HOW TO STUDY FOR AN EXAM

Walk Before An Exam

It’s been proven that exercise can boost your memory and brain power. Research conducted
by Dr. Chuck Hillman of the University of Illinois provides evidence that about 20 minutes
exercise before an exam can improve performance.

Speak Out Loud Instead of Simply Reading

Although this may make you look a little crazy, give it a go! You will be surprised how much
more you can remember when you’ve said it out loud. Warning: Don’t try this in a crowded
library!
Reward Yourself With A Treat

There are many ways to integrate a reward system into your habits so you learn how to study
for exams more efficiently. Here’s a simple way to motivate yourself to study with Gummy
Bears:

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 Theorem, why not teach a
class of stuffed animals!
Create Mental Associations

The ability to make connections is not only an easier way to remember information, but it’s
the fuel of creativity and intelligence. Steve Jobs famously said “Creativity is just
connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little
guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something”.

Mind Maps are an easy way to connect ideas by creating a visual overview of different
connections. Read more about the benefits of using Mind Maps to learn here.

Draw Diagrams

Drawing diagrams will help you to visualise information which would be hard to describe.
This creates a visual memory in your mind which can be recalled in an exam. You may
even be asked to draw or label diagrams such as the human heart in your exam so get
practicing!
Times New Roman is the Fastest Font to Read

Simply put – there’s a reason why Times New Roman is the default font on most
applications!

Use Apps to Block Distracting Sites

The SelfControl app helps you to avoid distractions by blocking websites for a certain
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!”.

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 even get extra credit for
mentioning that you took the initiative and watched a film about the topic!

Check out the infographic in this blog post which helps you decide which documentary to
watch.
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 your fingertips:

Create Flashcards for Quick Memory Buzz

Quickly test your knowledge of key concepts, definitions, quotes and formulas with
flashcards. Sign up to GoConqr now to create your first Flashcard deck like the one below
now!
Take Regular Study Breaks

When your brain is working, you need to take regular study breaks to help your brain 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 concentration will become impaired
after this period, anything new after 1 hour 30 minutes does not get assimilated.

Listen to the Correct Type of Music

In our blog post “Music for Studying: 10 Tips to Pick the Best Study Music” we looked
into the area of how the correct types of music can lead to more productive studying by
elevating your mood. Have you made your Mozart Spotify playlist yet?
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 for exams:

Practice, Practice, Practice…

Practicing sample answers to past exam questions can help train your brain to retrieve
information. The same applies to Reading Tests. Create realistic, exam-like condition and
test your understanding by using our new Quiz tool. Try our general Knowledge Quiz below:

Don’t Stay Up All Night Before an Exam

Make sure to get adequate rest the nights leading up to your exams. When you sleep, your
brain assimilates the information you have learned when studying so getting a good night’s
sleep will help you remember those pesky maths formulas you need for your exam!

Don’t make this your sleep schedule:

Discover News Ways to Learn

Trying new study methods can help you find what really works for you. Use technology to
your advantage by watching educational TED Talks or downloading useful dictionary apps
for example. Read more about the benefits of learning how to study for exams with
technology .

Use Scents or Gum to Jog Your Memory

This may seem a bit random but spraying an unfamiliar scent while you’re studying is one of
the study methods that 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 in a Group

Studying in a group can help you collect new insights to enhance your learning experience.
The GoConqr groups tool is an innovative spin on the traditional study group formula. Our
Groups tool helps you share resources, discuss ideas and interact with members of your team
or group project. Sign up here to get started!

Meditate

Meditation is one of the study methods that can help students stay focused when studying.
Not only will meditation help you concentrate when studying but it will help reduce pre-
exam stress as it improves both mental and physical health.

Check out this Meditation Education infographic on Edutopia which details the educational
benefits of meditating:
Exam Preparation: Ten Study Tips

Preparing for exams? Give yourself the best chance with these top ten study tips, and try
not to let the stress get to you! Remember: you've got this.

Give yourself enough time to study

Don't leave it until the last minute. While some students do seem to thrive on last-minute
cramming, it's widely accepted that (for most of us) this is not the best way to approach an
exam. To help sort out your time management, set up a timetable for your study. Write down
how many exams you have and the days on which you have to sit them. Then organize your
study accordingly. You may want to give some exams more study time than others, so find a
balance that you feel comfortable with.

Organize your study space

Make sure you have enough space to spread your textbooks and notes out. Have you got
enough light? Is your chair comfortable? Are your computer games out of sight?

Try and get rid of all distractions, and make sure you feel as comfortable and able to focus as
possible. For some people, this may mean almost complete silence, for others, background
music helps. Some of us need everything completely tidy and organized in order to
concentrate, while others thrive in a more cluttered environment. Think about what works for
you, and take the time to get it right.

Use flow charts and diagrams

Visual aids can be really helpful when revising. At the start of a topic, challenge yourself to
write down everything you already know about a topic - and then highlight where the gaps
lie. Closer to the exam, condense your revision notes into one-page diagrams. Getting your
ideas down in this brief format can then help you to quickly recall everything you need to
know during the exam.
Practice on old exams

One of the most effective ways to prepare for exams is to practice taking past versions. This
helps you get used to the format of the questions, and - if you time yourself - can also be
good practice for making sure you spend the right amount of time on each section.

Explain your answers to others

Parents and little brothers and sisters don't have to be annoying around exam time. Use them
to your advantage. Explain an answer to a question to them. That will help you to get it clear
in your head, and also to highlight any areas where you need more work.

Organize study groups with friends

Get together with friends for a study session. You may have questions that they have the
answers to and vice versa. As long as you make sure you stay focused on the topic for an
agreed amount of time, this can be one of the most effective ways to challenge yourself.

Take regular breaks

While you may think it's best to study for as many hours as possible, this can actually be
counterproductive. If you were training for a marathon, you wouldn't try and run 24 hours a
day. Likewise, studies have shown that for long-term retention of knowledge, taking regular
breaks really helps.

Everyone's different, so develop a study routine that works for you. If you study better in the
morning, start early before taking a break at lunchtime. Or, if you're more productive at
nighttime, take a larger break earlier on so you're ready to settle down come evening.

Try not to feel guilty about being out enjoying the sunshine instead of hunched over your
textbooks. Remember Vitamin D is important for a healthy brain.

Snack on brain food

You may feel like you deserve a treat, or that you don't have time to cook, but what you eat
can really have an impact on energy levels and focus, so keep away from junk food. Keep
your body and brain well-fuelled by choosing nutritious foods that have been proven to aid
concentration and memory, such as fish, nuts, seeds, yogurt and blueberries. The same
applies on exam day - eat a good meal before the test, based on foods that will provide a slow
release of energy throughout. Sugar may seem appealing, but your energy levels will crash an
hour later.

Plan your exam day

Make sure you get everything ready well in advance of the exam - don't leave it to the day
before to suddenly realize you don't know the way, or what you're supposed to bring. Check
all the rules and requirements, and plan your route and journey time. If possible, do a test run
of the trip. If not, write down clear directions.
Work out how long it will take to get there - then add on some extra time. You really don't
want to arrive having had to run halfway or feeling frazzled from losing your way. You could
also make plans to travel to the exam with friends or classmates, as long as you know they're
likely to be punctual.

Drink plenty of water

As a final tip, remember that being well hydrated is essential for your brain to work at its
best. Make sure you keep drinking plenty of water throughout your revision, and also on the
exam day.

Good luck!

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This article was originally published in February 2008 and was updated in May 2017.
How to Study for Exams

You have a test on the horizon. It’s a big one, and you know you need to hit the books. Not
sure where or how to begin? Don’t panic! Learn how to study for a test, step-by-step.

1. Ask the right questions

You don’t want to walk in on test day unprepared for what you're about to face. Try to get the
answers to these crucial questions before you start studying.

Questions to ask before a test

 What material will the test cover?

 Will there be an exam review session during class?

 Will there be after-school opportunities for more review?

 What is the format of the exam? Multiple-choice? Short answer? Will there be essays to
write?
 How many points is the exam worth?
 Do you have specific study tips to help me prepare? (After all, your teacher knows your work
the best!).
2. Sort out your schedule

You can actually spend less time studying for your exam if you start with a great game plan.
Make a list of what topics you need to cover and when you’re going to cover them. Start your
study schedule as early as possible (usually a few weeks before your test), and figure out how
much time you’ll need to study each day to stay on track.

3. Grab your gear

Gather up all your class notes, quizzes, handouts and worksheets. Your previous homework
will help you see what your teacher thinks is important. (Plus, you can learn from your past
quiz mistakes).

Study for exams in this order: 1.) definitely 2.) probably 3.) might be on the test.

4. Study smarter

Instead of memorizing all your notes, prioritize what you’ll study. Start with what will
definitely be on the the test, then what will probably be on the test, and finally what might be
on the test. That way, if you run out of time, you know you at least have the essentials
covered. By starting with the toughest material first, you have time to ask your teacher
questions or get help from our tutors.

5. Mix it up

Now that you know WHAT you need to study, figure out the best way to review and
internalize what you predict will be on the exam. Make flashcards for history class, outline
your biology notes, record yourself practicing your French accent—whatever you need to do
to get ready. Check out our favorite “outside of the box” study methods.

Read More: 10 Steps to Ace Your Next Test

6. What keeps you motivated?

Study groups can help you study more efficiently for exams. Make a plan with friends to
review the class material together, share and compare notes, or work through tricky concepts.
Or, reward yourself for each study session with something small (even if it’s just a TV break)
to help you stay focused.

7. Sleep still matters

An all-nighter might sound like a good idea, but a restful night’s sleep is actually the key to
your success. Start a healthy sleep routine in the weeks leading up to your exam, so you’ll be
fresh and ready for test day. (But if you do happen to need some midnight study help, our on-
demand tutors are there for you.)
8. Bring what you’re supposed to bring

Find out what you’re allowed to bring to the exam, and make sure you don’t leave anything
essential at home. Many teachers will let you bring a calculator to math or science exams.
Some classes may even hold open textbook or open notes exams. Stash pens, papers, and
extra paper in your bag, so you’re ready for anything.

Stuck on how to study for exams?

Try an online tutoring session with one of our experts, and get help in 40+ subjects.

The Staff of The Princeton Review

For more than 35 years, students and families have trusted The Princeton Review to help them get
into their dream schools. We help students succeed in high school and beyond by giving them
resources for better grades, better test scores, and stronger college applications. Follow us on
Twitter: @ThePrincetonRev.
Scientifically, The Best Ways To Prepare For Final Exams
By Shaniese Alston

Finals week can be a stressful time for all students–I know it is for me. So, knowing how to
properly prepare for finals is the key to avoiding stress and acing every single one of your
exams. Of course, all students would love to relax by receiving massages or by the healing
power of dogs before finals (I sure would!).

But, we all know this isn’t really possible. There needs to be a uniform way to assess our
performance as students and it has to happen at some point (hence, “finals”). So how else can
we lower stress and know that we’re on the right track to excel in each course? Well, here are
some proven methods that will have you focused and better prepared for final exams.

1. Say NO to cramming: Study in intervals! Studying in 20-50 minute increments and giving
yourself 5-10 minutes in between is more beneficial than cramming. Distributing learning
over time typically benefits long-term retention more than a short period.

2. Say YES to cardio: Science says that just 20 minutes of cardio can improve your memory.
Whether you’re dancing, jogging or busting a sweat by walking, exercise will increase your
energy level and reduce the effects of stress. Very important!

3. Eat superfoods/antioxidants: Everybody knows you should eat breakfast the day of a big
test. Research suggests that high-carb, high-fiber, slow-digesting foods like oatmeal are best
(oatmeal is more fulfilling than cereal). But what you eat a week in advance matters, too.
When 16 college students were tested on attention and thinking speed, then fed a five-day
high-fat, low-carb diet heavy on meat, eggs, cheese and cream and tested again, their
performance declined. The students who ate a balanced diet that included fruit and
vegetables, however, held steady, says Cameron Holloway, a senior clinical researcher at the
University of Oxford. When you study, your brain consumes glucose, so take a five-minute
break every hour to let your body produce more fuel for your studying. Eating a healthy
snack is very beneficial and can make a significant difference (almonds, fruit, and yogurt are
good choices).

4. Alternate study spots: Shake up your finals routine! Spending all night in the library can be
draining. According to the New York Times, simply alternating the room where a person
studies improves retention. In an experiment, psychologists found that college students who
studied a list of 40 vocabulary words in two different rooms — one windowless and cluttered,
the other modern, with a view on a courtyard — did far better on a test than students who
studied the words twice, in the same room. Why? Supposedly, the brain makes subtle
associations between what it is studying and the background sensations it has at the time. Try
alternating your study spots between the library, a study room, and a quiet coffee house.

5. Time management: Cramming causes anxiety, which lowers your ability to retain
information. By creating a balanced study plan and schedule, you will be able to study each
subject in its entirety and ultimately boost your test performance.

6. Avoid the all-nighter: Almost every college student pulls an all-nighter, but it is a bad idea.
Based on a 2008 study by Pamela Thacher, Associate Professor of Psychology at St.
Lawrence University, all-nighters impair reasoning and memory for as long as four days. As
a result, you will receive lower grades. But that’s not all; you would then be forced to wake
up earlier than expected–and that’s bad too. According to Dan Taylor, director of a sleep-and-
health-research lab at the University of North Texas, this will interfere with rapid-eye
movement (REM), which aids memory. So, get a good night’s sleep and expect to perform
better on tests. (Quick tip: Review the toughest material right before going to bed the night
before the test. It makes it easier to recall the material later, adds Taylor!)

7. MINIMIZE distractions: Research shows that while many teens prefer to study while
listening to music, texting friends, or watching television, they are less likely to retain
information that way. If you must listen to music, stick to instrumental music and consider
downloading these study tools to keep you focused!

8. MAXIMIZE practice-testing: You may have thought highlighting, re-reading and

summation would be effective ways to study. Think again! A 2013 study, Improving
Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, found that these techniques do not
consistently boost students’ performance. Practice testing through the use of flashcards, or
taking practice exams was observed to be a highly effective studying technique.
How to Study for Any Test or Exam (Even If You Feel Unmotivated)

Wondering how to study for that upcoming exam? This page is full of test-taking
strategies, study tips, and other useful resources that will help you along the way.

How to Study for a Test or Exam

 How to Create a Study Schedule for Your Final Exams – Your exam preparation efforts will
be most effective if they’re well-coordinated from the start. This video guides you through
the process of creating and maintaining a well-oiled study schedule.
 How to Prepare for Exams Like A Pro: The Exam Prep Cycle – This guest post by my friend
Tom Miller digs into the process of creating and taking practice quizzes, one of the absolute
BEST techniques for mastering content.
 How To Ace Your Final Exams – My first video on preparing for finals. Covers the Forgetting
Curve, where to find practice exams, how to stay motivated, and more.
  8 Better Ways to Make and Study Flash Cards – Flash cards are an excellent tool for
studying factual information, and this video will help you use them to their fullest possible
extent.
 How to Get Better at Math (While Spending Less Time Studying) – Even if you think you
aren’t a “math person,” this video and post will prove you wrong. Learn how to apply spaced
repetition techniques and deep focus to master math concepts.
 How to Remember More of What You Learn by Leveraging the Spacing Effect – Your brain
encodes information more efficiently when you add increasingly large intervals of time
between your study sessions. This video shows how you can do that, both with paper flash
cards and digital tools.
 How to Finish a Huge Assignment or Project Overnight – While it’s best to avoid
procrastination, this video will show you how to finish a large project at the last minute.
 Use The Corson Technique When Asking Professors For Help – At some point during your
test preparation phase, you’ll probably need to ask a professor for help. The Corson
technique is a way to ask more effective questions and make a good impression.

How to Take a Test (and Improve Your Scores)

 Ace Your Next Exam: 10 Revision and Test-Taking Tips – This collection of tips fits into both
of the first two categories on this page, but I wanted to feature it first since contains a ton of
ideas and content you’ll probably find helpful.
 How to Stop Making Dumb Mistakes on Exams – A lack of preparation will kill your exam
grades faster than anything else, but careless mistakes can easily chip away at them as well.
This video will help prime your brain to catch these kinds of mistakes before they happen.
 5 Strategies That Make Test Anxiety Irrelevant – Test anxiety can make taking an exam a
dreadful experience, but it can also literally block your brain from making connections and
remembering information. However, it’s something you can fight. This video gives you
several strategies for doing just that.
 Confidence Tracking: A Brain Hack for Improving Your Exam Grades – When you’re unsure
about an answer you’ve written on a test, research has shown that you should change it.
More often than not, people who do this end up being correct. However, a recent study has
unearthed an elegant technique that makes the catch-all “when in doubt, change it” advice
obsolete, and it’s called confidence tracking.
 How to Improve Your Grades on Multiple Choice Tests – If you’re going up against a test
with a multiple-choice component, check out this article for some strategies for recalling
answers, avoiding mistakes, and exploiting statistics to improve your chance of guessing the
correct answer when you come across a question and totally draw a blank.
 5 Rules for Answering Essay Questions on Exams – Like multiple choice questions, essay
questions can be tackled in a strategic way that sets you up for success.
 How to Study for (and Take!) Open Book Exams – Open book exams sound easy…until you
sit down to take one and realize you’re completely unprepared. This guide will help you
make sure your next open book exam goes smoothly.
 The EXACT Process for Using CLEP Tests to Skip College Courses – CLEP tests can let you skip
college courses, saving you a lot of money. Here’s how to use them to get your degree
faster.

How to Motivate Yourself to Study

 Stop Saying, “I Don’t Feel Like It.” – Professionals do their work on a schedule, regardless of
whether they “feel like it” or not. This video reminds you that you have a CHOICE of whether
or not you succumb to these types of feelings.
  How to Motivate Yourself to Study – Here’s a quick, 4-step process to getting the study
motivation you need to get to work. You’ll also find some strategies for building long-term
motivation.
 5 Methods for Focusing and Concentrating Effectively – Strong test preparation happens
when you’re deeply focused. These strategies will help you get yourself into the flow state,
avoid distraction, and maintain concentration.
 Want to Be Healthier and More Productive? Take Regular Breaks – Humans aren’t like
computers; we operate best on a cycle of work and rest. And while the most important part
of rest is probably sleep, it’s also vital that you take breaks throughout your workday as well.
This article will help you schedule them strategically, use them well, and avoid pitfalls that
can turn a break into an extended procrastination binge.
 So You Failed a Test… or a Whole Semester. What Now? – It happens to all of us at one
point or another; failure is simply a part of life. Should you fail something this semester, this
video will help you cope with the defeat and come back stronger than ever.

Get Through Finals with These Study Podcast Episodes

 A Giant Boatload of Final Exam Tips – This episode is basically an audio version of this very
page; in it, Martin and I sit down and go through a ton of different strategies for performing
well on final exams.
 Deep Work: How to Focus and Resist Distractions – This is the most popular College Info
Geek Podcast episode of all time, and for good reason. By cultivating a habit of doing deep
work, you’ll learn faster and achieve more in less time. In this episode, Deep Work author Cal
Newport and I talk in depth about how to build this habit.
 How to Make a Comeback and Save Your Grades – If you’ve fallen behind or let your grades
slip, now’s the time to start taking action toward making a comeback. This episode is loaded
with practical advice for making it happen.
 How to Get Better Test Scores Through Confidence Tracking – An interview with Justin
Couchman, the psychology professor who conducted the research on the confidence
tracking technique. If you watched the video on confidence tracking and want more detail
on why it works, give this a listen.
Top 10 exam tips
On this page

 1. Find out about the exam

 2. Ask for help
 3. Sort out your subject material
 4. Review past exam papers
 5. Know where to go
 6. Don't cram
 7. Keep your cool
 8. Use your reading time
 9. Break the questions down
 10. Review your answers (if you can)
 Come up with your own strategies

Exams are inevitable for students, but they don't have to be painful. These tips can help you
get ready for and get through your exams. They can also help you prepare for tests and class
presentations, and tackle in-class assignments.

1. Find out about the exam

Know your enemy – find out as much as you can about the exam. Questions to ask include:

 How much is the exam worth to your overall mark in the subject?
 What type of exam is it (for example, multiple choice, essay, open book, take-home)?
 Will there be a choice of questions or tasks?
 How much will each question or task be worth?

2. Ask for help

Don’t feel bad if you need to ask for help. People you can talk to about exams include:

 teachers
 lecturers
 family members
 friends and fellow students.

If you’re feeling really stressed you might also find it helpful to speak to a
counsellor. Our Student counselling page has tips for finding a counsellor.

3. Sort out your subject material

Before starting to review a subject it helps to:

 check you have all of the handouts

 put your notes in order
 read over any course outline or subject guide
 write your own summaries of each textbook chapter or section of the subject guide.
Getting all your gear together makes it easier to find what you need while you’re studying.

4. Review past exam papers

Get your hands on any old exam papers from the subject and familiarise yourself with the
structure and format. Places you can get past exam papers from include:

 your teacher or lecturer

 your school or university library
 the Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority.

When reviewing, practise answering the questions within the specified time limits.

5. Know where to go

Make sure you know where and when the exam is happening. You don't want to miss your
exam! Here's how to make sure that doesn't happen to you.

 Check your exam timetable for time and place details.

 Do a practise run to find out how long it takes to get there.
 Make a list of everything you need to take with you (for example, calculator, pencil, ruler).
 Do some study at the same time as your exams (for example, if you have an early morning
exam, practise getting up and studying earlier in the day).

6. Don't cram

Staying up all night to cram will only stress you out. It's better to just review what you've
already studied and get an early night. That way you'll be as refreshed as you can be on the
day of your exam.

If you want to do some preparation the night before, keep it simple:

 Get all your materials together.

 Read over your notes.
 Test yourself on key concepts.
 Set your alarm.

7. Keep your cool

Fronting up to an exam can be nerve-wracking, but here are some tips for staying calm:

 Don’t talk too much to other students before the exam.

 Try to get there with time to spare so you don't arrive all rushed.
 Make sure you have a decent breakfast.
 Listen to some inspiring music on the way to the exam.
 Wear your lucky shirt or bring a lucky charm (if you have one).
8. Use your reading time

The way you use your reading time can really help you make the most of your exam time.
Here are some ways to use your reading time well:

 Read all of the instructions very carefully.

 Scan the whole exam paper.
 Check how many pages there are.
 Check how much each question is worth (it helps to spend more time on heavier weighted
questions).
 Plan which questions to answer first (consider starting with questions you're confident
about).
 Plan how much time you'll spend on each answer or section.
 Start thinking about your answers.

9. Break the questions down

A great tip for any exam is to break the questions down to make sure you really understand
what you’re being asked.

Look for the key parts of the question. These can give you clues on how to answer it.

For example, for the question, "Explain the difference between study and revision", you
could split this question into four parts:

1. Explain – Give reasons to show how or why something is the way it is.
2. The difference – What are the distinguishing factors between study and revision?
3. Study – What is study?
4. Revision – What is revision?

10. Review your answers (if you can)

If you finish the exam before the time is up it's a good idea to go back over everything, even
answers you're confident you got right. Try to:

 review as many answers as you can

 start with the questions you're least confident about
 make sure you've answered every question
 make sure you've answered every part of every question (some questions might have
multiple parts).

Come up with your own strategies

Remember – these tips are only some of the things that you can do to get the most out of your
exams. There might be other things that work even better for you.

Ask around – find out what your friends do for their exams – maybe some of their tricks will
work for you as well! Maybe your teachers have some good recommendations too.
For more tips and advice about exams and studying, check out our Top ten study tips page.

Top 10 study tips

On this page

 1. Pick a place and time

 2. Study every day
 3. Plan your time
 4. Discover your learning style
 5. Review and revise
 6. Take breaks
 7. Ask for help
 8. Stay motivated
 9. App it up
 10. Look after yourself
 Now come up with your own strategies
 Links

Study isn't just for the night before an assignment's due or the night before an exam.

It's never too early – or too late – to develop good study habits. The sooner you get into a
good study groove, the easier everything will be and the more your chances of getting good
marks will improve.

Here are our top tips for getting the most out of study.

1. Pick a place and time

Everyone has their own idea about the best place and time to study. Whether it's your
bedroom at night or the library after school, find a study space and a regular study time that
works for you and stick with it.

 Set up your study space – Your study space should be quiet, comfortable and distraction-
free. It should make you feel happy and inspired. Decorate it with your favourite pictures or
objects. If you want to listen to music or burn incense, pick a space that lets you do that.
 Find your best time – Some people work better in the morning. Others work better at night.
Work out which time suits you and plan to study then. Don't study much later than your
usual bedtime – pushing yourself late at night can make you too tired to study properly.

2. Study every day

If you study a little bit every day you'll be continually reviewing things in your mind. This
helps you understand things. It also helps you avoid the stress of last-minute cramming.

Early in the year an hour or two a night might be enough to stay on top of things. Later in the
year you might need to study more each day.
If you're finding it hard to find time to study, cut back on some (but not all!) of your other
activities. Prioritising study might mean spending less time online, or it might mean cutting
back on shifts at work, or giving weekend sport a miss for a while.

3. Plan your time

It helps to have some plans in motion so you can make the most of your study time.

 Set alarms – Set alarms to remind you about your study plans. A regular reminder keeps you
honest and your plans on track.
 Use a wall planner – Stick a calendar or wall planner up so you can see it whenever you're
studying. Mark it up with important dates, like exams and assignment due dates. Use it to
block out your regular study timetable too.
 Make to-do lists – Lists break tasks down into manageable chunks. At the start of the week,
make a list of the things that you need to have done by the end of the week. Make a to-do
list at the start of each study session too, so that you're clear about what you need to be
doing with your time.
 Set time limits – Before you start your study session, have a look at your to-do list and give
yourself a set time to spend on each task. If you don't get something done in the set time,
consider whether it's the best use of your time to keep going with it, or to start working on
something else.

4. Discover your learning style

Most of us have a preferred way of learning. Get to know the learning style you're most
comfortable with and study in the ways you learn best.

Note that these styles are just a way to think about diffent studying techniques – they're not
hard and fast rules that say you should only study in one way. Try each of these out and see
which ways you prefer.

 Auditory learners prefer to learn by listening. Try reading your notes aloud and discussing
them with other people. You might like to record key points and play them back.
 Visual learners prefer to learn by seeing. Try using colours in your notes and draw diagrams
to help represent key points. You could try to remember some ideas as images.
 Tactile/kinesthetic learners prefer to learn by doing. Try using techniques like role-playing
or building models to revise key points.

5. Review and revise

At least once a week you should go back over the things you've studied in class. Thinking
things over can help you to understand the concepts and help you remember when you need
them the most.

 Quiz – Get a friend or family member to quiz you on key concepts. Offer to help your friends
with their work too. Quizzes are great ways to get confident about what you know and find
out what you still need to learn.
 Make your own study materials – Think up some practice exam questions or create your
own flash cards to help you study. This way you learn it all twice: once when you make the
study materials and once when you use them to revise.
6. Take breaks

It's important to take breaks while you're studying, especially if you're feeling tired or
frustrated. Working too long on a task can actually decrease your performance.

When you take a break, make sure you get away from your desk or study space. A bit of
physical – even just a walk around the block – can sometimes help you to look at a problem
in a different way and could even help you to solve it.

7. Ask for help

If you're stuck on something, or something just doesn't seem to make sense, you can always
ask for help. Talk to your teachers or lecturers about the things you don't understand. Talk to
your friends and fellow students too.

8. Stay motivated

When you're studying it helps to keep in mind your reasons for doing all this hard work, like
a course or career you're working towards. It can help to have something in your study space
to remind you of your goals.

You could also decorate your study space with inspirational quotes or photos of people you
admire and family members you want to make proud of you.

9. App it up

There are heaps of apps out there for helping students with all aspects of study. Have a chat
with your friends and teachers or lecturers to see which apps they recommend.

You should also check out the iTunes Collections page on iPads for Learning, which provides
links to Australian Curriculum courses on iTunes U as well as educational apps aimed at high
school, middle school and primary school students.

10. Look after yourself

You’ll study better if you take care of yourself. Make sure you eat well and get enough sleep
and physical exercise. Don't reward yourself with too many sugary or fatty snacks or push
yourself to study late into the night. It’s also a good idea to make sure you drink lots of water
when you’re studying.

Now come up with your own strategies

These tips are only some of the things you can do to get the most out of your studying. You
might already have other things that work better for you. Find out what your friends do when
they're studying. Maybe your teachers have some good recommendations too.

Whatever it is, whatever strategy you come up with, when you find something that works for
you, put it into practise and go for it!
Links

If you’ve got an exam coming up you might also like to have a look at our Top Ten Exam
Tips page. You should also check out the links below.

Ergo - Study Skills

The State Library of Victoria's Ergo website has a helpful range of studying tips and advice.

iPads for Learning - iTunes Collections

Links to collections of apps and iTunes U courses.
How to Study For Exams

Exam preparation has never been easier

Okay, the moment of truth is here. It’s exam time.

You might be thinking that this is where you need to put in a lot of work, but you’re
wrong. You won’t have to cram.

If you’ve followed the advice on this site, you’re ready and exam time should be easy.

Everything you have done so far has prepared you for this moment. You’ve taken good notes.
You’ve read and highlighted your textbooks. You’ve written test questions for you to
practice.

So how are you going to convert that into a perfect grade? Just do this:

1. Spaced repetition.
2. Self testing.
 3. Only study what you don’t know.

1. Spaced Repetition

Not to oversimplify, but exams are about the 3 R’s—Read, Retain, Regurgitate. You have to
put stuff in your head and keep it there long it enough to put in on the exam. Getting it in
there is easy. It’s keeping it there that is hard.

Cramming is not the way

There are two ways you can try to retain information for an exam. The first way is to wait
until you are very close to the exam and then try to cram it all in. That’s what happens to
most students who don’t manage their time or have a good study plan.

Cramming is a loser’s game. It’s highly stressful and woefully ineffective. It’s not how to
study for exams.

The Most Effective Retention Strategy

The second and more effective way to do it is spaced repetition. That is doing small frequent
reviews of all of your material over a long period of time right to test day.

Studies have shown that this will improve your ability to retain information over time. It’s
easier, way less stressful, and assures that you’ll uncover any difficulties well before the
exam.

When I was in college, I’d never heard of spaced repetition, but it’s just a fancy name for
frequent review. I always did that anyway.

The concept is pretty simple. Whatever you learn, you’re going to forget it over time. If you
want to increase your ability to retain the information, study it more frequently over time.

There are a bunch of studies and charts out there that show the between the passage of time
and the ability to retain information over time. Let’s just say, without spaced repetition, it’s
short.

Spaced repetition is frequently done with flash card apps that present the ones you get wrong
more often than the ones you get right. You can do something similar on your own.

When you took notes and read your textbook, you wrote test questions. You’ll be using those
to do frequent reviews.

When to start studying for an exam?

One big question is: ‘how far in advance should you start studying for an exam?’

Again, there have been all kinds of studies that try to really quantify the time / frequency
rations on this stuff. I’ll keep it simple for you: study early and study often. You can start
right after you leave your first class – and you should.
It’s important for you to self-test as frequently as you can. How often will depend on the class
and how well you remember the material.

You’ll know how often by how well you score yourself on self tests. If in doubt, more is
better.

The key to spaced repetition is making sure you have time to do it.

You may have noticed that I’ve been harping a lot about the importance of having time in
college: getting things done early, using every minute as soon as possible, and not wasting
time.

One of the big benefits of that is always having as much time ahead of you as possible.
Having time for frequent reviews is why.

When you do things right, you’ll find yourself done even days ahead of your deadlines.
You’ll have plenty of study time blocks you can use for other things. You could get even
farther ahead, or you can start using some of that time for your frequent reviews. You need to
balance both.

Whenever you have extra study time and nothing due, it’s tempting to just go have some fun.
Don’t waste that study block. Remember, you committed to it.

Pick a class and start doing a review. It can literally be a couple of days after your first set of
notes. Just do a quick self-test and see how you do. Get some early indication of what you
know and don’t know.

There is no hard and fast rule to when you should start studying for an exam. Remember that
everything you do in every class in college leads up to an exam.

Shovel makes the decision on when to start very easy. It knows how much time you need to
get ready for your exam and when you plan to get started and will let you know if you have
enough time within your specified period or if you need to start earlier.

But as a rule of thumb, there’s no such thing as too early or too often. If you have time, start
using it to study. Here’s how:

Start With A Complete Review

One big benefit of self-testing early and often is that you find and fix any problems well
before the exam. There are no loose ends. If you wait until right before the exam to start
studying, you might be in for some painful surprises.

The first thing you need to do is a complete review of your materials—the class notes and
your textbooks. You’ve covered a lot of ground. Time to go back and take a high-level view
of everything that will be covered on the exam.

Do you remember it all? Do you recognize all of the concepts? Missing anything? Any more
clarification needed? Do you need to schedule a visit to the professor? Do you have test
questions that cover every testable concept?
Take some time to review, refresh, and confirm.

The beauty of the work you’ve done so far with your readings and your notes is that you can
speed through your review and get a good idea about how much time you’ll need to spend
studying for that test.

Plan Your Test Review Time

Make sure that spaced repetition is planned and not just what you do with your extra time.
Identify specific study blocks and add some test study each week into your plan.

Remember, it’s small, early and often. You don’t have to sit for hours studying for an exam.
Just focus on one concept, one lecture, one chapter of your textbook.

In Shovel App planning study time for exams is part of the process and you can add more as
an Ungraded Task.

2. Self-Testing

If you can get your hands on some practice exams, start with those. Work on them as early as
you can and get an idea of the format and the way that the professor comes at things on the
exam. That can help when you are writing your own.

Practice exams are good, but they’re still not a substitute for self-testing with your own
questions.

The way to an ‘A’ is to know it all—by heart. You’ll be sure that you can ace any exam,
regardless of the form it takes. Studies have shown that being able to explain the specific
concept by heart is the best way to remember it.

Read the Questions, SAY the Answers

So you wrote lots of test questions in your notebooks and textbooks. Start asking them.

First cover the notes side of your notebook with a piece of paper. Start looking at those test
questions and no peeking. Scan down the side and slowly and carefully read the test question.
Now say the answer as a complete sentence. Remember, no shortcuts here. Say the answer as
if you’re explaining this to someone who doesn’t have any idea about the subject.
If you don’t know it, they slide the paper down to expose the notes and then give it another
try.

Just revisit the question as often as you need to until you get it down. Slow it down, think
about it, say it, and you’ll learn it. If you can answer every question by heart, there is no test
format that you can’t ace. None.

3. Only Study What You Don’t Know

The biggest benefit of self-testing one question at a time is that you won’t waste time
studying things you already know.

Have you ever watched someone study for an exam? Students look at each page of their class
notes and textbooks, scanning the material that they need to know for the exam. They scan
one page and then turn to the next and the next and the next wondering if they know what’s
on there.

What they are doing is looking for things that they may not know.

I had this actual conversation with my daughter when she was in high school:

“What are you doing?”

“I’m studying for the exam.” (Paging through textbook) “Really? Do you know all of that
stuff?”
“Yep, I think so.”
“If you know it, then why do you keep looking at it?”

Most students spend endless hours looking at material they already know, or . . . that they
don’t know. They aren’t really sure.

You’ve probably been there yourself. You tell yourself, “Okay, I know that concept. Yep, I
know those. Uh, that one I better spend a bit of time and re-read that. Should be okay with
that one.” And on and on it goes. Why do students do this? It’s completely ineffective and a
waste of time.

Here’s a clue: it’s because they have never separated the material that they DO know from
what they DON’T know. The only way they’re able to find what they don’t know is to keep
paging through the same material until they notice something that they think they don’t
know. Then they stop and spend some time on that. Then they start looking again. Page after
page after page. Then they repeat it again the next day, constantly looking at pages that don’t
matter.

That isn’t how material really sinks in. First of all, just re-reading it is a poor way to
remember it. Secondly, continually looking at things you already know is a monstrous waste
of time and effort.

What if instead you could focus your complete attention on only the things you DON’T
know? What if instead of just reading it, you had to recite it by heart so that regardless of the
form of the exam, you would absolutely know the answer?
Check Off The Questions You Know

Writing those test questions makes it easy to review what really matters in the most effective
way possible.

Just look at the questions. When you’re absolutely sure you know the answer to a question
and can recite it by heart, just draw a thin line through it or otherwise indicate that you know
it.
Every time you come back to study, just scan down your questions. Stop and ask yourself the
questions that you still don’t know and skip right by all of those questions you checked off
earlier. You won’t waste any time continually looking at material you already know.
You can now focus ONLY on what you don’t know. Isn’t that where your time should be
spent? When all of the questions are crossed off, you just took the test. And guess what—you
got an A!

My only warning is to just make sure you aren’t crossing off questions too early during your
periodic reviews. You will forget things over time, so keep reviewing everything until a
couple of weeks before the exam. After that, you can check things off when you’re absolutely
sure you will retain the material come exam time.

If you are using a flash card app most of them will automatically show you the things you get
wrong more often and eliminate the things you know well.

Don’t OVER-Study For Your Exam

The beauty of studying only what you don’t know is that you won’t over study. Most students
actually study too much. They get so worried that they might be missing something that they
keep going over the same things again and again. It’s hard to believe that studying for exams
can be a waste of time, but it often is.

Sooner or later you will reach a point of diminishing returns. It’s time to stop. Your time is
better spent getting other things done. When you know the answer to any question by heart,
you know you’re done. You don’t have to guess.

Trust your system and trust your instincts. If you took good notes, read carefully, and wrote
good test questions, and self tested until you are confident you have it, you’re done. Don’t
waste even more time continually looking at things you already know. Use that time to start
reviewing for a different exam or getting ahead on your other assignments. Move on.

Final Review

The night before your exam, all you need to do is take a quick glance down the test questions
and review the few remaining difficult concepts. Then call it a night.

You’ll never need to cram for exams.

I don’t remember ever studying for any exam past 8:30 p.m. the night before. My goal for
that night was to be completely confident that I knew everything days before. My ritual the
night before an exam? I went out for a beer. Seriously. I didn’t even think about school. I was
ready and I knew it.

When I walked down the hall late at night, I’d notice lights on under many of the doors.
Everyone was up cramming, probably on the wrong things, and not really learning it anyway.
Crazy. Inefficient. Ineffective.

Guys would often come to my room asking if they could review my test questions and copy
my essay outlines. Sure, if you think it’ll help you this late, here you go. It rarely helped
them.

Self test, early and often, and don’t waste time on things you already know.
You Got Your A

You WILL get A’s. And it will be easier than ever before. You managed your time. You
knew everything you had to do. And you knew you had time to get it done.

You broke it down into small bites and knew how long it would take.

You showed up at every class and sat front and center. You were totally and completely
undistracted. You took copious notes and prepared them for review. You highlighted your
textbooks.

You got the hardest things done early so you had plenty of time at night if you needed it.
Usually, you didn’t. You were way ahead so you went out and had fun. You understood
everything because you started so far ahead that you never ran out of time to clear things up if
you needed to.

You wrote the test questions, and with all that extra time, you self-tested often and many
weeks ahead. You never crammed at night, ever.

You knew you were ready.

You focused all of your time on the things you didn’t know and never wasted a minute on
what you already knew. It didn’t matter what question was on the exam because you knew it
all by heart anyway.

You will never worry about an exam ever again.

Post-Exam Review

No matter how well you did on your exam, take the time to reflect on it. Is there anything you
learned taking it that will give you an advantage on the next one? Was the form of the exam
as you expected? Did the material come mainly from your textbook or class notes? Did the
hints your professor dropped during class or office hours show up on the exam?

If you did miss some questions, ask yourself why. Go back and find the material in your
notes or your book and understand why you missed it. Did you not think it was important?
Did you fail to highlight it? Did you fail to write a test question? Understand exactly where
and why you didn’t get it right and fix it next time.

Read every single word your professor wrote on that exam—and this goes for papers, too.
Your professor is telling you exactly what you need to do differently next time. Adjust your
study accordingly.

Remember, anything less than perfect is an opportunity to improve.

Whenever you think less than perfect is OK, remember this:

When I took my private pilot written exam, I got a 90% and I was very happy about it. When
I told my instructor, he gave me a cold stern look and replied,
“Which 10% of flying an airplane do you not want to know?”

That will stick with me forever.

Don’t ever accept anything less than perfect. You don’t have to.
20 Study Strategies for Finals Week
Want to learn how to study for finals? Keep reading to take the stress out of
finals week!

Elizabeth Hoyt

September 06, 2018

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Finals week can be the most stressful time for a student, whether in high school, college or graduate
school. Ensure you’re prepared for your exams with these study tips, which can help you conquer
your finals. Follow this list as finals week approaches (the earlier you prep, the better) so you can ace
your exams from start to finish:

1. Create your own study guide.

While many teachers provide a study guide, creating your own can help you understand the material
better. Outlining the important information you need to learn can be helpful, both in creation and to
refer to during your studies.
2. Ask questions.
Your professors and TA’s are there to help! Ask them questions regarding the material and the exam
so that you’re prepared when exam time arrives.

3. Attend the review session.

Review sessions offer vital information on exam format, what will be on the exam and key concepts
you should be focusing your studies on.

4. Start early.
If you always start ahead of schedule, you’ll never be cramming the night before an exam. You’ll
almost always perform better in doing so!

5. Organize a group study session.

It can be helpful to study in groups – sometimes. Evaluate whether or not studying with others will
be beneficial to the subject as well at your learning process.

6. Study things not on the study guide.

Study guides aren't always comprehensive – they’re just suggestions of the main concepts to learn.
Use your study guide for its intended purpose: a guide. Be sure to fill in the blanks with related
information.

7. Take breaks.
You won’t be able to memorize or comprehend all the material at once. Balance is key - ensure that
you reward learning with break times to recharge and relax.

8. Stay well-rested.
There’s a lot to be said about a good night’s sleep. Make sure you’re well-rested so that you can be
fully focused during your exams.

9. Create a study schedule - and follow it.

Splitting the material into chucks you can actually achieve can be very beneficial. That way, you can
keep track of what you’ve accomplished instead of looking at the big picture and getting
overwhelmed.

10. Prioritize your study time.

Some exams will be more difficult than others, some you may find easier to study for. Some may be
worth more of your grade than others. Make sure to evaluate all of your exams to consider and
determine all of the involved factors so you can study accordingly.

11. Study for the style of exam.

If it’s multiple choice, you’ll need to know definitions and concepts. For essay exams, focus on your
understanding of all the concepts presented, with examples in mind.

12. Quiz yourself.

If you think about and create actual exam questions, you will likely become more familiar with what
you need to study and, in the meantime, familiarize yourself with the type of language that will be
on the exam. Draft potential exam questions and quiz yourself so that you can set expectations of
what you need to focus on.
13. Meet with your professor or TA.
Often times, meeting with an instructor, whether it’s a professor or a TA, can give you helpful hints
for what to study and ways to prepare for the exam.

14. Reorganize your notes.

Evaluate and reorganize your notes into what’s important, outlining important concepts, formulas
dates and definitions so they’re easy to understand.

15. Pace yourself.

Make sure you stay focused and don’t burn yourself out. A great way to do so is to pace yourself
rather than opting for the dreaded all-nighter. You can easily pace yourself by following tips like
starting early, creating a study schedule and taking breaks when necessary!

16. Teach classmates.

Learning by teaching is a method that really works! If you work with a study buddy and explain
concepts to one another, you're re-learning the material all over again. It's a great way to reinforce
what you've learned and help someone in the meantime!

17. Revolve your focus.

Switching up your subjects is a helpful way to learn everything for your exams while preventing
burnout on one topic. Make sure to switch it up before your eyes glaze over! That way, you can keep
studying for longer periods of time while maintaining your focus.

18. Color code it.

Create a system that allows you to color code material that's going to be on the exam by what's
most important, less important, etc. This will help you focus on the most pertinent information and
prioritize the material.

19. Visualize.
If you're a visual learner, it can help to create mind maps or diagrams to visualize how the concepts
you're learning relate to one another. This is especially beneficial when learning concepts that build
upon the understanding of one another, like in science courses.

20. Make it fun.

It's easier to focus if you adapt to studying by quizzing yourself, creating acronyms or rewarding
yourself for a job well done. Create a game plan - literally - that allows you to accomplish tasks and
be rewarded for each. For example, why not reward yourself with a piece of chocolate or a sip of
your coffee after you've accomplished a new chapter or allow yourself five minutes of free time for
every chunk of material you digest? You can even add in fun factors like power-ups every time you
learn a new definition and lose a life, which means you add another definition to your list, when you
get an answer wrong! Share your favorite study tips for finals below!
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How to Study for Finals: 22 Fail-Proof Study Tips for Students

Show up for your tests stress-free and confident.

By

Sierra Tishgart

Heather Schwedel

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Elizabeth Kiefer

April 9, 2019
This content is subject to copyright.


Wondering how to study for finals? With a a little strategic planning, you can get the most out
of your study sessions. Discover study tips that will help you create a game plan, retain
information, stay focused and walk into your tests with confidence.

1. Understand your goals.

"Students follow a series of requirements, and it becomes very easy to feel like you're simply
jumping through a series of hoops as opposed to understanding why that class and that test
are relevant to you," says Colin Gruenwald of Kaplan Test Prep. "You have to ask why you're
going to invest the time and energy to do well on a test. Why do you intend to be the student
who gets an A?"

2. Prioritize the tests that matter the most.

"It's a mistake to consider all of your finals equal if you're materially better at one subject
than another," says Gruenwald. "Some students think that they should commit equal time to
studying for each test. They're taking away from their opportunity to really commit time
where they need it."

3. Clarify the content and format of your exams.

"Find out what the test is going to cover," says Ted Dorsey, author of Tutor Ted's Guide to
the SAT. "Ask what the format is—multiple choice, essay, or both. Once you begin studying,
bring any questions you have to your teachers. Most teachers will be happy to help you."

4. Aim to begin studying at least one month in advance.

"Everyone knows that studying a little bit over a long period of time is absolutely, undeniably
the right way to study, and yet we are all terrible at actually putting this plan into effect," says
Gruenwald. "The best time to start studying is at the beginning of the class. Set aside a little
time each week to sit down and organize your notes and think about what's going well and
what's going badly. Three to four weeks ahead of time is the latest that you want to create a
study plan for yourself. Cramming is toxic."

5. Create an action plan.

If you don't define what you do while you study, you set yourself up for endless hours in the
library spent mindlessly scrolling through Facebook in between taking notes that won't
actually help you remember the material. Georgetown professor and study expert Cal
Newport recommends creating a detailed action-based plan that abandons "studying" as the
verb of choice.

When you're thinking about how to study for finals, get specific. An example of an action
plan might look something like this:

 10 a.m. - 12 p.m.: Outline pages 1-25 in biology textbook

 12 - 12:15 p.m.: Snack Break
 12:15 - 1 p.m.: Diagram the parts of a cell
 1 - 1:30 p.m.: Read through all your notes
Besides focus and organization, there's another bonus to being specific: When you're done
with your predetermined plan, you can give yourself permission to be done for the day.

The most effective studying happens in short, concentrated bursts, so making a checklist will
ensure you don't bite off more than you can chew. You'll also feel accomplished at the end of
your study session, instead of being overwhelmed by all the stuff you haven't reviewed yet.

6. Take as many practice tests as you can.

Chances are your teachers have provided you with practice questions, essay topics, and a
variety of other materials to get your mind in test-fighting shape. (And if they haven't, it's
your job to ask!) Not only do examples help you work through a semester's worth of material,
they also make you more familiar with the structure of the exam, which in turn helps with all
that nasty test anxiety.

7. Remove all distractions and avoid multitasking.

In the process of writing this article, we had to resist checking our email (and Twitter and
Instagram ...) every five minutes, just like anyone else with a minor internet addiction. But
the research is in, and multitasking is just not something our brains can do well. At all. If
you're spending the evening hitting the books, leave your laptop at home (or if you need your
computer to take notes, disconnect from wifi!). The same goes for smartphones, social media
accounts, and whatever else might end up being a distraction: When you've settled in to
study, it's time to do that and only that. You'll absorb the material so much better and be way
more efficient with your time.

8. Read out loud.

A big part of studying is just reading: finally reading that chapter you skipped, re-reading the
material you felt shakiest on, reading over the notes you took months ago … no wonder your
eyes tend to glaze over before long. To prevent entering a trance-like state where you're
reading without really processing, start reading out loud. It's one of the oldest and lo-fi study
hacks, but also one of the most effective, as it forces you to focus on every word. If that starts
to get too easy, read upside down. Yes, turn your notes or book upside down and try to read it
that way. It'll slow you down, but you'll actually concentrate on what you're reading, not all
the other things fighting for your brain's attention.

9. Listen to recordings.

For those moments when you can't conceivably have your nose stuck in a book — while
you're walking, driving, exercising, folding laundry, whatever — considering listening to a
recording that complements your studying. Whether you have recordings of your professor's
lectures, found a podcast on the topic, or taped yourself reading over your notes, plug in your
earbuds and listen up. This is especially helpful for auditory learners who do best when they
hear (and not read!) information. Pro tip: When you're really pressed for time, play the
recordings at twice the speed. Seriously, talk about efficiency!
10. Attend all class reviews.

If your teacher is offering any reviews or study sessions, take advantage of them! Your
teacher, naturally, is going to focus on the material that will be on the final, which will help
you focus on the most important things. Plus, you can ask any the teacher about anything
you're finding challenging.

11. Take five-minute breaks every hour.

"When you study, your brain consumes glucose," says Dorsey. "Take a five-minute break
every hour to let your body produce more fuel for your studying. Take a walk and stretch.
Taking breaks will actually improve your studying."

12. Play classical music while you study to concentrate better.

Studies have actually show that listening to classical music a person's reasoning and
intelligence while they are listening to the music (it's called the Mozart effect). Try it for
yourself and see if Bach, Vivaldi, Beethoven or Mozart give you a boost!

13. Build up your endurance.

Build up mental endurance by pushing past your comfort zone. Maybe you're used to learning
10 flashcards every day, but what if you learn 15 instead? This is sort of like increasing the
reps on a weights set, except instead of building your biceps, your brain is getting buffer.

14. Use apps to help you.

We generally recommend staying off your phone while studying (distractions!), but here's
permission to make a few more swipes. There are tons of apps out there to optimize your
studying, and many are either free or pretty cheap. There are apps to replace graphic
calculators, apps that show the periodic table, apps that create paper flashcards and apps that
show world maps. If you're a data junkie, try Study Checker, which tracks your study habits
and reveals the trends, so you can see where you can up your efficiency.

15. Stay motivated by periodic rewards.

How do you stay motivated when you're so not in the mood to study? Treat yourself! The
carrot-and-stick approach is indeed for real. It's unrealistic to think you'll be able to review
non-stop, so build in breaks as rewards. This has a whole bunch of benefits. Chunking your
review will make the material more digestible, you'll be more driven to get things done since
there's a (temporary) reprieve in sight, and your brain will benefit from the refresh.
Ultimately, it's all about hacking your brain a little bit. When you're deep in a studying haze,
you may be so eager to escape that you find yourself making strange bargains, like that you
get to look at Instagram for five whole minutes if you can finish the next chapter of your
reading. Just go with it.
16. Try memorization techniques.

When Joshua Foer wrote his book Moonwalking with Einstein (which documents his
yearlong quest to join the ranks of memorization masters), he learned a lot about how to
remember tough facts with easy techniques. One such tip? Associating hard-to-recall nuggets
with familiar spaces (this technique is called building a memory palace).

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Here's how it works: if you were trying to remember everyone who signed the U.S.
Constitution, for example, you would mentally place the signers along a path through your
childhood home to help you recall each one. There's Benjamin Franklin at the front door,
George Washington sitting on the couch, James Madison in the kitchen, Pierce Butler
hovering in the hall, etc. Imagine all the signers in different places in the house, and your
brain will create a pattern to recall them by associating the men with places you know like the
back of your hand.

17. Fuel your brain with healthy snacks.

Trust us—if you eat heavy, unhealthy foods late at night, your brain isn't going to be in prime
form. As such, it's especially important to factor food into your study routine! Fruit and nuts
are particularly good choices during crunch time. And fuel goes beyond what you're putting
in your mouth: Getting enough quality sleep and taking some time to recharge is also super
important. After all, what's good for the body is good for the mind.

18. Learn how you study best.

"Everyone learns differently," says Dorsey. "Just because your friend makes color-coded
outlines, it doesn't mean that's the best way for you to study too. Change the lyrics of a song
you know to help you memorize the countries of Africa. Write a funny story about the
characters in The Scarlet Letter. Any studying is good studying, so do it the way that works
best for you."

19. Know when to stop studying.

"Within 12 to 24 hours of the test, it's time to stop studying," says Gruenwald. "You're not
going to learn a lot of new content. The likelihood is much higher that you're going to stress
yourself out and confuse yourself. For the last-minute studier, flashcards can be a good
resource. They can earn you a few more points on test day, and it's a much healthier thing to
do than starting on page one of the textbook."

20. Get a good night's sleep.

"Eight hours is ideal for the night before an exam," says Dorsey. "It may be tempting to stay
up late studying, but remember: you're going to need energy and focus while you're taking
your exam."
21. Naturally energize yourself the morning of the test.

"Do something stimulating the morning of the test," says Gruenwald. "Don't sit down and
watch a back-to-back marathon of American Idol; that's just going to zap your energy level.
Instead, read a book, do a crossword puzzle, take your dog for a walk, or get some exercise.
Do something that's going to make you feel alive and positive, and will build up your energy
level and confidence in the 24 hours before the test. Please, stay away from caffeine and
energy drinks! Your hand will shake so that you can't write coherent words, and you may
crash in the middle of the test."

22. Relax.

Last but not least among our study tips is simply to take a deep breath and relax. "You've
survived final exams before, and you'll survive them this time too," says Dorsey. "If you're
feeling nervous when you sit down to take the test, take three slow, steady breaths. Remind
yourself that you've been getting ready for these tests all year long."
17 Scientifically Proven Ways to Study Better This Year

For better or worse, studying is part of college life. It is also a technique that requires
patience, practice, and trial and error. As you think about studying methods that are right for
you, consider the tips below. You might find techniques that will help you get the most out of
your college classes (both the engaging and the not-so-engaging ones).

Set Yourself up for Success

One of the most beneficial ways to begin the studying process is to set yourself up for success
from the start. Consider the following tips.

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1. Stick to Print

Tablets and other eLearning media are convenient and portable, but research suggests that
traditional print materials still have the upper hand when it comes to studying. Some
researchers argue that adopting interactive habits like scrolling, clicking, and pointing
enhances the academic experience, but more than 90% of students polled said they prefer a
hard copy or print over a digital device when it comes to studying and school work.
Furthermore, a psychology lecturer finds that students required more repetition to learn new
material if they were reading on a computer screen versus reading printed material.

2. Listen to music
While some experts argue the ability to concentrate during silence or listening to music while
studying is left up to personal preference, many agree that playing certain types of music,
such as "obscure 18th century composers," can help students engage parts of their brain that
help them pay attention and make predictions. Not to mention, listening to music may
improve your mood and change your whole outlook about studying in general.

3. Exercise First

The benefits of exercise on the brain have been well established in the fields of health,
fitness, and psychology. Studies show our brainpower gets a boost following even a short
workout, as our bodies are pumping oxygen and nutrients to the brain. According to Dr.
Douglas B. McKeag, breaking a sweat shortly before cracking the books can make you more
alert, open, and able to learn new information during your post-workout study session.

4. Relax
Stress hinders learning. UC Irvine researchers find that stress lasting as briefly as a couple of
hours can engage corticotropin-releasing hormones that disrupt the process of creating and
storing memories. Taking study breaks to exercise or drawing a few deep breaths will help
your studying if they lower your stress level.

When and Where to Study

While you might think late-night study sessions are disadvantageous to your academic
success, research suggests they are not necessarily a bad idea. Additionally, some
psychologists even encourage students to break with their daily college-life routines,
especially when it comes to studying for a midterm or final exam.

5. Study When You’re Tired, and Get Some Rest!

Studying at your tiredest can help your brain retain higher concentrations of new skills, such
as speaking a foreign language or playing an instrument. There’s even a term for it: sleep-
learning. As the memory-consolidation process does its best work during slow-wave sleep,
your brain could be getting both the restoration and reactivation it needs during its time of
rest. All of this means that reviewing study materials before bed can help you brain learn,
even in your sleep.

6. Change Your Scenery

A change of scenery impacts learning and concentration abilities. Psychologist Robert Bjork
suggests that simply moving to a different room to study (or going a step further and learning
amongst the great outdoors) could increase both your concentration and retention levels.

Study Methods

Scientists have been investigating information retention and the studying process for decades.
The best way to find the most effective study method for you is to test various tips, such as
the ones listed below.

7. Thwart the "Curve of Forgetting"

Scientists started exploring the "curve of forgetting" in 1885, but the concept remains useful
to today's study habits. The gist of the "curve of forgetting" is this: The first time you hear a
lecture or study something new, you retain up to 80% of what you’ve just learned -- if you
review the material within 24 hours. Fortunately, this effect is cumulative; so after a week,
you may retain 100% of the same information after only five minutes of review. Generally,
psychologists agree this type of interval studying -- as opposed to "cramming" -- is best, and
that students should study closer to the day they learned the material than the day of the test.

8. Use Active Recall

This controversial method of studying was a hot topic in 2009, when a psychology professor
published an article advising students against reading and rereading textbooks -- which, he
argued, merely lead students to thinking they know the material better than they do since it is
right in front of them. Conversely, he suggested students use active recall: closing the book
and reciting everything they can remember up to that point to practice long-term
memorization.

9. Use the Leitner System

Named for its originator, German scientist Sebastian Leitner, the study method forces
students to learn, through repetition, the material they know least well. The system involves
moving cards with correctly answered questions further down a line of boxes and moving
incorrectly answered cards back to the first box. Thus, the cards in the first box are studied
most frequently and the interval becomes greater as the student proceeds down the line,
forcing her to review again and again the information she doesn't know.

10. Take the Practice Tests

As you would with the ACT, SAT, or GMAT, take advantage of professors and instructors
who make old exams available as practice tests. You can get a sense of the instructor’s testing
style and a become familiar with how the information might be presented on the real test day.
A 2011 study finds students who tested themselves with a practice test after learning the
material retained 50% more of the information a week later than their peers who did not take
a practice test.

11. Make Connections

Experts argue that the difference between "slow learners" and "quick studiers" is the way
they study; for example, instead of memorizing, "quick learners" make connections between
ideas. Known as contextual learning, this process requires students to customize their own
methods of learning, thus making connections that inspire all of the information to fall into
place and make sense for them individually. Some students find that recording all information
visually in one place (such as on a sheet of paper or chalkboard) can help to paint a fuller
picture and aid their connections within the learning process.

12. Try the Fenyman Notebook Method

Physicist Robert Fenyman created this organization-based learning method by writing on the
title page of an empty notebook, notebook of things I don’t know about. From there, he
developed a technique of deconstruction and reconstruction of ideas, in an effort to
understand even the most complicated of concepts. To use this method and learn how to
study effectively, first identify what you want to learn. Then, try explaining it as you would
to a five-year-old. The Fenyman method is ideal for using analogies to further illustrate your
concept (e.g., a bonsai tree is just like a big tree, but smaller).

13. Take on the Role of Teacher

Research shows that students have better memory and recall abilities when they learn new
information with the expectation of having to teach it to someone else. This makes sense, as
teachers are charged with not only learning information for themselves, but also with
organizing key elements of said information to explain it clearly to others. Studies also
suggest that students are more engaged and will instinctively seek out methods of recall and
organization when expected to take on a "teacher" role. This can be especially effective with
subjects like reading comprehension and science, though part of the magic involves working
out how you’d "teach" each subject on a case-by-case basis.

14. Think About Your Thinking

Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, thrives on self-awareness. To achieve this,

students need to be able to assess their level of skill and where they are in their studies, as
well as monitor their emotional well-being around potentially stressful studying activities.

What Not to Do When Studying

While the studying methods included above are strategic and focused, the tips below remind
us that we can, in fact, "overdo it" when it comes to studying.

15. Don't Overlearn

Once you’ve been able to cycle through your flashcards without making a single mistake, you
may feel a sense of satisfaction and call it a day, or you may feel a charge of adrenaline and
be tempted to continue studying. When you come to this fork in the road, keep in mind that a
sharp onset of diminishing returns during "overlearning." With a limited amount of time to
study each topic, you’re better served moving on to something else.

16. Stop Multitasking

Multitasking is a myth. You may think you’re killing two birds with one stone by texting
while studying, for example, but you’re actually forming poor study habits. According to
researchers, so-called "multitasking" extends your study time and ultimately may damage
your grades.

17. Forget About "Learning Styles"

Researchers and learning experts debate the concept of learning styles, some even go so far as
to say they don't exist. Our conclusion is this: Despite the amount of work on the subject,
scientists have found "virtually no evidence" to support the concept of learning styles, though
they left the possibility open to further investigation in years to come. We recommend you
don’t go out of your way to try to make your material fit a specific style because it may not
be worth the time or effort.

Bonus Tip: Don't Focus on One Subject for Too Long

If you’ve never felt "burned out" from repeatedly studying pages of history notes,
scrutinizing chemistry formulas, or practicing music scales, consider yourself lucky. But
know that the threat is real. It's best to vary your material rather than zeroing in persistently
on one area. (It is acceptable to join related or similar subject areas together; for example,
instead of only memorizing vocabulary, mix in reading as well. If doing math, tackle several
concepts together instead of just one.)
12 Secrets for Memorizing Things Easily

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We learn things throughout our entire lives, but we still don’t know everything because
we forget a lot of information. Why does this happen?

Bright Side decided to learn why this happens and find a way to memorize information much
more effectively. There is a universal formula that helps us to memorize things more easily
that was made by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist. And it works.

Why we forget

© pixabay

Your brain protects you from overloading with useless information. That’s why all new
information is stored in the short-term memory, not in the long-term memory. If you don’t
repeat it or use it, you forget it very quickly.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve shows that just one hour after learning we forget more than
half of the learned information. One week later we remember only 20%.
 How to remember everything

In order to keep the information in your head for a longer time, you need to try to put it into
your long-term memory. Forced memorization is not very effective in this case because your
brain can’t make sense of the information quickly and form strong associations. If you want
to remember things for a long time, you need to extend the memorization period. It should
be as long as a few days or even weeks.
 © Warner Brothers Television

You can practice interval memorization using self-made cards or special applications like
Anki (Android, iOS) and SuperMemo (Android, iOS).

12 more memorizing tips

 Try to understand what you learn. Things that you understand are memorized 9 times
faster.
 Learn the most necessary information. You need to set your priorities correctly.
 Take this into consideration: things that are at the beginning and at the end are memorized
the best (serial position effect).
 Switch your attention from one topic to another. Remember that similar memories get
mixed (interference theory) and become a “mess.“
 Learn opposite things. For example, if you are learning a foreign language, memorize day
and night. Opposites are easier to memorize.
 Build your own ”mind palace.“ The idea is to associate certain things with a certain place.
For example, if you are in your room, try to connect a thing you are learning to something
in your room. Repeat it a few times. After that, try to recall what the room looks like in your
memory, and repeat the things you learned this way.
 Use “nail words.” The point of the technique is to nail one learned thing to another.
So when you think of the nail, you automatically recall the other thing.
 Associate new words with those you already know. If you are learning a language, you can
memorize something new based on what you know.
 Make up stories. If you need to memorize a lot of information in some particular order, try
to put the pieces into a story. It’s important that the pieces are connected to each other
with some kind of plot.
 Use a tape recorder. Record the information you are learning, and listen to the recording
a few times. This method works best for people who memorize audio information better.
 Visualize. Use body language when learning. This will help you trigger your muscle
memory.
 Choose only the best materials. Don’t use outdated books and methods of learning.
Things might have changed a lot since the books were written. Don’t waste your time
on something that may turn out to be wrong.
The 'Secret' to Memorization

Do Memory Experts Have Alien Brains?

I’m about to teach you how you can memorize 10X faster than you ever thought possible.

Just by sitting and watching my videos you are going to become a better student. And that’s
how powerful your memory can be to you, it can make you an amazing student.

Memorization is the first step in the learning process.

Yes, you need to understand, apply, analyze, evaluate and create information too, but
underlying all that, you need to build a really solid foundation and that’s built on
remembering the basic facts.

And that’s what separates the top students from everyone else, because everyone else is using
the wrong methods, the wrong techniques to memorize, and they’re the ones who flail away
trying to jam information into their brain at the last minute and the day after the exam, what
happens? That information is gone.

But the top students know how to memorize quickly and effectively, so not only do they give
themselves more time for those more valuable higher level stages of learning, they can recall
the same information from their long term memory next year and apply it to what they’re
learning then, and save themselves even more time.

The problem most people face is not that they have a bad memory, they’ve just never been
taught the correct way to use their memory, and that’s frustrating and completely
unnecessary.

It’s like your parents asking you to drive down to the corner store to buy some bread but not
teaching you how to drive the car. So you get home two hours later, the car is all messed up,
there’s a trail of destruction behind you, and the local police have you on their watch list.

So if your memory is like a car, you need to learn how to drive it properly.

What is the 'Secret' to Memorizing Faster and More Effectively?

You need to use your visual memory.

Memory 'experts' don't have an alien brain, or a brain that's any different to yours. They
simply use visualization and association to leverage the astonishing natural power of their
visual memory.

When I first learned these techniques, I was blown away, one, by how amazing they are, but
two, that they’re not taught at school.
And I know other people are blown away too, not just because my videos have been seen by
millions of people around the world, but because normal people – just like you – leave raving
reviews about what they’ve discovered their memory can do.

What I want to do is show you the most important and easiest changes you can make to how
you remember and recall, because it’s so, so powerful.

After you’ve watched my videos you’re going to be a much better student. It doesn’t take
months of practice, it just takes a bit of knowledge and application.

I think you’re really going to love this stuff because it’s rare that you get content that can help
you so much in such a short period of time.

Here’s what you can do right now. Check out the free videos here on our blog at Memorize
Academy, and enroll in some of the free online video training courses we’ve got available.

There’s so much really valuable information right there, but if it blows your mind and you
want to go even further, I’ve also got premium courses that teach you the more advanced
visual memory techniques, and show you how to apply them to any type of information you’d
like.

So register for your free video training, sign up to receive my updates and offers, and take the
first step to changing your life and becoming an amazing student.
5 Simple Tricks to Remember Everything You Learn
The secret to successful learning is making memories stick. Here's how you
can do it more effectively.
By Erin BrodwinBusiness Insider

Getty Images

From where you parked your car to the password for your Facebook account, the sheer
number of things you have to remember each day is pretty astounding.

So if you are having trouble keeping some of these details sharp, chances are you're not
alone.

But there is a group of people whose main goal is to make what you see and hear stick.
These "memory athletes" travel the world to showcase their skills -- and a group of them is
set to compete this June 24-26 in San Diego, California as part of an event called the Extreme
Memory Tournament.

But these memory champions also have some great advice for the rest of us. Here are five
simple strategies for remembering things you've learned.
1. Create a memory palace.

The memory palace is based on the idea that our spatial memories are much stronger than our
memories for specific words or objects. You can probably easily recall, for example, where in
your home you store your holiday decorations or your office supplies, says World Memory
Champion Alex Mullen. And you can apply this innate ability to other harder-to-recall things,
like a list of groceries.

Try it: Take your list (let's say it includes apples, paper towels, bread, and milk) and, as you
walk through your home in your mind, create a scene of each grocery item in each space. In
the living room, for example, you might imagine a group of kids bobbing for apples, while in
the dining area you picture each furniture item covered in rolls of paper towels. Next you
approach your bedroom, where you picture a giant laying on your bed while snacking on
loaves of bread. In the bathroom, you see the sink and bathtub overflowing with milk.

2. Think of a scene.

We form visual memories much like how a camera records an image: What we see gets
imprinted, kind of like a photograph, in a specific set of brain cells in our hippocampus, deep
inside the brain. This process is called encoding.

The reason we misplace things like our keys, wallet, phone, or car so often is because we
store so many similar versions of those memories. Think of how many times you've parked
your car or tossed your keys somewhere. Your brain has encoded thousands of those
memories. Over time, they begin to blur.

To improve your memory, you have to be able to keep those recollections apart. Next time
you set down your keys, try creating a precise scene in your head, suggests US Memory
Champion Joshua Foer. Take note of the surface on which you're resting it. Is it wood, steel,
or concrete? Red or blue? Is there a photograph or an object nearby that you can keep in
mind?

3. Establish an emotional connection.

aving a sense of connection with an object or a place can help us remember details about it.

In a recent review, Harvard and MIT scientists compared how well people could remember
photographs against how well they could recall the color of a few simple squares. Overall,
people were far better at remembering details about the photos than they were at recalling
details about the squares. Researchers think this discrepancy has to do with people's ability
to link things in the photos with their own feelings or memories, and therby keep the memory
sharper.

4. Try a mnemonic.

If you're trying to remember words in a particular order, try making an word out of each of
the item's first letters. One infamous example is using the name Roy G. Biv to
remember the colors of the spectrum (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).
"Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se, but for creating mental structures that make it
easier to retrieve what you have learned," write Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark
McDaniel, in the book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning."

5. Connect the new thing to older things.

Someone told to recall a man who is a baker is more likely to hold on to that memory than
someone told to remember a person with the last name Baker, Foer says in a TED talk.

Why?

Because "the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you," Foer says. "It is entirely
untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. But the common
noun baker, we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their
hands."

"The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to prior knowledge,"
the authors of "Make It Stick" write, "the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and
the more connections you create that will help you remember it later."

This story first appeared on Business Insider.

The Science of Memory: Top 10 Proven Techniques to Remember
More and Learn Faster

Melanie Pinola / June 6, 2019

I've always been envious of people with exceptional memories. You know, the kind of people
who amass encyclopedic knowledge with seemingly little effort, while the rest of us struggle
to remember the name of the person we were introduced to seconds ago.

There's hope for all of us, though. Just as we can strengthen any other muscle in our bodies,
we can train our brains to remember more and learn anything faster. You don't need to be
born with a photographic memory (and, in fact, with a few notable exceptions, virtually no
adults actually have a photographic memory).

Whether you need to study for an exam, want to learn a new language, hope to avoid
embarrassing memory lapses (what's the name of your manager's spouse again?), or simply
want to stay mentally sharp, improving your memory is easier than it sounds. All it takes is
trying out new memorization techniques or making key adjustments in your lifestyle. Here
are 10 of the best tips and tricks to help boost your memory for both the short and the long
term.

 The Science of Memory

 Lifestyle Changes That Can Improve Your Memory
 Mnemonics Help You Remember More
 Everyday Memorization Techniques

The Science of Memory

First, let's talk about how memory works, so we can understand the science behind these
memorization techniques.

If memory–or how our brains make and recall memories–seems mysterious to you, you're not
alone. Scientists and philosophers have been trying to figure out how human memory works
for at least 2,000 years–and they're still making new discoveries. For example, in 2016,
British scientists won the largest prize for neuroscience in the world (1 million Euros) for
their work on memory–the discovery of a protein in the brain that plays a key part in memory
formation and memory loss. There's still lots to discover and understand.

Still, we do know that there are basically three stages or steps to memory processing:
encoding, storage, and recall.
Encoding

The first step to creating a memory is called encoding: It's when you notice an event or come
across a piece of information and your brain consciously perceives the sounds, images,
physical feeling, or other sensory details involved.

Let's take, for example, your first trip to Las Vegas. Your memory of that event is formed by
your visual system (noticing extravagantly designed buildings and lush landscaping, for
example), your auditory system (the ringing of the slot machines), and perhaps smell (the
distinctive scents pumped into each casino).

"Research suggests we remember things better and retain them longer when we associate
meaning to them using semantic encoding"

If you attach meaning or factual knowledge to any of this sensory input, that's called semantic
encoding. For example, if you associate the Bellagio Resort and Casino in Vegas with its
location on a map or the fact that the dancing fountain show takes place every 30 minutes,
you're encoding the Bellagio with semantic memory.

This is good to know because research suggests we remember things better and retain them
longer when we associate meaning to them using semantic encoding.

Storage

All of these little bits and pieces of information are then stored in different areas of your
brain. Your neurons (the nerve cells in your brain) pass signals to each other about what you
perceived, effectively "talking" with each other and building either temporary or long-lasting
connections. It's that neural activity and the strength of those connections that make a
memory, neuroscientists believe.
The network of neurons in our brains are the key to storing and retrieving memories

There are two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. Short-term or working memory is
like your brain's scratchpad. It's when your brain temporarily stores information before either
dismissing it or transferring it to long-term memory—for example, remembering what you
want to order for lunch before calling the takeout place. Once your food is delivered and
eaten, your brain can let go of that info. Long-term memories are those memories you hold on
to for a few days or many years–things like how to ride a bike or the first dinner you had with
the first person you fell in love with.

Both kinds of memories can weaken with age because the brain loses cells critical to those
connections between neurons over time–but that's not inevitable. As with muscle strength,
you can exercise your brain; with memory, it's "use it or lose it."

Recall

And finally, to retrieve a memory, your brain "replays" or revisits the nerve pathways created
when the memory was formed. Repeatedly recalling information helps strengthen those
connections and your memories, which is why techniques like reviewing your notes or using
flashcards help you retain information.

However, when you remember something, it's not an exact reproduction of the first time you
experienced an event or came across a fact, because your own awareness of the current
situation gets mixed in with the memory. As The Human Memory explains:
Memories are not frozen in time, and new information and suggestions may become
incorporated into old memories over time. Thus, remembering can be thought of as an act of
creative reimagination.

That's also why people can have false memories, or their memories of events might change
over time.

Now that we know some of how memory works, we can use that understanding to improve
our memory. We'll start with the lifestyle changes we can make, since they can improve more
than just our memory, and then go over specific memorization techniques.

Lifestyle Changes That Can Improve Your Memory

In general, increasing your overall health with better sleep, regular exercise, and better
nutrition will improve your brain health–including memory–as well as your physical health.
These three things will give you the biggest bang for your buck in preventing memory loss
and improving your memory overall.

1. Sleep on It

Here's an easy way to boost your memory: Get a good night's sleep or take a power nap after
learning something new. One research study found that people who slept for 8 hours after
learning new faces and names were better able to remember them compared to those who
didn't get the sleep opportunity. And in an analysis of two research datasets, psychologist
Nicolas Dumay determined that not only does sleep protect our brains from forgetting
memories, it also helps us retrieve memories better.
Why is this? It appears that sleep "resets" our brains and is critical for memory and learning.
If you're sleep-deprived, the brain's neurons become over-connected with so much electrical
activity that new memories can't be saved.

So this makes the case against late-night cramming for a test or staying up all night to
rehearse your presentation. As the New York Times explains:

Hit the hay at your regular time; don’t stay up late checking Instagram. Studies have found
that the first half of the night contains the richest dose of so-called deep sleep — the
knocked-out-cold variety — and this is when the brain consolidates facts and figures and new
words. This is retention territory, and without it (if we stay up too late), we’re foggier the
next day on those basic facts.

Naps count too! Researchers found that taking a nap of about 45-60 minutes immediately
after learning something new could boost your memory 500%.

So sleep on it. If your boss or co-workers catch you napping at work, just show them these
findings.

2. Get Moving
Just as sleep is important for both your physical and mental health, so too is that other pillar
of health: exercise.

Our brains rely on oxygen to function properly, and to get that oxygen, we need a healthy
flow of oxygen-rich blood to our brains. Guess what? Exercise improves blood flow to the
brain. Researchers at the National Institute on Ageing discovered that aerobic exercise, such
as running, is linked with improved memory. Exercise such as this triggers high levels of a
protein called cathepsin B, which travels to the brain to trigger neuron growth and new
connections in the hippocampus, an area in the brain believed to be critical for memory. The
tests were done on mice, monkeys, and 43 sedentary university students who were forced to
get fit for the study. Those subjects with the largest improvements in memory? You guessed
it: those with the largest increase in cathepsin B after physical activity.

Don't rush to get your running shoes on just yet, though. After studying or learning something
new, it might pay to wait. Exercising about 4 hours after learning might be better for
improving memory than exercising immediately after. Scientists are still unsure why delaying
exercise is more effective than working out immediately, but perhaps our brains need time to
soak in new information before that brain-boosting exercise.

3. Improve Your Diet

We don't mean to sound like your mom or doctor with all this advice, but here's the last
lifestyle-based recommendation: Eat healthier.

You've probably guessed it, but saturated and trans fats–the kind you get from red meat and
butter–are linked to poorer memory. Just as cholesterol can build up in your heart's arteries, it
can build up in your brain. Harvard Health explains:
The buildup of cholesterol plaques in brain blood vessels can damage brain tissue, either
through small blockages that cause silent strokes, or a larger, more catastrophic stroke. Either
way, brain cells are deprived of the oxygen-rich blood they need to function normally, which
can compromise thinking and memory.

Diets such as the Mediterranean diet, which consists mostly of vegetables and fruit, olive oil,
seafood, and nuts—rich in healthy unsaturated fats—have been linked in numerous studies to
improvements in memory and lower rates of memory decline.

Ready to feed your brain? Here's the Mayo Clinic's guide to getting started with the
Mediterranean diet.

Mnemonics Help You Remember More

Beyond living a healthy lifestyle, specific memory techniques will help you better remember
details of anything you're learning. "Mnemonics" refers to any system or device designed to
aid memory–usually, patterns of letters, ideas, or associations, such as ROYGBIV to
remember the colors of the rainbow.

Here are some of the most common and helpful mnemonics:

4. Try Common Mnemonics

The most common mnemonics help you quickly remember words or phrases. For example, to
remember the order of the planets orbiting the sun, you might have learned in grade school
"My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" (where the first letter of each word
stands for Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto,
respectively).

Here are some other examples:

 Acronyms or Expression Mnemonics: Similar to the planetary example above,

thinking "Every Good Boy Does Fine" can help you remember the lines of the treble
clef in music (EGBDF).
 Music Mnemonics: Music is a powerful mnemonic because it provides a structure for
information and encourages repetition. It's a lot easier to remember a catchy song than
it is to remember a long string of words or letters, such as your bank account
password. (It's also why advertisers often use jingles to make their messages stick in
your head. Don't get me started with that Kars4Kids jingle.) You probably learned the
alphabet through the ABC song, and if you're studying a popular subject, chances are
there's a song for that, like learning the 50 states in the USA with the Fifty Nifty
United States song or learning all the elements with the periodic table song.
 Rhyming Mnemonics: Perhaps you're familiar with the rhyme that starts with "30
days hath September, April, June, and November"? Rhymes are similar to music
mnemonics. When the end of every line rhymes, it creates a song-like pattern that's
easy to remember. One expression I learned from watching a cooking show: "Looks
the same, cooks the same"—a reminder to chop and dice ingredients uniformly for
even cooking.
 The Rhyming Peg System: You can use number rhymes to memorize a list of items
using the "peg system" (also known as the "hook system"). In this system, for each
 number, you memorize an image of a word that rhymes with it. That image provides a
"hook" or "peg" for things you want to remember, especially in order.

So, for example, let's say you had a grocery list of items to buy: milk, cookies, bananas, and
bacon. With the peg system, you'd:

1. First learn or create the rhyming peg. One = bun. Two = zoo. Three = tree. Four = Door. And
so on.
2. Form a vivid mental image of the rhyming object for each number. (What does that bread
bun look like? What kind of shoe is it? What color are the leaves on the tree? What kind of
hardware does the door have?)
3. For each item on your grocery list, picture the rhyming object with your list item. For
example, if the first item on your list is "milk," "one" = "bun", so envision a container of milk
being squeezed between a giant bun of bread. Then see a box of cookies falling into a lion's
cage at the zoo, a maple tree inside the store with bananas hanging off of a branch, and
slices of bacon stuffed in the mailbox slot of a black door.

The rhyming peg system helps you remember a list of items

It takes some work and creativity to memorize a list this way, but you'll retain that
information much longer than if you just tried to memorize the words in order. And once
you've got the basic rhyming peg down, you can reuse this for any future lists.

Resources: Peglist.com can generate a visual list for you using this number rhyme. And
check out hundreds of mnemonic devices you can use in everyday life or to learn a new
subject.

5. Create a Memory Palace

"The number one technique that we top memory athletes use is still and will always be the
memory palace. If someone were to learn one thing, it should be that."- Nelson Dellis, four-
time USA Memory Champion

The memory palace is a mnemonic device that's as tried-and-true as it gets—and deserves a

section of its own. Invented by orators in ancient Roman and Greek times, the memory palace
(or mind palace or "method of loci") technique is both effective and enjoyable to use, whether
you're trying to remember a speech you have to give, details of a case you're working on (a la
Sherlock Holmes), or your grocery list. In fact, four-time USA Memory Champion Nelson
Dellis—who claims to have an average memory—says that "The number one technique that
we top memory athletes use is still and will always be the memory palace. If someone were to
learn one thing, it should be that."

With the memory palace technique, you associate a location you're familiar with—such as
your apartment, the block you grew up on, or the route you take to work or school—with the
items you're trying to remember. It works because you're visually pegging (or "placing")
representations of what you want to remember in places you already have strong memories
of.

To use the memory palace technique:

1. Imagine yourself standing your memory palace. Your home is a great one to start with,
even if it's not a palace.
2. Mentally walk through this palace noticing distinctive features you can use to store things
you want to remember. Each stop on that path is a "loci" you can peg the idea or object to.
For example, your front door might be one loci, the table in your foyer a second loci, a lamp
in your living room another. Commit those features to memory so when you think of your
palace, the route and objects in it will be imprinted in your mind.
3. Associate what you need to remember with the loci in your palace. If you had a grocery list,
for example, at the front door you could picture milk flooding over the door from the inside,
like a waterfall of milk. Then you get to the foyer and the table is buckling under the weight
of all the chocolate chip cookies stacked on it to the ceiling. And instead of a lightbulb in
your living room lamp, you see fluorescent yellow bananas.

It sounds pretty absurd, but as we'll discuss in more detail later, the more visual, animated,
and outrageous you can make your memories, the better.

Here's a video from 2016 World Memory Championship winner Alex Mullen describing in
great detail how to "attach" words to objects and locations in with the memory palace
technique. You'll find yourself remembering these 20 words long after you watch the video:

6. Remember More with Chunking

Chunking is another mnemonic device that can make large amounts of information more
memorable. You probably use it already. To remember or share a phone number, chances are
you chunk the numbers so they're easier to remember: "888" "555" "0000"–rather than the
more memory-intensive "8 8 8 5 5 5 0 0 0 0." Research suggests that on average the human
brain can hold 4 different items in its working (short-term) memory. But by grouping
information into smaller sets, we can "hack the limits of our working memory," as The
Atlantic puts it, to remember more.

The chunking technique involves grouping items, finding patterns in them, and organizing the
items. You might group items on your grocery list by aisle, for example, or look for
connections between events in a historical period to create chunks of them, such as moments
in the 1920s that involved the US Constitution.

Chunking works because our brains are primed to look for patterns and make connections.
Brain Pickings explains:

Our memory system becomes far more efficient, effective—and intelligent—than it could
ever be without such refined methods [as chunking] to extract useful structure from raw data.

To put this into practice yourself, you could group vocabulary words for a new language
you're learning by topic, organize items in a list by the first letter or by the number of letters
they have, or associate items with the larger whole they might be involved in (e.g., apples, pie
crust, brown sugar, butter = apple pie).

Everyday Memorization Techniques

In addition to memory aids or tricks like the ones above, there are also broader strategies that
will help you better remember what you come across everyday—techniques that work no
matter what you're trying to memorize.

7. Make New Connections That Are Visual (and Perhaps Outrageous)

Shattered glass. Stinky socks. Screaming, swaddled babies. When Dellis gave me a crash
course on memorization techniques in preparation for the 2012 USA Memory Championship,
the one thing that stood out to me across all of the methods he shared was how vivid–and
often absurd–the images you create need to be to become fixed in your memory.

Visualization is a key skill when it comes to memory. Names and numbers are hard to
remember because they're abstract and our brains can't easily latch onto them. But our brains
store and recall images much more easily.

Here are some visual tricks that work well:

Turn the sound of names into images: As soon as a stranger says, "Hi, I'm Mike," and you
say, "Hi Mike"–poof! You forget this person's name, because you haven't really associated
that word with anything about that person (maybe it's been stored in your short-term memory,
but probably not). You need to connect "Mike" to something more.

With the memory palace technique and other memorization techniques that deal with symbols
(such as letters and numbers), the best strategy is to turn something abstract into a sound and
visual representation. Use the sounds in the word to turn it into an image. In the case of
"Mike," you can think of a picture of a microphone. For multi-syllable names, create an
image for each syllable. For "Melanie," you might think of a melon and a knee crushing it.

Then, the second step is to peg (or anchor) that image onto the place you will remember it. If
your new friend Mike has unusually big eyes, you might imagine microphones bulging out of
each of his eyes.

It's similar to the memory palace technique, but instead of anchoring new visual information
to a location, you anchor it to a physical feature of whatever you're trying to remember.

Animate the images: The more animated and vivid you can make these images, the better.
Doing this creates stronger, novel connections in your brain between that word or number
and an image.

Engage as many of your senses as possible: Remember how the brain begins the encoding
process through your senses? You'll remember abstract things like names and numbers more
if you tap into your sense of hearing, taste, and smell. In the Mike example, perhaps you'll
hear audio feedback from the microphones. In the Melanie example, perhaps some of the fruit
is gushing out of the melon and you can actually smell it.

When it comes to numbers, similar techniques apply. You can associate numbers 0-9 with
images, which will help you better remember long strings of numbers. 0, for example, might
be a donut; 1 could be a flagpole; 2 might be a swan. To remember the number 210, then,
picture a swan swimming past a flagpole to pick at a donut. (Memory champions such as
Dellis encode double- or triple-digit numbers with images so they can memorize hundreds of
digits in five minutes. For example, 00 equals Ozzy Osbourne, 07 is James Bond.)

Practice and learn more: This name game can help you train yourself to remember names
and faces better. And Litemind explains how the major memory system for numbers works.

8. Write It Down, Don't Type It Out

Put away your laptop. You're more likely to remember notes you write by hand than those
you type.

There are a few reasons why handwriting is preferable to using your laptop when it comes to
memory. First, the physical act of writing stimulates cells at the base of your brain, called the
reticular activating system (RAS). When the RAS is triggered, your brain pays more attention
to what you're doing at the moment. When you're writing by hand, your brain is more active
in forming each letter, compared to typing on a keyboard where each letter is represented by
identical keys.

Also, research has shown that when people take notes on their laptops, they tend to transcribe
lectures verbatim. Conversely, when taking notes by hand, we tend to reframe the
information in our own words–a more active kind of learning.
Perhaps even better: Create mind maps for topics you're learning. It combines the visual
element–remember, our brains latch onto images–with handwritten words.

Make a note of it: Learn how to take effective notes and combine paper notebooks with
digital tools for productivity.

9. Use Spaced Repetition

You know how you can study for a test or learn something new, like interesting facts from a
book, and then immediately forget what you learned? Unless we actively work to retain that
information, chances are we'll lose it–in a matter of days or weeks. That's the natural
exponential nature of forgetting, as depicted by the forgetting curve:

Our chances of remembering anything new we learn drops greatly if we don't revisit the material

If you want to remember something for the long term, such as vocabulary in a foreign
language or facts you need for your profession, the most efficient way to learn that material is
spaced repetition. As Gabriel Wyner explains in his excellent book on learning languages,
Fluent Forever, "At its most basic level, a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is a to-do list that
changes according to your performance."
You'll begin with short intervals (two to four days) between practice sessions. Every time you
successfully remember, you'll increase the interval (e.g., nine days, three weeks, two months,
six months, etc.), quickly reaching intervals of years. This keeps your sessions challenging
enough to continuously drive facts into your long-term memory. If you forget a word, you'll
start again with short intervals and work your way back to long ones until that word sticks,
too. This pattern keeps you working on your weakest memories while maintaining and
deepening your strongest memories. Because well-remembered words eventually disappear
into the far off future, regular practice creates an equilibrium between old and new.

The way to defeat forgetting is to use a spaced repetition system, with your own physical
flashcards or with an app such as the Anki or Pauker. Digital apps are more convenient,
naturally, but the act of creating your own cards–including finding images to tie to what
you're learning–is a powerful learning experience. For both methods, daily reviews are ideal,
but any type of regular routine will help you learn and remember faster.

Pro tip: Wyner shares these tips with us, particularly for learning a new language: Make your
memories personal (don't just copy someone else's mnemonics) and make sure you can
actually hear the sounds you're trying to remember. Here's his advice on how to create better
flashcards.

10. Share What You're Learning

Finally, there's the old adage that "the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone
else." When I asked the Zapier team what their favorite memorization and learning technique
was, most people mentioned teaching, explaining, or even just mentioning something they
learned to someone else.

This is the The Protégé Effect. As demonstrated in one study:

As [students] prepare to teach, they organize their knowledge, improving their own
understanding and recall. And as they explain the information to [a computerized character
that learns from the students called Betty's Brain], they identify knots and gaps in their own
thinking. A 2009 study of Betty’s Brain published in the Journal of Science Education and
Technology found that students engaged in instructing her spent more time going over the
material and learned it more thoroughly.

Bonus Tip: Offload the Stuff You Don't Need to Memorize

The human brain is incredible. Because our neurons can store many memories at a time, our
mental storage capacity is somewhere around the 2.5 petabytes (million gigabytes) range–
enough to hold three hundred years' worth of nonstop TV shows.

That said, while we don't run the risk of our brains getting full, there's tons of information we
come across that we can simply offload to our digital tools. Memorizing information takes
effort, so we should focus on the information that we really need to commit to memory.
Evernote can stand in for your second brain to help you remember just about anything, or you
could use one of the plethora of other note-taking apps to do the same.

Related: Use a book note-taking system to remember more of what you read
Memory might still be a mystery to us, but studies have shown that the techniques above will
help you retain more of what you learn. I don't have a photographic memory and sometimes
still struggle to remember where I left my keys, but when I try to commit something to
memory using at least one of the techniques above, it tends to stick in my brain. At least, I've
had fewer "What's your name again?" moments.

Keep Reading:

 How to Better Remember and Make Use of What You Read

 Learn a New Image Faster with Google Images
 How to Fix Your Broken Perception of Time

Forgetting curve image via Cambridge University Press. Brain network image by Bob
Holzer. Sleep photo by planetchopstick. Exercise photo by Fit Approach. Food photo by
Moyan_Brenn. Name tag photo by quinn.anya. Notebook with pen photo by Neil Conway.

“If we didn't get these ongoing notifications through Zapier, we’d miss important information
on how patient funding is going. It's saved us so much time.”

Grace Garey, co-founder of Watsi

Build workflows with your apps.

Connect apps. Automate tasks. Get more done.

About the Author

Melanie Pinola is a NY-based writer on the Zapier team. Besides trying out new productivity
systems, she enjoys cooking, playing video games with her family, and traveling. Follow her
at @melaniepino
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Forbes CommunityVoice Connecting expert communities to the Forbes audience.What is This?

6,589 viewsJul 7, 2017, 08:00am

Eight Simple Memorization Tricks To Help You Remember Anything

Forbes Coaches Council CommunityVoice

Post written by

Forbes Coaches Council

Top business and career coaches from Forbes Coaches Council offer firsthand insights on
leadership development & careers.

Whether you're networking or attending an important business meeting, being able to

remember details like names, dates, events and other information is critical. Unfortunately,
memorization doesn't come easily or naturally to everyone; in fact, for some people, these
details go in one ear and out the other, almost as quickly as they hear them.

If you fall into this group, never fear: There are a few simple things you can do to help your
brain hold on to more of those crucial little tidbits. To improve your memory and retain more
information, follow these tips from members of the Forbes Coaches Council.
Members of Forbes Coaches Council share simple tricks for boosting your memory.

All images courtesy of Forbes Councils members.

1. Connect The Information With Emotion

Facts can be easy to forget; rote memory does not always serve. However, no matter what
information you seek to recall, connecting it with emotion rather than mere repetition can
create a visceral response, helping to successfully embed the information into a person's
memory. Believe it or not, this method requires less effort and can produce greater results. -
Karima Mariama-Arthur, WordSmithRapport

2. Use The Rule Of Three

When being introduced to someone, say their name in your head three times, "Mike, Mike,
Mike." There is something about saying something three times that helps people to
remember. Ever notice how an ad on the radio will tell you the company phone number three
times? It's clever in marketing, but works just as well in real life. - Erin
Kennedy, Professional Resume Services, Inc.

3. Write It Down Right Away

Challenge your cognitive processing by using a pen and paper to capture the essence of the
subject matter to memorize. We are in an era where note-taking and studying is done on
mobile devices or laptops, with keyboards becoming the new norm for learning. Studies
show that penning a concept to paper forces the brain to process the idea, allowing you to
internalize it on a much deeper level. - Rachel Lourdes Mestre, Rachel Mestre LLC

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4. Determine How You Learn Best

There are many different learning styles, the most common ones being visual, auditory, and
verbal. If you commit to discovering how you learn best, you'll retain information easier and
commit it to memory. - Brian Tracy, Brian Tracy International

5. Get More Sleep

Sleep plays a significant role in improving memory and the function of long-term memory
consolidation.The brain processes many details throughout a day. During sleep, the brain
basically weeds out what's not needed and stores important information in long-term
memory. A good sleep alerts our brain and allows us to focus, learn, process and retain the
information over a longer period of time. - Parul Agrawal, Viva La Coach

6. Move Your Body

Using your body is one of the most powerful secrets to improve memorization. Moving your
body while learning or memorizing something new engages different parts of your brain,
helping you turn short-term memory into long-term memory. Movement can be as simple as
writing on paper, or standing up if you're sitting down. You can clap your hands, move your
feet or even dance! - Mariana Lacombe, MarianaLacombe.com

7. Visualize The Scenario

Remember the hunt for the car keys? Are you picturing where you were, who you were with,
the last place you "saw" them with you? When we use pictures and association, it is much
easier to retrieve the memory. This layering effect allows us to store more data than a single
retrieval system would allow. Give it a try, it works like magic. - Alexsys "Lexy"
Thompson, Trybal Performance

8. Harness The Power Of Association

I used to be a teacher, responsible for memorizing over 100 names of students and parents
each and every school year. How did I accomplish this huge feat? As soon as I met someone
and learned their name, I would think of a person, place, thing or idea with a similar or same
name and in my mind, visualize this new person side-by-side with that person, place, thing or
idea. - Daphne Valcin, Daphne Valcin Coaching
Eight Ways to Remember Anything
Research-based strategies to boost your memory and keep it strong

Posted Nov 16, 2009

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I once came up with a metaphor I thought perfectly captured the sheer mass of material my
classmates and I were expected to memorize in our first two years of medical school: it was
like being asked to enter a grocery store and memorize the names of every product in the
store; their number and location; and every ingredient in every product, in the order in which
they appear on the label—and then to do the same thing in every grocery store in the city.

When I look back now, I can't imagine how any of us were able to do it. And yet we did. The
mind's capacity to store and recall information is truly wondrous. And we've learned a lot
about memory and learning since I attended medical school. Though much of what follows
are techniques I used to survive my first two years of medical school, much of the science
that proves they work is new.

8 Strategies for Remembering

 1. Become interested in what you're learning. We're all better remembering what interests
us. Few people, for example, have a difficult time remembering the names of people they
find attractive. If you're not intrinsically interested in what you're learning or trying to
remember, you must find a way to become so. I have to admit I wasn't so good at this in
medical school—the Krebs cycle (I provide the link only to prove how immensely boring it is)
just didn't excite me or relate to anything I found even remotely exciting.
2. Find a way to leverage your visual memory. You'll be astounded by how much more this will
enable you to remember. For example, imagine you're at a party and are introduced to five
people in quick succession. How can you quickly memorize their names? Pick out a single
defining visual characteristic of each person and connect it to a visual representation of their
name, preferably through an action of some kind. For example, you can remember Mike
who has large ears by creating a mental picture of a microphone (a "mike") clearing those
big ears of wax (gross, I know—but all the more effective because of it). It requires mental
effort to do this, but if you practice you'll be surprised how quickly you can come up with
creative ways to generate these images. Here's another example: How often do you forget
where you left your keys, your sunglasses, or your wallet? The next time you put something
down somewhere, pause a moment to notice where you've placed it, and then in your mind
blow it up. If you visualize the explosion in enough detail, you won't forget where you put it.
Remember: Memory is predominantly visual.
3. Create a mental memory tree. If you're trying to memorize a large number of facts, find a
way to relate them in your mind visually with a memory tree. Construct big branches first,
then leaves. Branches and leaves should carry labels that are personally meaningful to you in
some way, and the organization of the facts ("leaves") should be logical. It's been well
recognized since the 1950's we remember "bits" of information better if we chunk them. For
example, it's easier to remember 467890 as "467" and "890" than as six individual digits.
4. Associate what you're trying to learn with what you already know. It seems the more
mental connections we have to a piece of information, the more successful we'll be in
remembering it. This is why using mnemonics actually improves recall.
5. Write out the items to be memorized over and over and over. Among other things, this is
how I learned the names of bacteria, what infections they cause, and what antibiotics treat
them. Writing out facts in lists improves recall if you make yourself learn the lists actively
instead of passively. In other words, don't just copy the list of facts you're trying to learn but
actively recall each item you wish to learn and then write it down again and again and again.
In doing this, you are, in effect, teaching yourself what you're trying to learn—and as all
teachers know, the best way to ensure you know something is to have to teach it. This
method has the added benefit of immediately showing you exactly which facts haven't made
it into your long-term memory so you can focus more attention on learning them rather
than wasting time reinforcing facts you already know.
6. When reading for retention, summarize each paragraph in the margin. This requires you to
think about what you're reading, recycle it, and teach it to yourself again. Even take the
concepts you're learning and reason forward with them; apply them to imagined novel
situations, which creates more neural connections to reinforce the memory.
7. Do most of your studying in the afternoon. Though you may identify yourself as a "morning
person" or "evening person" at least one study suggests your ability to memorize isn't
influenced as much by what time of day you perceive yourself to be most alert but by the
time of day you actually study—afternoon appearing to be the best.
8. Get adequate sleep to consolidate and retain memories. Not just at night after you've
studied but the day before you study as well. Far better to do this than to stay up cramming
all night for an exam.

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Why Memory Malfunctions

Memory loss is one of the most common complaints I hear in my clinical practice.
Unfortunately, as a normal part of the aging process, many people start to find they can't
bring to mind names, places, and things as easily as they used to be able to do and worry
they're facing the beginning of dementia.

"Benign forgetfulness" is the name we give to a process that occurs with normal aging in
which a memory remains intact but our ability to retrieve it becomes temporarily impaired.
Usually we try to describe the name or thing we can't recall and when someone names it for
us we instantly remember the word we wanted. As long as this is age-appropriate and doesn't
significantly interfere with normal functioning, there is no increased risk for progression to
dementia.

However, the trick lies in assessing what is and isn't "age-appropriate." Formal testing is
sometimes necessary in ambiguous cases. Reassuringly, in one study, patients over the age of
50 who initially presented with what was considered to be benign forgetfulness had only a
9% chance of progressing to dementia. Unfortunately, cognitive impairments other than
memory loss are correlated with a higher risk of progression to dementia.

Another reason people often have trouble remembering things is because memory is a
function of concentration. Which means when you multi-task you tend to forget more easily.
Have you ever entered a room only to forget why you did so? More likely you'd remember if
you weren't simultaneously planning your dinner for that night and trying to remember the
phone number of the person who just left you a message. This also explains why people who
suffer from depression or anxiety have a harder time remembering things: Both conditions
interfere substantially with the ability to concentrate. The strength of a memory is also
determined by the emotional state that accompanied the original event. Emotion, negative or
positive, tends to embed events in our memory like a chisel carves lines in stone—a double-
edged sword for people suffering from PTSD.

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Decreasing Deterioration

Here are three things that have been shown in studies to decrease the risk of mental
deterioration as you age:

1. Exercise your body. Evidence suggests this not only retards normal age-related memory
deterioration but reduces the risk of developing dementia. It doesn't even have to be
vigorous exercise—just 150 minutes of walking per week has been shown to be of benefit.
Whether more intense exercise results in a greater risk reduction remains unclear.
2. Exercise your mind. Evidence also suggests that doing things that work the mind may delay
or prevent memory loss. This research is just in its infancy, so here's as good a guide as any
to figuring out what activities will work: If an activity requires you to take breaks, it probably
qualifies. We can watch television, for example, for hours on end without becoming
mentally fatigued, but solving math problems, learning to knit, or even reading all require
effort that tires the mind.
3. Take ibuprofen. Though one study suggests a daily dose of ibuprofen decreases the risk of
developing dementia, the risk reduction appears too modest to justify the increased risk of
 stomach bleeding that accompanies ibuprofen's daily use, so I do not recommend this.
However, if you're already taking ibuprofen for some other condition, like arthritis, this
might be an added benefit.

If the mind is indeed like a muscle—and more and more research is validating that model—
then memory may very well be like muscle tone: The more the mind is used, the more robust
memory may become. As I've moved on from my medical school days to reach early (very
early) middle age, I've found myself experiencing benign forgetfulness far more than I like.
As a result, I find myself comforted that the old adage "use it or lose it" seems not just to
apply to the body but to the mind as well.

If you enjoyed this post, please feel free to explore Dr. Lickerman's home page, Happiness
in this World.
4 Easy Ways To Learn Faster And Remember More

Anthony Metivier| December 20, 2018| Memory Improvement Podcast

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Have you ever sat down to learn faster

and thrown your hands up in the air?

Not to catch a balloon or give a salute.

But because you were furious and frustrated?

And have you felt that a learning task was so hard that you just wanted to give up?

I hear you!

After all, I’ve put some of the toughest learning challenges in front of myself all the time.
Languages like Biblical Hebrew, German, Chinese.

Musical instruments like sitar and bass.

Hands-on mechanical tasks like figuring out how to spread the good news about memory
techniques with a videos, blogs and podcasts.

And in all cases, it takes grit.

It takes tenacity.

It takes these…

4 Secret Ways To Make It So Easy

You Can Run Circles Around Everyone Else!

If you’re interested, I’d like to share these 4 secrets with you, plus another 4 in this video:

All I ask is that you read them carefully and give at least ONE of them a serious try (minus
the last one in the video above).

But let’s be clear:

Trying just one would be good. But …

50% would be great.

100%? …

Why that would be downright Magnetic!

1. The Most Powerful Question Any Learner Can Ask

One of the reasons some people find learning so painful is that they don’t ask a simple
question.

It’s a question that, when applied often, can unlock the nuclear power needed to drive you
through some of the hardest missions in life.

It’s a question almost no learner asks.

Probably because it’s a bit tough for most people to wrap their heads around.

It sounds kind of selfish, after all.

The question is:

“What’s in it for me?”

But even if it has a selfish angle to it, this question is so important.

Why?

Because So Many Learners Are Trying To

Accomplish Outcomes For Everyone But Themselves!

Think about it:

You go to school and learn things to please the machine …

You get a medical degree to appease your family …

You study a language because it’s part of a degree …

Nothing wrong with any of that, unless …

 None Of It Has To Do With What
You Authentically Want In Life!

And so it’s little wonder learning feels hard. If you’re the last person who gets a kick-back for
all that effort, it’s always going to feel like you’re trying to chew through a brick wall.

Make it easier on yourself by learning things that have a definite payoff for the number one
person that matters: You.

Because here’s the plain truth:

You’re a good person.

You want to serve others.

And you can change the world.

But it will never happen if you secretly hate the learning process because it just doesn’t serve
your needs first.

Want a fast and easy way live authentically? Practice gratitude:

 2. Why Comatose Zombies Can
Outlearn The Flash Any Day

Okay, that sub-headline might be a bit misleading.

What I mean to say is that you need to relax to learn.

Because here’s a fundamental truth:

Information flees from tension. But it’s Magnetically attracted to relaxation.

Let me say that again:

Information flees from tension. But it’s Magnetically attracted to relaxation.Click To Tweet

And the more you know how to relax your brain, the more information will want to stick
around. You’ll be able to slosh it around the mouth of your mind like fine wine and actually
enjoy it for a change.

And what you enjoy … ?

Pleasure Is Instantly Easier To Remember!

The trick you need to understand when it comes to relaxing your mind is this:

Your mind is produced by your brain.

Your brain is a physical entity.

And that’s what makes the Memory Palace technique so powerful:

It’s something physical out in the world being used physically inside your material brain.

Don’t know how to make a Memory Palace? No problem. Register for this:
And to get the most of the training, relax your mind each time before you use your memory.

That said, never try to relax your mind without relaxing your body first.

In fact, it’s very likely that the only way to truly relax your mind is by relaxing the body first.

So the next time you sit down to study, stretch a little first.

Meditate.

Focus for awhile on your breathing.

Attention paid to breathing will lower most of your resistances to learning and make
everything easier.

3. Understand That The Map Is Never The Territory –

But Maps Sure Do Help!

When I created this Infographic and Podcast episode teaching you how to
realistically memorize a textbook, I had no idea people would find it so practical and useful.
After all, everybody asks me for “tips and tricks” that will let them memorize entire books.

But the truth is that this feat is rarely necessary. In fact, it’s probably never necessary.

But if you use the techniques I teach in that podcast to get a global overview of the book you
need to read, you’ll have a map. This map will set the stage for your experience of the
territory.

And that will give you laser-targeted tools for remembering the parts that matter. Proof:

When you can do that, you do better than just learn and remember. You also create
knowledge.
And when you create knowledge, the speed at which you can learn grows exponentially. It
feels good, creates energy and encouragement and keeps you on the path of continual growth.

Nothing difficult or painful about that.

4. The Magnetic Magnifying Glass Method

Have you ever heard the phrase, “you don’t know what you don’t know”? Tony Buzan
mentioned it during our conversation some time ago on the Magnetic Memory Method
Podcast.

If you want to make learning faster and easier, make sure to get yourself in orbit with that
concept.

Why?

Because when you hold a magnifying glass to your own ignorance, you get real clear on what
it is you need to learn. Without that clarity, it’s nearly impossible to make progress!

In other words, learning truly is hard and slow when you’re stumbling around blind in a cloud
of unknowing.

But when you ask questions about what you know and don’t know about a topic, suddenly a
lot of that fog is whisked away.

Want a simple exercise you can use for each and every learning project you ever undertake?

It’s easy, fun and speeds up everything.

It’s called:

Writing summaries.

Every time you take a class, attend a lecture, read a chapter, watch a video or even use an
app, take a quick second to jot down everything you can remember.

Then beneath that, start asking questions about what it is you think was covered … but
mysteriously can’t remember.

Then make two plans:

One plan for how you’re going to continue to remember what you remembered.
Another plan for what you’re going to do to fill in the gaps so that you can remember the
information you think flew over your head.

Simple. Elegant. Easy and effective.

Why Most People Prefer A Life Based On Excuses

A lot of people will go through a post like this, nod yes to each and every point and then
carry on with their lives of learning desperation.

The reason why this happens, beyond just a bad way of drawing from their episodic memory,
is simple:

It’s all contained in point number one.

If you missed it and care about the life of your memory and your mind, go over it again.

And if you feel like you’re resistant to any of the wisdom contained in this post, review the
second point I’ve made.

If anything on the planet raises your hackles, a few simple brain exercises that take just a few
minutes of your time could be a game changer for you.

And if you’d like a realistic way to remember everything of importance in any book or posts
like these you encounter in the world, there’s a link there just waiting to help you out.

For the true Magnetic Knight, point four will be the most precious of all. There’s a little
comment section below where you can complete this part of the exercise. I’ll be around to
help you fill in any gaps I may have missed.

I look forward to hearing from you, and until next time, keep learning and keep yourself
Magnetic! 🙂

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Last modified: December 20, 2018

About the Author / Anthony Metivier

Anthony Metivier is the founder of the Magnetic Memory Method, a systematic, 21st Century
approach to memorizing foreign language vocabulary, names, faces, numbers, poetry and any
information in ways that are easy, elegant and fun.

20 Responses to " 4 Easy Ways To Learn Faster And Remember More "

1. Venu

June 7, 2017 at 9:33 am

Hello Anthony,

Thanks for the share. Learning anything faster doesn’t mean just hearing but listening.
Hearing just brings the content to the ear, but listening sends it to the memory.
Listening makes it what it is, what it is for me, and brings all the other required
questions for saving in the memory.

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

June 7, 2017 at 5:25 pm

Great point, Venu. Hearing and listening are definitely two different things.
That’s why paying attention to information carefully is the first rule of
memory.
 Thanks for taking a moment to share your thoughts and bring this deeper level
of clarification! 🙂

Reply

2. Jooooo

June 8, 2017 at 6:35 pm

I like the content of the podcast. but I think you should put a search option on your
site, so that I can look for previous podcasts and blogs easier

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

June 8, 2017 at 6:51 pm

Thanks for letting me know you like the podcast. 🙂

The search bar is on the right navigation panel. It says “Search this website”
and on desktop is visible beneath the “Recent Posts” feature box.

It also appears in this area on the mobile version, normally at the very bottom
of the page.

Thanks for asking about it and do feel free to let me know what you’re
searching for. Perhaps I can direct you better than a robot. 🙂

Reply

3. sandeep

June 11, 2017 at 5:12 am

Hi Anthony,

The post is really very helpful for a student. Anyone who want to learn anything is
considered to be a student. Thanks for the share, its also helpful for me. 🙂

Reply
 o Anthony Metivier

June 11, 2017 at 6:07 am

Glad you found this useful, Sandeep.

And I agree: All who learn are students. 🙂

Reply

4. Kgosi

November 29, 2017 at 3:31 am

Anthony great podcast! Must say I am about to jump into learning a new technology
and am overwhelmed by the book I need to read. However, this podcast alone has
made me change my mindset indeed. FEAR is gone now 🙂

Thanks! Please send us more podcasts like these ones when possible.

Kgosi
SA

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

November 29, 2017 at 3:39 am

So glad to hear that, Kgosi. Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast
and letting me know it created an impact for you.

I think an episode that compliments this one that you might one to check out
involves the truth about attention span. I think you’ll find it just as inspiring.

Thanks for taking a moment to post. I look forward to your next one!

Reply

5. Fiadjoe Ruth ehornam

 August 10, 2018 at 12:03 pm

I really liked the way you explained things. I am about to learn a new technique for
learning faster.

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

August 10, 2018 at 6:22 pm

Great to hear from you and thanks for posting.

Which technique in particular have you decided upon?

Reply

6. Rabab

December 10, 2018 at 3:46 pm

Hi,

I have this problem when I begin learning any language I give up after 3 or 4 courses.

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

December 10, 2018 at 8:21 pm

Thanks for sharing this experience, Rabab.

Learning a language is about more than taking courses. You also want to make
sure that you have at least one speaking partner, ideally more.

That’s what the Big 5 of Language Learning is all about.

If you haven’t gone through that video on this page, I suggest that you do. I
think it will help you see the big picture and how memory techniques fit
within it.

Reply
7. Anjana S.Krishnan

January 4, 2019 at 2:27 am

Hi. The podcast is very informative.I would like to try these techniques to remember
faster. Actually I was searching for a guidance to learn faster and remember
better.Thanks Anthony.

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

January 4, 2019 at 8:41 pm

Glad you found this helpful, Anjana. What topics and areas of interests do you
study? 🙂

Reply

8. Lanre Adeleye

February 13, 2019 at 4:13 am

Very helpful and educative. I’m deploying the two I have not been practicing.

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

February 13, 2019 at 6:57 pm

Glad that you found this useful, Lanre. Which two were you using before?

Reply

9. Zulfiqar

February 22, 2019 at 1:56 pm

 Very informative and beneficial for students. Keep it up.

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

February 22, 2019 at 4:39 pm

Will do, Zulfiqar. Thanks for posting!

Reply

10. Emmanuel

March 1, 2019 at 2:53 am

You can learn faster by repetition This means you don’t need to memorize anything
while learning.

When you try to remember you force your brain to do something it’s not ready to do
at this moment. The secret most people don’t know is that the brain can remember
itself without being forced to do so, but it has it’s natural way to do so.

If you try to memorize things and study hard, you are forcing your brain into learning
and the effect is that you don’t learn well.

You can learn faster when you repeat a lot of times the information you need to
remember without trying to remember it. This way your brain will absorb it in at an
optimal, faster pace.

Reply

o Anthony Metivier

March 2, 2019 at 4:31 pm

Thanks, Emmanuel, though there is a ton of evidence that speaks again your
comment here.

For example, did your brain “naturally remember” the two typos you made in
your post? Or did you “naturally” forget to edit your post?
 (Don’t worry: I’m not a typo-crybaby. I make them myself, but am just
making a point everyone needs to notice about your claim here.)

The whole idea of natural memory is as awkward as those who think memory
techniques are artificial. If anything, it’s the other way around:

Memory techniques amplify the ways we naturally learn through association.

Repetition, especially when done to excess without effect, is unnatural and
cruel.

After all, they say that the definition of insanity is doing the same things over
and over again and expecting a different result. And in this case, they royal
“they” are quite right.

Thanks for taking the time to share your views on learning faster. Much
appreciated! 🙂

Reply

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Can You Really Remember Everything?

Subscribe now for my FREE Memory Improvement PDFs and Videos. You'll discover how
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* Speak any language fluently

* Recall complicated formulas, math equations, or numbers.

* Master the technical terms for your field of work or study.

* Recite poetry, jokes, and even long speeches word-for-word

* Quickly absorb the most important ideas from books, textbooks, or lectures…

Unlock your natural ability to learn and remember anything 3x faster now!
An ancient memorization strategy might cause lasting changes to the
brain
18 comments

Using the memory techniques of the pros alters patterns in brain activity, new research says

By Rachel Becker Updated May 29, 2018, 11:43am EDT

Share

Update May 29th 11:40AM ET: This article was originally published on March 16th, 2017.
It has been updated to include video.

Weird as it might sound, there are competitive rememberers out there who can memorize a
deck of cards in seconds or dozens of words in minutes. So, naturally, someone decided to
study them. It turns out that practicing their techniques doesn't just improve your memory,
but it can also change how your brain works.

The right kind of memory training may cause lasting changes to the brain

There’s been a long-standing debate about whether memory athletes are born with superior
memories, or whether their abilities are due to their training regimens. These tend to include
an ancient memorization strategy called the method of loci, which involves visualizing
important pieces of information placed at key stops along a mental journey. This journey can
be an imaginary walk through your house or a local park, or your drive to work. The
important thing is that you can mentally move back through it to retrieve the pieces of
information you stored. (The ancient Greeks are said to have used it to remember important
texts.)

Boris Nikolai Konrad, a memory coach and athlete who’s in the Guinness Book of World
Records for memorizing 201 names and faces in just 15 minutes, chalks his superior memory
abilities up to training with this and other mnemonic techniques. “It's a sport like any other,”
Konrad told The Verge. Only, he adds, “you're not moving that much.” But practicing is key.

Simon Reinhard at South German Memory Championship 2010.

To find out what’s going on in top-level rememberers’ brains, Konrad teamed up with
neuroscientist Martin Dresler at Radboud University in the Netherlands. They recruited 23 of
the top 50 memory competitors in the world. All were between the ages of 20 and 36. Then,
the scientists scanned the memory athletes’ brains while they were just relaxing, and also
while they memorized a list of 72 words.

The team, and their co-investigators at Stanford University, found that the memory athletes’
brains don’t appear to be built any differently from yours or mine, according to results they
published in the journal Neuron. “That was quite surprising, since these are really the best
memorizers in the world,” Dresler says. “And still, they didn’t show a single memory
structure, any single region or collection of regions that was anatomically strikingly different
from normal control subjects.”

Even so, their brains don’t work the way yours or mine does. The athletes were able to recall
at least 70 of the 72 words they studied — compared to an average of only 39 words for the
non-athletes they were compared to. What’s more, while the professional rememberers’
brains were structurally similar to the control group, the memory athletes’ brain scans
showed unique patterns of activity, where brain regions that are involved in memory and
cognition were statistically more likely to fire together.

How to build your memory palace

Image: Pixabay

The method of loci is also known as the memory palace, and Konrad says the first step is to
make up a set of locations. The place doesn’t matter as much as your familiarity with it. Then
you create a map in your mind with a series of stops. The first stop might be your front door.
The second could be the table next to it where you put down your sunglasses. Then, when
you’re given a list of words to memorize, you visualize scenes that link the words with each
stop.

Say the first word is “keys,” Konrad says. You probably wouldn’t want to imagine sticking
your keys in the lock — that’s too mundane. It’s better to picture something more vivid:
“Maybe someone throwing keys, like arrows in a dart board, into your front door — and
you're a bit scared of that,” Konrad says. That would stick in your memory. So then, when
you want to remember the words, you picture yourself walking through the memory journey
you plotted out. And when you see the keys sticking out like throwing knives from your front
door, you’ll remember the word: keys.

To figure out if the method of loci is behind these memory superpowers, Konrad and Dresler
divided 51 men in their 20s who had never trained for or participated in memory
competitions into three different groups: one group was trained in the method of loci, and
they practiced using an online course for six weeks, 30 minutes per day. One control group
got a training regimen of the same length, but played a simple short-term memory game that
didn’t involve any strategy. And the other control group didn’t have to do anything but show
up for brain scans and memory tests.

Sure enough, after the six weeks were up, the group that trained with the method of loci
demolished their previous scores on the second set of memory tests — recalling an average of
62 of the 72 words, an increase of about 36 words. By contrast, the group practicing with the
memory game and the group that didn’t train at all barely improved.

Additionally, the same patterns of brain activity that showed up in the memory athletes also
started emerging in the group trained with the method of loci. That was true even at rest,
when they weren’t trying to memorize anything. That implies the right kind of memory
training causes lasting changes to the brain, says Jee Kim, a neuroscientist investigating
memory at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Australia who was not
involved in this study.

So, why does the method of loci work so well? After all, brain-training games like the ones
marketed by Lumosity don’t actually make you smarter (which is why Lumosity had to pay
$2 million to settle charges of deceptive advertising). And this latest study bears that out —
the group playing the short-term memory brain-training game didn’t improve significantly.

But the group using the method of loci did — and right now, Konrad and Dresler can only
speculate as to why. They think it works by taking abstract, unrelated pieces of information
and making them signposts on a route — which incorporates navigational and spatial
memory skills humans evolved over time. Ancient people probably didn’t need to remember
the order of playing cards of hundreds of names. But, Konrad says, “It was always important
for humans to remember where is shelter, where is food, where is danger — and therefore our
brains can do that easily.”

The same patterns of brain activity started emerging in the group that trained like the memory
athletes

The paper did have some limitations: for one thing, the participants in the training portion of
the study were all male, and were all relatively young. So it’s tough to generalize the findings
to the broader population — after all, anyone who’s tried to learn a new language as an adult
knows that younger brains are much more primed for learning. The University of
Melbourne’s Kim told The Verge in an email that the methods and analyses are sound, and
the study adds a new piece to the puzzle. But she also wants to know what biological changes
are driving the changes in brain activity, and how that changes with age.
Dresler says those are questions he and his colleagues hope to answer in the future, with more
people and more advanced methods. And in the meantime, the take-home point is that
memory skills can be learned. “It shows that superior memory on that level is not something
that is just inborn talent, but is something that essentially can be learned by everyone,”
Dresler says — before adding the caveat, “at least, to a certain extent — probably not
everyone will win the world championships.”
The Lost Art of Memorization: How to Utilize Your Memory
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Last updated by Amanda WilksJanuary 30, 2019

Flickr user Frederik Rubensson

Studying is not the same as memorizing. It’s a reality that many students face, but not all
understand until it’s possibly too late. That often happens when they go through the semester
attending classes, taking tests, and believing at the final exam that they have never heard of
certain terms. It leaves them with the well-known blank stare at the paper and that feeling of
hopelessness as you wrack your memory to remember.

Studying implies taking information that has been given to you and applying to certain areas.
Memorizing, on the other hand, is the process of remembering specific information. It’s
considered painful and difficult for most. However, it’s truly not. There is no such thing as
being unable to memorize lists and words. If your brain functions properly, you have that
capability. What you lack, however, is the right technique.

Our minds are wonderfully complex. It takes a certain amount of stimulation to truly make us
focus on one thing at a time, especially when it poses next to no interest. The good news is
that once you understand how to engage it even in the most challenging of times, it will stay
forever. In fact, mastering the art of memorization will be of excellent help later in life.
Use The Partnership Between Your Eyes and Your Mind

Visuals can be powerful. Learning to use them for your memory is a true skill that will be
incredibly useful throughout your life. Memorizing gets easier when you attribute more than
just one element to the information. And there’s nothing more impacting to your mind than
an image or a color. Use them to your best abilities, and try to “persuade” your mind into
remembering them.

Colors are excellent for this purpose. Colorize different sections, names, or dates, to get the
best results. However, don’t go too far. You want your notes to look like an organized chart,
not a rainbow. Resort to the primary colors in order to not overwhelm your mind. This is a
particularly good trick used in the business world, where you have a lot of ever-changing
information shifting quickly. A colorful representation of data is extremely beneficial.

Another secret would be to “snap a picture” of the words. Not with your phone, but with your
mind. Instead of only learning the words, learn their aspect and their place in the text. When
you’re faced with a test that challenges your knowledge, your mind will make the association
easier by finding your path back to it. In fact, with enough practice, you will end up
memorizing its place on the page before you remember the information.
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Let Your Voice Be Your Guide to Boost Your Memory Skills

It may sound narcissistic, but you listen to your own voice better than you do others.
Speaking the words out loud can be a great way of helping your mind remember the words.
This includes both while reading and after you believe you have everything memorized. It
will be of excellent help in discovering your gaps. More importantly, it will involve more
functions of your brain as it will equally involve auditory processes. The more it’s involved,
the more focused you will be.

A good way to do it is also to record yourself. It can make great use of your time if you play
it in the morning while you’re getting ready or even while you shower. Surely, you can
sacrifice music for those few couple of minutes for the sake of your grades. Accessing your
auditory senses can be done in the car as well, letting the recording go on as you drive. Even
if your attention is mostly on the road, the background noise will still etch in your mind and
memory.

Your Hand Remembers the Words

Read your material, and then you can start writing it down in a notebook. Your hand will help
your mind remember those words if they had passed through it at least once. Many students
underestimate the power of this technique or don’t know about it altogether. However, it can
be incredibly powerful in every situation, except perhaps those where you need to cram in
half an hour. It can be a little more time-consuming, but well worth it.

To make the most out of this, transcribe the words as you read them. You don’t even have to
learn them yet, just write them down and let your mind get used to it. After, you can begin
working from memory. Put pen to paper and continue jotting down everything you can
remember, quizzing yourself, and assessing your answers. Once you’re at an exam, you will
see that both your hand and your memory will work together.

Your Muscles Offer Reference

There are certain popular tricks to memorize words, lists, and information. For example,
chewing gum of a particular flavor while studying, and then once again at the exam will help
your brain trigger the right memory. The so-called study snacks have their own role to play.
However, it’s more than that. Muscle memory implies more than reflexes, but a true
connection between body and mind that can improve your ability to remember certain things.
It’s not something meant to be used just by professional athletes.

Moving around while you are reading and speaking the words out will add more engagement
to the process. It doesn’t have to be distracting. However, certain motions would help, even if
it’s just gesturing. Mimic the words as you read or speak them to create a physical correlation
to what you’re studying. Something as simple as pacing back and forth can be incredibly
helpful as well. It will keep you engaged, body and mind, and thus, improve the memorizing
process.
Your Spare Time Could Be Used Productively

No one wants their free time to be used for studying, but there are subtle ways where you can
make use of downtime to improve your memory. Using flash cards, for example, is a great
way of reviewing what you have studied and test yourself. It’s useful during exams to have
them at hand, and cram as much as you can even as you are waiting for the bus or driving to
school. When stopping at a red light, bring out a flash card, read the question, read the
answer, and then set it down. At the next stop light, do the same, but switch the card.

Your mind will be able to not only memorize the question and its answer but the
circumstances as well. Whether it’s a song on the radio, a background noise, the color of the
car next to you, or hundreds of other references available, it will be forced to recall more.
However, only glance at your flash cards when waiting at a red light. It’s unsafe to do so in
the middle of driving. Your eyes should be on the road at all times and not focused on
reading while in traffic.

Your Logic Will Help You Interpret the Words

Repetition is key. Practice makes perfect. But interpretation and finding meaning in the
words is even better. It might take a bit more effort, but understanding the information will
help you memorize it better and faster. Simply put, you don’t learn anything by reading. You
possibly read thousands of words each day in books or media, but that does not mean you
memorize them. You can do it over and over again, and it might still not happen.

Did you notice how often you’re in the mood to do some cleaning around your room when
you’re supposed to be studying? Or perhaps organize your closet or catch up on emails?
That’s because when you are not committed, your brain is looking for any excuse to get
distracted. By giving meaning to the words, closing yourself away from distractions, and
understanding the information, you will memorize everything better.

The truest secrets of memorization imply engaging your mind to its best abilities. These will
help you pass your exams and succeed later in life, simply because these are skills that will
always come in handy. Your brain is incredibly complex and capable of greatness. You have
the ability to unlock it. All you need to know is how to apply the right techniques.

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