It is not hard to train your brain to good store facts and make it easier to recall upon request. You just need to re-think the way you learn and how you commit facts to memory and then you will be well on your way. I advise this simple technique for expanding your short and long term memory.
To remember something you must learn it once and then think about what you learned 3 times in the first day and then think about 3 times the next week. Then think about it 3 times the next month and then three times the next quarter and then three times the next year. When I say think about it, I mean precisely concentrate on the concept, data or facts or be adding to it and as you learn something new, put it all together and then begin reasoning of it in the same time frames. You can do this by paging thru a book or letting a random event trigger the memory and then start reasoning about it then.
During the first week or so your facts is in your memory cache so to speak and not committed very well to long term memory, but if you corollary this process it will be later. Consider it a cache memory or Ram so to speak. This way of memorizing is based on my studies of memory. Unfortunately the kid who crams for a test, is not getting much out of it in that case? If it is not used after the test then the short-term memory will break its connections, it will still be there, but it will not be so easy to get to when you need to recall it.
It also helps to try to put leading tidbits of facts together and concentrate them with a sound, smell, picture or feeling. For instance if you wish to remember something in a book and you see a bird fly by the window, concentrate the bird with the information. Lets say the you are studying Biology and you look at some internal organ seems like it could be used as material to build a nest if it were straw or food if it looks stringy like a bunch of worms. You can concentrate that with the bird. Then think of that part which corresponds to the bird. How would that part function on the bird? Then each time you see a bird you can think of the internal workings of that bird which will refer you back to the similarities of the human body organs you were studying at the time. You will obviously see a bird three times in a day and three times in the next few days and weeks and months, you see?
If you are studying geometry and shapes, angles, etc, well every time you see that pattern anywhere think about them and concentrate these thoughts together. Finally combining all things close to that shape and then any shape close to that or whatever that is radically separate too. Now you can think about the bird as it flies at discrete angles, how its internal organs are similar to humans and how the body has angles of movement and geometry and join together all that together too. Finally you will have your entire brain all hooked to each other you see? So try it for me at your earliest convenience and start reasoning about every thing you read, learn, hear and see. Think on this in 2006.
