necessary for fetal brain development, and a handful of studies have linked f
ish-heavy diets with reduced risk of mental decline in old age.
But before you take the bait, consider: Those studies trusted subjects to rememb
er and report their dietary habits a fishy procedure. A test of mice found that
an omega-3-rich diet had no impact on cognitive function. And cold-water fish th
at are high in omega-3s are also likely to have elevated levels of methylmercury

and PCBs, both known neurotoxins. It would be great if fish really were brain f
ood. Unfortunately, we've got to throw this one back.
G.L.
Chewing Gum
School principals may scoff, but the notion that gum enhances alertness dates to
World War I, when sticks were slipped into soldiers' rations. The rationale: Ch
ewing increases blood flow to the motor cortex and can trick the brain into expe
cting a meal. This triggers an increase in insulin production that could boost c
erebral glucose levels and thus smarts. Too bad a 2004 study found gum chewers t
o be less attentive than a control group. Looks like Mrs. Snodgrass was right af
ter all. G.L.
Listening to Music
Music can certainly expand your mind; if you don't believe us, play Dark Side of
the Moon while watching The Wizard of Oz. But can it amp up your brain power? T
hat's the claim of companies like the Monroe Institute, which market CDs and MP3
s that promise to increase focus and improve memory.1 This ain't Baby Bach: The
recordings pump a different frequency into each ear, and these tones mix in the
brain to produce a pulse that supposedly shifts the firing pattern of neurons, a
ltering brain waves and -- the thinking goes -- reverse-engineering the mental s
tate that accompanies them.
A compelling idea, but it's less likely to produce serious thought than a Fergie
concert. In a recent study at Oregon Health and Science University, subjects ex
posed to a binaural pulse in the 3- to 8-Hz theta band (which is linked to worki
ng memory) showed no change in brain wave activity as measured by EEG. What's mo
re, they actually became depressed and forgetful. If you wanted that, you'd just
listen to Celine Dion.
G.L.
Taking Supplements
The supplements industry claims its products can boost your intelligence. Intell
igent enough to check out the scientific basis for those claims? Pill purveyors
better hope not. Here's how a few remedies rate on our snake oil scale.
Mathew H
onan
B Vitamins
Summary Useful for staving off Alzheimer's, but don't expect it to help you solv
e that sudoku.
Snake Oil Rating
Ginkgo Biloba
Summary It may come in handy during your sunset years, but until the dementia se
ts in, this won't help.
Snake Oil Rating
Ginseng
Summary Might regulate glucose, which may improve cognition, but that's a whole
lot of maybe.
Snake Oil Rating
Gotu Kola
Summary It reduces anxiety in rats, but for humans the only provably "smart" thi
ng is the marketing.
Snake Oil Rating
Huperzine A
Summary One study showed memory improvement in healthy adults, but more solid ev
idence would be nice.
Snake Oil Rating

_
Do you find yourself forgetting where you left your keys or blanking out informa
tion on important tests? Fortunately, there are plenty of things that you can do
to help improve your memory.
Obviously, utilizing some sort of reminder system can help. Setting up an online
calender that sends reminders to your phone can help you keep track of all thos
e appointments and meetings. Creating daily to-do lists can ensure that you don'
t forget important tasks that need to be completed.
But what about all the important information that you need to actually cement in
to your long-term memory? It will take some effort and even involve tweaking or
dramatically changing your normal study routine, but there are a number of strat
egies you can utilize to get more out of your memory.
Before your next big exam, be sure to check out some of these tried and tested t
echniques for improving memory. These research-proven strategies can effectively
improve memory, enhance recall, and increase retention of information.
Up next - discover one of the most important things you can do to help improve y
our memory.
This content is provided in partnership with National 4-H Council. 4-H experienc
es help GROW confident, caring and capable kids. Learn more by visiting their we
bsite.
2 of 13
Focus your attention on the materials you are studying.
1
Attention is one of the major components of memory. In order for information to
move from short-term memory into long-term memory, you need to actively attend t
o this information. Try to study in a place free of distractions such as televis
ion, music, and other diversions.
Getting rid of distractions might be a challenge, especially if you are surround
ed by boisterous roommates or noisy children. One thing you can do is to set asi
de a short period of time to be alone.
Ask your roommates to give you some space or ask your spouse to take the kids fo
r an hour so you can focus on your work.
If you need more tips, be sure to check out this article on five ways to improve
your attention.
3 of 13
Avoid cramming by establishing regular study sessions.
According to Bjork (2001), studying materials over a number of session's gives y
ou the time you need to adequately process the information. Research has shown t
hat students who study regularly remember the material far better than those who
do all of their studying in one marathon session.
Structure and organize the information you are studying.
Woman placing post-its on a wall - Compassionate Eye Foundation/Noel Hendrickson
/Digital Vision/Getty Images
Photo Credit: Compassionate Eye Foundation/Noel Hendrickson/Digital Vision/Getty

Images
Researchers have found that information is organized in memory in related cluste
rs. You can take advantage of this by structuring and organizing the materials y
ou are studying. Try grouping similar concepts and terms together, or make an ou
tline of your notes and textbook readings to help group related concepts.
5 of 13
Utilize mnemonic devices to remember information.
Mnemonic devices are a technique often used by students to aid in recall. A mnem
onic is simply a way to remember information. For example, you might associate a
term you need to remember with a common item that you are very familiar with. T
he best mnemonics are those that utilize positive imagery, humor, or novelty. Yo
u might come up with a rhyme, song, or joke to help remember a specific segment
of information.
In order to recall information, you need to encode what you are studying into lo
ng-term memory. One of the most effective encoding techniques is known as elabor
ative rehearsal. An example of this technique would be to read the definition of
a key term, study the definition of that term and then read a more detailed des
cription of what that term means. After repeating this process a few times, you'
ll probably notice that recalling the information is much easier.
Visualize concepts to improve memory and recall.
blackboard with idea illustration - yang wenshuang/E+/Getty Images
Photo Credit: yang wenshuang/E+/Getty Images
Many people benefit greatly from visualizing the information they study. Pay att
ention to the photographs, charts, and other graphics in your textbooks. If you
do not have visual cues to help, try creating your own. Draw charts or figures i
n the margins of your notes or use highlighters or pens in different colors to g
roup related ideas in your written study materials.
When you are studying unfamiliar material, take the time to think about how this
information relates to things that you already know. By establishing relationsh
ips between new ideas and previously existing memories, you can dramatically inc
rease the likelihood of recalling the recently learned information.
Research suggests that reading materials out loud significantly improves memory
of the material. Educators and psychologists have also discovered that having st
udents actually teach new concepts to others enhances understanding and recall.
You can use this approach in your own studies by teaching new concepts and infor
mation to a friend or study partner.
Have you ever noticed how it's sometimes easier to remember information at the b
eginning or end of a chapter? Researchers have found that the order of informati
on can play a role in recall, which is known as the serial position effect.
While recalling middle information can be difficult, you can overcome this probl
em by spending extra time rehearsing this information. Another strategy is to tr
y restructuring what you have learned so it will be easier to remember.
When you come across an especially difficult concept, devote some extra time to
memorizing the information.
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Another great way to increase your recall is to occasionally change your study r
outine. If you are accustomed to studying in one specific location, try moving t
o a different spot during your next study session. If you study in the evening,
try spending a few minutes each morning reviewing the information you studied th
e previous night. By adding an element of novelty to your study sessions, you ca
n increase the effectiveness of your efforts and significantly improve your long
-term recall.
Researchers have long known that sleep is important for memory and learning. Som
e recent research has shown that taking a nap after you learn something new can
actually help you learn faster and remember better.
One study actually found that sleeping after learning something new actually lea
ds to physical changes in the brain. Sleep deprived mice experienced less dendtr
itic growth following a learning task than well-rested mice.
So the next time you are struggling to learn new information, consider getting a
good night's sleep after you study.
_
id you forget to that you were having a quiz this week? Or did you miss an impor
tant appointment that you should have remembered? From forgetting little things
like where we left the television remote to big things like the date and time of
a significant meeting, memory failures can wreak havoc on our lives. Fortunatel
y, there are plenty of things you can do to help improve your memory.
Psychologists have developed a number of great memory improvement tips that have
been shown to be very effective. I also asked readers of our Facebook page to s
hare some of their favorite tips and strategies for remembering dates, names, ev
ents, and other important information, and our fans had loads of excellent ideas
to share! Some of these you have probably heard of and you might already be usi
ng in your daily life. Others are creative solutions that you might want to try
out. The key is to find the method that works best for you!
Remember - kemalbas / E+ / Getty Images
kemalbas / E+ / Getty Images
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
For some types of information, particularly anything unfamiliar or difficult to
remember, repetition is the key.
"Not sure about numbers but I love using flash cards and saying it over and
over aloud. Eventually the subconscious will remember it! I'm studying hypnother
apy right now, very interesting what I'm learning about the mind."
Lisa
."

"Repetition drives things from the short-term memory to the long-term memory
Ceejay

"As with most things in life, repetition always improves my recalling perfor
mance. However, I think the way people use repetition technique is what really v
aries. If I was a so-called visual learner, I may produce several spider-diagram
s or posters whereas, if I was a verbal learner, I may record all the key facts
on a mobile device and listen to it again and again and perhaps make new recordi
ngs later on."
Daniel
"I'm pretty hopeless with names, someone once told me to look a person in th
e face and repeat their name 3 times... Always works a treat! (Maybe it's the co
gnitive process instead of telling myself 'I'm hopeless with names... Chicken or
the egg?!)" - Stephanie

Thought bubbles - Tara Moore / Stone / Getty Images

Tara Moore / Stone / Getty Images
Form Associations
Many readers suggested that forming associations between the information you are
trying to remember and things you already know can help. This might involve ass
ociating the new information with similar words, with a song, or with a mental i
mage.
"I worked in a restaurant where you had to learn the name and number of ever
y dish. So I'd remember dishes instead of numbers. My alarm code was raw juice,
apple juice, chicken katsu curry."
Tara
"Association. When it's something like a name sometimes I use like-words. Wh
en it's something to do with numbers, a simple tune helps."
Maribel
"I have been successful with remembering things especially names by ASSOCIAT
ION. Associating something or somebody with one that am very familiar with. At t
he very sight of same thing or person, it strikes a chord and the connection is
established. I have tried it a number of times and it proved successful."
Ceejay
"Relate what I'm memorizing to some information I already have, update the s
chema, but especially tying to how pleasant I find it to be, using a feeling wor
ks very well." Andrew
"I always remember things like dates with a song. I associate the dates with
songs I love the most. I play them regularly so it reminds me of a particular e
vent or date or person."
Inji
."

"Make an association with things that are important or mean something to you
Eleni

"Another method I use is to associate keywords (of a definition, a list, or

anything you want) with locations linked to each other. I can use points in my l
oungeroom, rooms in my house, shops in the shopping centre, points in the town,
etc. They must have logical sequence though. Then create ridiculous images using
the keyword and the prompt. Again, fast and effective." - Michelle
Write it down - Yagi Studio / Digital Vision / Getty Images
Yagi Studio / Digital Vision / Getty Images
Write It Down
For many people, myself included, one of the best ways to commit something to me
mory involves simply writing it down. Something about the process of writing the
information down and reading over it helps ensure that it won't be forgotten.
"While I'm studying for an exam or just retaining vital information I tend t
o have a habit of either changing color pens to write notes or tapping my feet s
omething physical. So during exam if I try to remember either I start tapping or
thinking what I have written in the 'purple pen' when I read about this subject
. Physical and a bit of visual triggers I guess!"
Sandra
"I actually have a weird way but it's always effective when I use it! I alwa
ys write on my hands what I need to remember, so whenever I make any move I'll i
mmediately notice them. For more details, watch Christopher Nolan's masterpiece
'Memento'." Ali
Listening - Alan Graf / Cultura / Getty Images
Alan Graf / Cultura / Getty Images

Create a Song, Story, or Mnemonic

Many readers suggest creative memory strategies like coming up with a song or cr
afting a quick narrative to link bits of information together in memory. Mnemoni
cs, which involve some type of image, rhyme, or figure of speech, are also popul
ar.
"Sometimes I'll turn an important number into a song and repeat it over and
over again. To remember dates and events I'll turn it into a song. Most often th
ough, I listen to music when I study and that helps me remember. I'll sing the s
ong during the test and what I studied pops back into my head. I'm always writin
g things down too. Sometimes, if I have to remember a list, I will take the firs
t letters of each word and memorize them, then the word becomes a focal point an
d I'm able to remember the list. Like IPOS...input process output storage, the f
our main functions of a computer."
Angela
"I personally like to use narrative chaining as it enables me to visualize t
he information rather than just reading it word for word. Another really good me
thod is also by taking the initiative to create a scenario where you are most li
kely required to remember the information such as an artificially simulated exam
/test. The environment could potentially serve as a context -dependent cue that
would assist in retrieving information."
Joe
"For a word list, for instance, say: "lamp", "necktie", and "alligator", I m
ight visualize an old fashion floor lamp, with a necktie for a pull-chain, and a
n alligator biting the end of it. I QUICKLY memorized a list of 50 words that wa
y. The more ridiculous the image, the easier it is to remember."
Bill
"I have a few sort of stock images in my mind that I associate with differen
t numbers, usually rhyming things (like shoe for two) I make up little stories i
n my head using them to remember complex number sets. If you do it for a while i
t becomes second nature."
Mark
Folders - Seb Oliver / Photographer's Choice / Getty Images
Seb Oliver / Photographer's Choice / Getty Images
Break It Down Into Smaller Parts
When you are struggling to memorize a large amount of information, breaking it d
own into more manageable pieces can help.
"By breaking it down in bits or chunks. E.g 0803 - 77 - 27 -186. Rather than
picturing the whole , e.g 08037727186." Terna
"At work I used to have to temporarily remember seven-digit serial numbers,
so I would break it down to three and four digit groups, like a phone number. Wi
th phone numbers or my license plate number that I am trying to permanently memo
rize, I look for double digits, a digit that I can link to a zero, or significan
t combinations." Bill
Tools and Technology Can Help
When all else fails, don't be afraid to rely on some type of tool to help you re
member important information. Write it down on a calendar; set a reminder on you
r phone; whatever it takes to ensure that you don't lose or forget something imp
ortant. Several readers suggested that they utilize their mobile phones or table
t devices to record essential information.
+
Are you interested in finding ways to learn new things faster? Do you want to be
come a more effective and efficient learner? If you are like many students, your
time is limited so it is important to get the most educational value out of the
time you have available.

Speed of learning is not the only important factor, however. Retention, recall,
and transfer are also critical. Students need to be able to accurately remember
the information they learn, recall it at a later time, and utilize it effectivel
y in a wide variety of situations.
So what can you do to become a better learner? Becoming an effective and efficie
nt student is not something that happens overnight, but putting a few of these t
ips into daily practice can help you get more out of your study time.
- Sam Edwards / Getty Images
Sam Edwards / Getty Images
1. Memory Improvement Basics
We've talked before about some of the best ways to improve memory. Basic tips su
ch as improving your focus, avoiding cram sessions, and structuring your study t
ime are a good place to start, but there are even more lessons from psychology t
hat can dramatically improve your learning efficiency. Check out some of these m
emory improvement tips to maximize your memorization and retention of new inform
ation.
Students learning - Prasit photo / Moment / Getty Images
Learning and practicing new skills helps your brain retain new information. Pras
it photo / Moment / Getty Images
2. Keep Learning (and Practicing) New Things
One sure-fire way to become a more effective learner is to simply keep learning.
A 2004 Nature article reported that people who learned how to juggle increased
the amount of gray matter in their occipital lobes, the area of the brain is ass
ociated with visual memory. When these individuals stopped practicing their new
skill, this gray matter vanished.
So if you're learning a new language, it is important to keep practicing the lan
guage in order to maintain the gains you have achieved. This "use-it-or-lose-it"
phenomenon involves a brain process known as "pruning." Certain pathways in the
brain are maintained, while other are eliminated. If you want the new informati
on you just learned to stay put, keep practicing and rehearsing it.
Learn multiple ways - Hero Images / Getty Images
Hero Images / Getty Images
3. Learn in Multiple Ways
Focus on learning in more than one way. Instead of just listening to a podcast,
which involves auditory learning, find a way to rehearse the information both ve
rbally and visually. This might involve describing what you learned to a friend,
taking notes, or drawing a mind map. By learning in more than one way, you re fur
ther cementing the knowledge in your mind.
According to Judy Willis, The more regions of the brain that store data about a s
ubject, the more interconnection there is. This redundancy means students will h
ave more opportunities to pull up all of those related bits of data from their m
ultiple storage areas in response to a single cue. This cross-referencing of dat
a means we have learned, rather than just memorized.
Teach to learn - Hero Images / Getty Images
Hero Images / Getty Images
4. Teach What You've Learned to Another Person
Educators have long noted that one of the best ways to learn something is to tea
ch it to someone else. Remember your seventh-grade presentation on Costa Rica? B
y teaching to the rest of the class, your teacher hoped you would gain even more
from the assignment. You can apply the same principle today by sharing your new
ly learned skills and knowledge with others.

Start by translating the information into your own words. This process alone hel
ps solidify new knowledge in your brain. Next, find some way to share what you ve
learned. Some ideas include writing a blog post, creating a podcast, or particip
ating in a group discussion.
Student - Mike Kemp / Blend Images / Getty Images
Mike Kemp / Blend Images / Getty Images
5. Utilize Previous Learning to Promote New Learning
Another great way to become a more effective learner is to use relational learni
ng, which involves relating new information to things that you already know. For
example, if you are learning about Romeo and Juliet, you might associate what y
ou learn about the play with prior knowledge you have about Shakespeare, the his
torical period in which the author lived, and other relevant information.
- LWA/Dann Tardif / Brand X Pictures / Getty Images
LWA/Dann Tardif / Brand X Pictures / Getty Images
6. Gain Practical Experience
For many students, learning typically involves reading textbooks, attending lect
ures, or doing research in the library or on the Web. While seeing information a
nd then writing it down is important, actually putting new knowledge and skills
into practice can be one of the best ways to improve learning.
If you are trying to acquire a new skill or ability, focus on gaining practical
experience. If it is a sport or athletic skill, perform the activity on a regula
r basis. If you are learning a new language, practice speaking with another pers
on and surround yourself with language-immersion experiences. Watch foreign-lang
uage films and strike up conversations with native speakers to practice your bud
ding skills.
Reading a textbook - Hero Images / Getty Images
Hero Images / Getty Images
7. Look Up Answers Rather Than Struggle to Remember
Of course, learning isn t a perfect process. Sometimes, we forget the details of t
hings that we have already learned. If you find yourself struggling to recall so
me tidbit of information, research suggests that you are better offer simply loo
king up the correct answer.
One study found that the longer you spend trying to remember the answer, the mor
e likely you will be to forget the answer again in the future. Why? Because thes
e attempts to recall previously learned information actually results in learning
the "error state" instead of the correct response.
Student thinking - David Schaffer / Caiaimage / Getty Images
David Schaffer / Caiaimage / Getty Images
8. Understand How You Learn Best
Another great strategy for improving your learning efficiency is to recognize yo
ur learning habits and styles. There are a number of different theories about le
arning styles, which can all help you gain a better understanding of how you lea
rn best. The concept of learning styles has been the subject of considerable deb
ate and criticism, but many students may find that understanding their learning
preferences can still be helpful.
Gardner s theory of multiple intelligences describes eight different types of inte
lligence that can help reveal your individual strengths. Looking at Carl Jung s le
arning style dimensions can also help you better see which learning strategies m
ight work best for you. Other models such as the VARK learning styles and Kolb's
learning styles can offer more information about how you prefer to learn new th
ings.
Testing improves recall - Tetra Images / Getty Images
Tetra Images / Getty Images
9. Use Testing to Boost Learning

While it may seem that spending more time studying is one of the best ways to ma
ximize learning, research has demonstrated that taking tests actually helps you
better remember what you've learned, even if it wasn't covered on the test. The
study revealed that students who studied and were then tested had better long-te
rm recall of the materials, even on information that was not covered by the test
s. Students who had extra time to study but were not tested had significantly lo
wer recall of the materials.
Multitasking - ImagesBazaar / Getty Images
ImagesBazaar / Getty Images
10. Stop Multitasking
For many years, it was thought that people who multitask, or perform more than o
ne activity at once, had an edge over those who did not. However, research now s
uggests that multitasking can actually make learning less effective.
In the study, participants lost significant amounts of time as they switched bet
ween multiple tasks and lost even more time as the tasks became increasingly com
plex. By switching from one activity to another, you will learn more slowly, bec
ome less efficient and make more errors.
How can you avoid the dangers of multitasking? Start by focusing your attention
on the task at hand and continue working for a predetermined amount of time.
Final Thoughts
Becoming a more effective learner can take time, and it always take practice and
determination to establish new habits. Start by focusing on just a few of these
tips to see if you can get more out of your next study session.
=
or each and every thing you do during any given day, you can guarantee that memo
ry plays a role. After all, who would you be without your unique memories of eve
nts, people, and experiences?
The fact is that memory plays such a pervasive and pivotal role in our everyday
lives that we often neglect its importance
that is, until something happens that
disrupts our daily routine. It is when we forget something important or realize
that one of our recollections is not accurate that memory's importance suddenly
comes into focus.
Just think about all the things that you rely on memory for each day:
Recalling the names of your new neighbors
Learning the information and skills required to perform a job
Remembering what you needed from the grocery store
Knowing what time to go pick your kids up from school
Drawing on memories from class discussions in order to write an essay
Recollecting words, phone numbers, dates, and other details that allow you t
o interact with others and complete the tasks you need to get done each day
Remembering your PIN number so you can access your bank account
Recalling all the Internet passwords you need to log into different websites
and accounts
Knowing that you need to return a phone call or make a doctor's appointment
As you read this article, you are drawing on memories of how to read and use lan
guage, moments in the past that remind you about what reading, and information t
hat you have already learned about human memory.
But, as we all know, memories are not perfect or immune to errors. If you've eve
r struggled to remember a password, forgotten a friend's birthday, or misplaced
an important document, then you know understand the frustrations when memory goe

s haywire.
In his book The Seven Sins of Memory (Compare Prices), psychologist and memory e
xpert Daniel L. Schacter presented a framework designed to outline the seven maj
or "sins" of memory, which he identifies as transience, absent-mindedness, block
ing, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. Schacter describes t
he first three sins as those of omission (the memory is lost), and the last four
as sins of commission (at least some of the memory is there, but it is either w
rong or unwanted).
Learn more about how these memory transgressions work and the havoc they can inf
lict on your life.
Polaroid photo memories hanging from a clothesline - Barbara Ferra Fotografia/Mo
ment/Getty Images
Barbara Ferra Fotografia/Moment/Getty Images
1. Transience: How Memories Fade Over Time
If I asked you what you had for dinner last night, you could probably remember.
You might even be able to remember what you had for dinner several nights ago. B
ut if I asked you to remember what you had for dinner on this same day five week
s ago, your chances of recalling such information are very, very slim.
Short term memories grow hazy quickly, but even long-term memories fade with tim
e. While you might be able to remember some events, particularly those you feel
are important, trivial everyday things like what you ate or where you went on a
certain day tend to fade quite fast as time passes. Even the details of major me
mories (e.g., your high school graduation, your wedding, the birth of your first
child) tend to get a bit fuzzy and unclear as time goes on.
This tendency for memories to weaken over time is a basic feature of memory, but
it also lies behind many of our memory problems. Whether you are trying to reme
mber the name of a childhood acquaintance, attempting to recall a vacation you t
ook during your senior year of high school, or struggling to piece together a st
ory you heard years ago, the gradual fading of memories can make it difficult to
recall even some of the most crucial details.
g-distracted.jpg - Anthony Lee / Getty Images
Anthony Lee / Getty Images
2. Absent-Mindedness: The Power of Distraction
Schacter suggests that absentmindedness happens when there is a problem between
attention and memory. They happen when we become distracted or overwhelmed and f
ail to notice important information and commit it to memory. Unlike transience,
these errors don't happen because the memory fades over time, but because the in
formation is never encoded into memory in the first place.
Most of us are all too familiar with absent-mindedness. You arrive at work only
to realize that you forgot your briefcase at home, for example. Why are we so of
ten distracted and forgetful? Schacter suggests that it is because we spend so m
uch of our lives on auto-pilot, performing daily tasks without really thinking a
bout them.
In most cases, this absent-mindedness results in nothing more than some mild inc
onvenience and annoyance, but sometimes the effects can be much more serious. Co
nsider this: Every year in the U.S., an average of 38 children die of hypertherm
ia after being left in hot cars. In most cases, their parents got distracted dur
ing their daily commute and then forgot to drop their children off at daycare, l
eaving them strapped in their car seats in sweltering cars for hours. In such ca
ses, absent-mindedness has utterly devastating consequences.
Other examples of absent-mindedness that can lead to serious consequences includ

e forgetting to turn the stove off before you leave the house, forgetting to loc
k your car doors, or forgetting that you left a candle burning in your house.
g-thinking.jpg - Tara Moore / Getty Images
Tara Moore / Getty Images
3. Blocking: Struggling to Remember Things We Know We Know
Does this sound familiar? Someone asks you the name of a mutual acquaintance. Yo
u know the person's name. You know that you know the person's name. Yet the soug
ht after bit of information seems to lie on the other side of a mental brick wal
l that you just can't seem to climb. Sometimes it might seem like the name is ri
ght there on the tip of your tongue. You might struggle to remember the name for
some time, only to recall it unexpectedly several hours later when you weren't
even thinking about it.
Names seem to be particularly susceptible to this blocking problem. Have you eve
r went to a movie with a friend and found yourself unable to remember the name o
f the lead actor? You recognize him, you might even be able to state with certai
nty the exact letter his first name starts with, but you just can't seem to extr
act his full name from your memory banks.
g-lineup.jpg - Image Source / Getty Images
Image Source / Getty Images
4. Misattributions: Mistaking the Source of a Memory
Misattributions involve thinking that information came from one source when it r
eally came from somewhere else. For example, you might attribute a funny story t
o your Uncle Mike when it was really a co-worker who told you about the event. I
n a lot of cases these misattributions might be relatively minor or inconsequent
ial, but in some settings (such as in a criminal court case), mistaking the sour
ce of information can have life altering costs.
For example, imagine an eyewitness who believes that they saw a specific person
commit a robbery. The witness insists that they indeed saw the suspect enter a c
onvenience store the morning that the robbery took place, but in reality they ac
tually saw the accused person at the same store the morning before the robbery.
While the memory of seeing the individual in question at the location is accurat
e, the witness misattributes the timing of the sighting.
g-false-memory.jpg - Tom Merton / Getty Images
Tom Merton / Getty Images
5. Suggestibility: How Outside Influences Trigger False Memories
Schacter suggests that suggestibility is possibly the most dangerous memory erro
r of all. Research on false memories has demonstrated that we are surprising sus
ceptible to suggestion, which can then lead us to believe in memories of things
that never happened or that are not true. This can be particularly troublesome i
n legal contexts where cases hinge on eyewitness testimony. In recent years, the
re have been numerous prominent cases where people have been convicted of crimes
based on the false memories of witnesses, and other troubling incidences where
people have been accused of crimes based on false memories elicited through the
use of suggestive psychotherapy methods.
While many people might like to believe that they are immune to this, research h
as shown that virtually everyone is susceptible to suggestion and the formation
of false memories. One study demonstrated that even people who had very good mem
ories could be led by suggestion to believe in a false memory.
Psychologist and memory expert Elizabeth Loftus has been studying and writing ab
out false memories since the mid-1970s, and her work clearly demonstrates just h
ow easily these incorrect recollections can be implanted. In one study, just ask
ing simple leading questions about a car that "smashed into" another car led wit
nesses to mistakenly believe that they had seen broken glass in a film portrayin

g a car accident.
Suggestive lines of questioning are often used in police interrogations, yet res
earchers have demonstrated that such methods can actually result in witnesses ha
ving false memories and making false claims about what they observed.
g-contemplation.jpg - Lana Isabella / Getty Images
Lana Isabella / Getty Images
6. Bias: How Our Current Beliefs Influence Our Memories
Our current knowledge and beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world can hav
e a powerful influence on how we remember the past. As we look back on past even
ts from our own lives, we sometimes edit these memories (often unconsciously) to
reflect the vision we have of ourselves today.
For example, we have a tendency to want things to be consistent, including our b
eliefs about ourselves. The problem is that as we look back on our memories, we
may find that the things we believe now are not necessarily in line with things
we may have done in the past. This need for consistency in our beliefs and actio
ns can result in mentally rewriting our own memories so that they better match u
p to our current state of mind. You might, for example, remember feeling distrus
t of a particular political candidate from a past election even though you actua
lly supported that individual at the time.
g-worried.jpg - Tom Merton / Getty Images
Tom Merton / Getty Images
7. Persistence: Remembering Things We Would Rather Forget
Of course, not all memories are good ones. You might find yourself dwelling on t
he memory of a painful breakup or an embarrassing moment at work. Sometimes, we
might even wish that we could just selectively eliminate these memories from our
minds, such as in the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind where one char
acter discovers that his girlfriend has had the memory of their relationship era
sed.
In many cases, this persistence of unwanted memories results in some minor disco
mfort or regret. At other times, invasive memories of accidents, assaults, robbe
ries, natural disasters, and other traumatic events can lead to depression, flas
hbacks, rumination, and post traumatic stress disorder, consequences that can be
disabling or even life threatening.
The bottom line:
Memory is vital and plays an essential role in our lives. Our memories can be bo
th impressive and accurate, they also have limitations and often serious failing
s. While memory errors can have both trivial and serious consequences, Schacter
suggests that these mental mistakes are simply a side-effect of other normal and
adaptive functions of memory. Memory processes have evolved to be both efficien
t and selective, allowing us to adapt and interact in a world filled with an ove
rwhelming amount of information. Our memories might fail us at times, but we are
still able to remember a enormous amount of important information, from knowled
ge that allows us to function every day to the childhood memories that connect u
s to our past.
_
Desperate to memorize a crucial fact? Look over there! (Kidding.) The trick is t
o distract yourself by studying stuff that's slightly different from whatever yo
u're trying to learn. Your brain will then work harder to permanently store the
original information. It's a tricky concept, but here's an example: In 2007, res
earchers asked UCLA students to try to memorize a set of 48 word pairs (country:
Russia, fruit: lemon, flower: lily, etc.). After studying the list, some studen
ts then had to sit through a slide show and view closely related material (flowe
r: rose). Guess what? The distracted students performed better on subsequent rec
all tests. "Distraction forces you to engage in processing," says Benjamin Storm

, a UCLA researcher who oversaw the study. Hey,

}
Once information has been encoded and stored in
order to be used. Memory retrieval is important
ly life, from remembering where you parked your

up in the sky

is that a blimp?

memory, it must be retrieved in

in virtually every aspect of dai
car to learning new skills.

There are many factors that can influence how memories are retrieved from long-t
erm memory. In order to fully understand this process, it is important to learn
more about exactly what retrieval is as well as the many factors that can impact
how memories are retrieved.
Memory Retrieval Basics
So what exactly is retrieval? Simply put, it is a process of accessing stored me
mories. When you are taking an exam, you need to be able to retrieve learned inf
ormation from your memory in order to answer the test questions.
There are four basic ways in which information can be pulled from long-term memo
ry. The type of retrieval cues that are available can have an impact on how info
rmation is retrieved. A retrieval cue is a clue or prompt that is used to trigge
r the retrieval of long-term memory.
Recall: This type of memory retrieval involves being able to access the info
rmation without being cued. Answering a question on a fill-in-the-blank test is
a good example of recall.
Recollection: This type of memory retrieval involves reconstructing memory,
often utilizing logical structures, partial memories, narratives, or clues. For
example, writing an answer on an essay exam often involves remembering bits on i
nformation and then restructuring the remaining information based on these parti
al memories.
Recognition: This type of memory retrieval involves identifying information
after experiencing it again. For example, taking a multiple-choice quiz requires
that you recognize the correct answer out of a group of available answers.
Relearning: This type of memory retrieval involves relearning information th
at has been previously learned. This often makes it easier to remember and retri
eve information in the future and can improve the strength of memories.
Problems with Retrieval
Of course, the retrieval process doesn't always work perfectly. Have you ever fe
lt like you knew the answer to a question, but couldn't quite remember the infor
mation? This phenomenon is known as a 'tip of the tongue' experience. You might
feel certain that this information is stored somewhere in your memory, but you a
re unable to access and retrieve it.
While it may be irritating or even troubling, research has shown that these expe
riences are extremely common, typically occurring at least once each week for mo
st younger individuals and two to four times per week for elderly adults. In man
y cases, people can even remember details such as the first letter that the word
starts with.
Even though memory retrieval is not flawless, there are things that you can do t
o improve your ability to remember information. Check out some of these great id
eas for how to improve your memory.
Coffee, yerba mat, Red Bull there's a caffeinated beverage for every demographic.
And no wonder: Caffeine jump-starts the body and sharpens the mind. But studies
suggest that we Yanks are doing it wrong. For optimal brain gain, regular tea b

reaks, as favored in the UK, are more effective than a 20-ounce French roast suc
ked down at Starbucks in lieu of breakfast.
Throughout the day, your noodle fills up with adenosine, a chemical thought to c
ause mental fatigue. Caffeine blocks the brain's adenosine receptors, countering
the chemical's dulling effects. To maximize alertness and minimize jitters, kee
p those receptors covered with frequent small doses
like a mug of low-caf tea or
half a cup of joe rather than a onetime blast. Test subjects reported that peri
odic small shots made them feel clearheaded and calm, both of which enhance ment
al performance. Even better, add a lump of sugar or have a carbohydrate-rich sna
ck at the same time for an extra cognitive kick. It seems that glucose and caffe
ine together do more to enhance cognition than either does alone. Biscotti, anyo
ne?
+
Learning new things actually strengthens your brain
especially when you believe
you can learn new things. It's a virtuous circle: When you think you're getting
smarter, you study harder, making more nerve-cell connections, which in turn mak
es you ... smarter. This effect shows up consistently among experimental subject
s, from seventh graders to college students to businesspeople. According to stud
ies carried out by Stanford University psychology professor Carol Dweck and othe
rs, volunteers with a so-called growth mindset about learning ("persist in the f
ace of setbacks") have more brain plasticity. In other words, their noggins are
more adaptable. They exhibit increases in cognitive performance compared with th
ose who have a so-called fixed mindset ("get defensive or give up easily"). "Man
y people believe they have a fixed level of intelligence, and that's that," Dwec
k says. "The cure is to change the mindset." Certain that we're wrong? Enjoy stu
pidity!
_
Want to join Mensa? Or work for the military, FedEx, or the NFL? Plan on taking
an intelligence test. They're supposed to be objective and consistent, but don't
believe it. By prepping for the verbal, numerical, and spatial problems on a ty
pical psychometric test, you can boost your score. Philip carter, author of IQ a
nd Psychometric Test Workbook, walked us through some sample questions.
_
ocrates likened it to a wax tablet. Descartes thought it was all about hydraulic
s. Today, it's seen as a supercomputer. Nice try. The brain is one of the most c
omplex structures on the planet, making it nearly impossible to comprehend, much
less describe with a metaphor.
Rollover the brain scan below to know your brain better...
_
f you're fleeing a cave bear, it's good to be stressed you'll run faster. If you
're stepping onto the set with Alex Trebek, that same anxiety will put your brai
n in jeopardy. While a little nervousness can boost cognitive performance, perio
ds of intense stress essentially turn us into Neanderthals: The amygdala, known
as the fear center, one of the most primitive brain regions, overrides the prefr
ontal cortex, which handles working memory and executive function. "When those d
eep brain areas are active, they shanghai your cortical neurons," says psychiatr
ist Edward Hallowell, author of CrazyBusy. "Your IQ plummets. Your creativity, y
our sense of humor all of that disappears. You're stupid." How to quiet your inn
er caveman? By slowing and synchronizing your pulse and respiration, thus sendin
g a message to your brain that everything is cool. Yoga or power napping could d
o the trick. Or try the StressEraser, a biofeedback device that suggests a targe
t breathing rate to help you calm down. That should help you nail that Daily Dou
ble.
_
One way to learn Better: Mix yourself up. That's advice from Robert Bjork, chair
of UCLA's psychology department and a leading expert in memory and learning. Vo
lunteers in his experiments exhibited superior recall when they learned informat
ion in randomly ordered chunks. For example, he asked subjects in one group to m

emorize five-letter sequences on a computer keyboard. First they learned one seq
uence, then moved on to the second, and then the third. Compare that to a second
group of volunteers, who practiced the five-letter combos in a random order. Wh
en tested, the random group had much better recall
something to remember when yo
u sit down to memorize stolen-base success rates before your next fantasy baseba
ll draft.
)
ant to impress your posse by locating both Guinea and Equatorial Guinea? Memoriz
ing the map of Africa is easier than you think, says Daniel Montello, who teache
s geography and psychology at UC Santa Barbara. Here's how.
1. Break It Up
Divide the continent's 47 nations into five regions: north, south, east, west, c
entral. Focus on one region at a time.
2. Give Them an Identity
Create silly associations for the shapes of the countries. Think Niger looks lik
e a drumstick? Imagine Niger the Tiger eating the leg of an antelope. The more u
nique the association, the easier it is to remember.
3. Put Them Together
Connect the associations in a memorable sequence--like Niger the Tiger chasing a
guy named Chad (who looks like a Venetian nobleman) right into a mouse named CA
R (Central African Republic). Make the images detailed and full of action to cem
ent the associations in your mind.
4. Conquer the World
You've mastered Africa. Now you're ready for a real geographic challenge: Centra
l Asia from Azerbaijan to Uzbekistan.
_
Can exercise make you think better? In some cases, yes. Here's what works best.
Aerobic Training
Don't cut that PE class! In 2006, Arthur Kramer of the University of Illinois us
ed MRIs to prove that aerobic exercise builds gray and white matter in the brain
s of older adults. Later studies found that more aerobically fit grade-schoolers
also perform better on cognitive tests.
Impact on intelligence: Strong
Lifting Weights
When weight lifters talk about getting huge, they aren't referring to their hipp
ocampus. Researchers have found only the most tenuous link between heavy resista
nce training and improved cognitive function. Got that, meathead?
Impact on intelligence: Negligible
Yoga
When facing a stressful situation or even a scary email, people often hold their
breath. Yoga can break that habit. Under pressure, "most people breathe incorre
ctly," says Frank Lawlis, a fellow of the American Psychological Association and
author of The IQ Answer. The result: more stress and less oxygen to your brain.
"So the first thing that goes is your memory."
Impact on intelligence: Possibly strong
Studying on the StairMaster
A spinning class may rev up your mental muscle, but that doesn't mean you should
study while huffing and puffing on the StairMaster. Research shows you'll just
confuse yourself. "It's like doing something while you're driving," says Charles
Hillman, a kinesiology professor at the University of Illinois. In other words,
you won't do either task well.
Impact on intelligence: Negligible
_
It should take you two and a half seconds to read this sentence. Any faster and
you won't absorb its meaning. The motor response of the retina, and the time it

takes the image of a word to travel from the macula to the thalamus to the visua
l cortex for processing, limits the eye to about 500 words a minute. (That's pea
k efficiency; the average college student can expect a rate about half that.) "T
here is no such thing as speed reading," says Keith Rayner a cognitive psycholog
ist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "Not if your definition of readi
ng is comprehending text." Studies show that fast readers fare worse than slower
ones when questioned about the text. So, to get smarter, slow down. It's even O
K to move your lips.
_