Proven Memory Principles

Mike Evans, in How to Pass Your Exams, 3rd edition, 2009, recommends developing your memory through active revision:

1. Make sense of the key ideas in what you read or hear.
2. Recall and review periodically.

How to Be a High School Superstar, by Cal Newport, 2010 endorses the same approach:

1. Quiz yourself and answer loud.

Memory Principles at HopeHero Software Works

1. Arouse desire for what you want to remember.
2. Chunk and encapsulate. If necessary reformat the input.
3. Make sense, find meaning, relate new materials to your existing knowledge..
4. Make a cue to easily re-activate what you've just remembered. e.g mental pictures, mental movies, tunes, rhymes, acronyms, etc.
5. Recite. Practice active recall.
6. Use it, apply it in real life.
7. Avoid distraction, intervention, interference.
8. Rest and sleep properly.

Types of memory

1. Audio loop e.g the way you remember phone numbers.
2. Imagery, pictures, snapshots
3. Episodic, films, movie-like events
4. Semantic, symbolic, verbal, language-related.

We will elaborate on each of these principles later.