There’s a lot of talk about exercising your body. But what about exercising your brain to keep it healthy? In my last post I talked about how gaming is good for your brain and gave you some examples and techniques on how to create  your own games.

By exercising your brain you are essentially improving your memory and mind capacity. Let me first talk about your memory. You hear and see many things but often you just don’t remember what it is you hear or see.

You hear people say “I have a good memory but it’s short”. That is true. Memory can be short-term or long-term. In short-term memory your mind stores information for a few seconds or a few minutes. For example, the time it takes you to remember the daily specials in a restaurant you were given by your server, or to compare the prices of numerous items in a grocery store.

Short term memory is needed otherwise your brain would soon read “disk full” if you retained every dish you ordered in a restaurant, and the subject of every ad you watched on TV.

Experts in this field have indicated that your brain is also meant to hold an average of seven items instantly in the short term, which is why you can usually remember a new phone number for a few minutes but need your credit card in front of you when you’re buying something online.

However, sometimes your short term memory can fail you.

As far as your long-term memory is concerned, it requires a conscious effort to recall episodic memories, which are personal memories about experiences you’ve had at specific times, and semantic memories (factual data not bound to time or place), which can be everything from the names of the planets to the color of your child’s eyes.

Many times you try to remember something from the distant past and you struggle to remember the true facts or details of your experience

So whether you want to improve your short term memory or long term memory, there are some basic techniques you can practice to help you with this process and keep your brain intact – functioning in a healthy way .

1. Concentrate and pay attention. You can’t remember something if you never learned it, and you can’t learn something and encode it into your brain if you don’t pay enough attention to it. Give your fullest attention to important things especially those you want to remember.

2. Read out loud. Most people learn through the combination of listening, seeing and hearing.  Memory is often enhanced through the visual -  learned mostly by reading or otherwise seeing what it is you have to know.

To improve your memory, read out loud what you want to remember to enhance your sense of hearing and increase your listening skills.

3. Organize information. Write things down in an address book, date book and calendar (use an electronic device like your computer, phone or itouch to save paper); take notes on more complex material and reorganize the notes into categories later.

Use both words and pictures if possible when organizing. We remember pictures easily. Something that is abstract and doesn’t make a picture won’t stay in the memory easily.

4. Practice and repeat information frequently. Review what you’ve learned the same day you learn it, and at intervals thereafter. What researchers call “spaced rehearsal” is more effective than “cramming.”

If you’re able to “over-learn” information so that recalling it becomes second nature, so much the better.

5. Be motivated and keep a positive attitude. Tell yourself that you want to learn and what you need to remember. Telling yourself you have a bad memory actually hampers the ability of your brain to remember, while positive mental feedback sets up expectations for success.

6. Visualize and associate information to what you already know. Connect new data to information you already remember, whether it’s new material that builds on previous knowledge, or something as simple as an address of someone who lives on a street where you already know someone.

Use visualization and association to memorize things easily and well. Small children have been taught this technique, so anyone can learn it. See exercise below and use technique number seven.

7. Use mental hooks. This technique comes from the “Billy Burden Memory Master Method course”. It’s a strategy that provides a way for you to file things into memory and give you a trigger to recall them at will.

Before I share the technique of using mental hooks, first take this experimental memory test  to see how well you can do without memory techniques. After that I will show you how to use mental hooks, visualizations and association to memorize the same list you are experimenting with. Continue reading →