Next time you need to quickly memorise a small piece of information, Wired suggests that you may actually have better luck retaining the information if you distract yourself. In 2007, researchers asked UCLA students to try to memorize a set of 48 word pairs (country: Russia, fruit: lemon, flower: lily, etc.). After studying the list, some students then had to sit through a slide show and view closely related material (flower: rose). Guess what? The distracted students performed better on subsequent recall tests.
Photo by Gaetan Lee.
Windows only: Remember everything you’ve learned using spaced repetition with SuperMemo. From the Wired article on its creator, Piotr Wozniak: SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget…. Twenty years ago, Wozniak realised that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research.
Wired details how to use mnemonic visualisations and rhyming techniques to build robust memorisation schemes and memorise anything. For example: The Number/Rhyme technique is a very simple way of remembering lists of items in a specific order. It is an example of a peg system—i.e. a system whereby facts are ‘pegged’ to known sequences of cues (here the numbers 1 – 10). This ensures that no facts are forgotten (because gaps in information are immediately obvious), and that the starting images of the mnemonic visualizations are well known.
The use of mnemonics for memorisation is by no means new, but Wired’s article offers an excellent primer. If you’re big on mnemonics, give us a glimpse at your system in the comments.
Memorize Anything [Wired]
