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Sharpen Memory Skills to Sharpen the Mind

Copyright (c) 2009 Stephen Lau

You don’t have to be forgetful. You don’t have to live with poor memory. Bad memory is not something you were born with and cannot be changed. The good news is that you can sharpen memory skills to sharpen the mind. Yes, you can significantly improve memory through the applications of basic memory tools.

Learn these basic memory tools to sharpen the mind to improve memory.

1. Good memory is a result of relevant mental associations. In mental processing, you associate the unfamiliar with the familiar, thereby enabling you to recall the new information as soon as you associate it with the old information you already know or remember.

2. Visualization is another powerful basic memory tool to help you sharpen the mind. Seeing is believing, and a picture is worth a thousand words. If you can vividly visualize something in your mind’s eye, your memory of that becomes more vivid, and you will retain that memory for longer.

3. Being creative and imaginative is an indispensable asset in good memory. The reason is that with a creative mind, you can come up with mental associations that are totally outrageous. The more absurd your mental associations are, the longer they will stick in your memory. You can learn to become more creative and imaginative through more practice. As long as you can think of something extraordinary, you can create out-of-the-ordinary mental associations that you will not easily forget.

4. The human mind has a great capacity for storage of information. In fact, we have used up only about ten percent of the storage space. To help you remember all types of information as well as to retrieve the stored information, you need to think logically and categorize systematically the information in your mind’s eye. The brain is like a file cabinet, where you put different types of information according to different categories or headings.

When your mind initially receives the information, it goes into your sensory memory, which is fleeting. In other words, the information becomes only short-term memory. If nothing is done about it, it will be forgotten soon. To be able to remember it and therefore be able to recall it later, you need to repeat that information, and that is where all the basic memory tools come into play.

You can associate the new information (short-term) with something you already know; you can visualize what the information will look like in your mind’s eye; you can use your imagination to make the image not only vivid but also absurd so that it will stick in your memory; and you categorize it in your mental file cabinet for subsequent retrieval. All you need is repetition of the information using all the basic memory tools to sharpen memory skills. Repetition holds the key to transfering short-term memory to long-term memory.

However, the process of repeating and remembering may not be as simple and straighforward as you wish: there may be obstacles to hinder the process. These obstacles include distraction, lack of focus, inadequate motivation, and stress.

The will is strong, but the mind is weak. You want to remember the information, but there may be distractions, such as noises around you, your memory of somethng else in the past, or your mental preoccupation with something in the future. If you cannot focus on remembering it, or if you are not motivated to remember it (that is, thinking it is not too important for you), the remembering process, despite the repetition, will not be effective. Worst, if you are under stress, your mind will not be able to utilize efficiently the basic memory tools to sharpen memory skills to sharpen the mind.

To conclude, sharpen memory skills to improve memory. You can do it!