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.

Study Smarter, Not Harder : Book Review

Today I am reviewing Study Smarter, Not Harder by Kevin Paul, 2009, 3rd edition. The book has a lot of useful tips for students at all levels.

First all of, here come tow major findings from the book.

1. No stress, full emotions ----------> good learning
2. Meditation ---> Gamma waves ---> good learning

Memory

Causes of good memory are :

1. Learning through multi-senses, multi-channels e.g. see, hear, do, touch, smell
2. Similarity
3. Association, links
4. Emotions
5. Intensity, vividness, sharpness
6. Repetitions
7. Mnemonics
8. Chunking: primacy effect (you remember most what you notice first), recency effect (you remember most what you notice most recently.)
9. Linkage
10. Reviews: After every hour, After every half day, After every whole day.

Stages of Reading

1. Read clues to know what to expect, what to look for, what to focus.
2. Slow reading to facilitate real, deep learning
3. Summarize and sketch.

Taking Lecture Notes

1. Key words, in your own words.
2. Key patterns
3. Diagrams, graphs.
4. Flexible, non-linear arrows to link points.
5. Spaces to fill later: With what you might have missed, With our own insights, etc.

If You Have to Cram, Cram Five Days in Advance

1. Focus on the possible. Cut back your ambitions.
2. Try to do just 2 new topics per day.
3. Practice output activities i.e. write, speak, present, demo etc.
4. Stop new input as the target date nears.