Memory Skills

I do this too, but when I try to explain this to other people they chalk it up to me being ‘nerdy’ or exceptionally ’smart’, and go back to their cramming.

Basically what works the best for me is to use whatever comes to mind whenever I first encounter a piece of information and link it to the actual definition, meaning, or application of that information.

Whenever I see, hear, or encounter anything at all, my mind cannot help but have some kind of reaction to it, a knee-jerk reflex thought that comes up. This reflex thought is usually totally unrelated to the idea being learned. I then do a little linking of that reflex thought to whatever is being learned. What then happens is that the next time I encounter that same information, if I haven’t already learned the true meaning or application of it, then at the very least the same knee-jerk reflex thought will pop up. From there it’s a simple matter of recalling that little link I manufactured to the actual information.

Once the information has been truly learned, I find that the knee-jerk reflex thought fades away and is replaced by the actual information.

Of course when in class sometimes the new information comes so quickly that there is no time to sit and think of a way to link the reflex thought to the information, or there’s no time to even have a reflex thought, so I have to take the time to do the linking myself at home when I’m studying the info at my own pace.

A little example, the Chinese term for ‘Hello’ is ‘Ni Hao’. Now my reflex thought at the moment for the sound ‘Hao’ used as a greeting is an American Indian like you see in the movies waving his hand in the air and going ‘How’. So now I imagine a really flexible Chinese kung fu guy meeting someone on the street, lifting his knee in the air to wave it and going ‘Knee How!’ as a greeting.

So what’s in that little image there. First I linked the sound by finding two other words that sounded the same but had a different meaning for me. I also added the detail of a Chinese guy so that I know it’s the Chinese language, and the kung fu added in for good measure because in my mind a kung fu guy is really flexible and can lift his knees really high, and kung fu originated in China so there’s that link to the country again. Now the next time I hear or see ‘Ni Hao’ in Chinese I have so much stuff in my brain to link to, aurally and visually, that it’s almost impossible for me to not remember what it means or how to use it. If I were a tactile learner I would even go so far as to imagine meeting someone on the street, lifting my own knee in a circle and saying ‘Knee How!’. And it’s a funny, interesting image for me, so I have fun thinking it up and have no trouble recalling it.

So where in there am I being ‘nerdy’ in any way? I’m actually linking the information to stuff I watch in my free time, to movies I watch for fun. I didn’t have to study anything before to have something to link the Chinese word to.

If you’ve lived for any length of time and can use your memory, then there are millions of moments, images, sounds, smells, and other tidbits in your mind that you can draw from and use when learning new information.

For me all it really requires to be able to create these kind of connections is to be playful enough to let yourself be silly for a while. I think everybody has the ability to imagine, play, and be silly. Weren’t we all kids before? Anybody can do this, you just have to disregard what you’ve been taught in school to be the proper way to ’study’ and do something that really works.

It’s just that ’studying’ in our minds has become so far detached from the idea of ‘fun’ and ‘play’ that we refuse to allow the two to become linked together, and studying becomes a boring and tedious chore for us. When it becomes boring and tedious, then learning becomes difficult.

Your brain doesn’t like boring and tedious, it likes to be stimulated, it likes fun and interesting! So why work against your brain when it’s so much easier to work with it?

It’s like taking your car up a mountain. You could turn the car off and push the car up the mountain. You’d probably still get to the peak if you persevered, but the car really wasn’t meant to be used that way. You’d have it much easier if you just got in the car, put on some music, turned on the ignition and cruised your way up.