Attention itself is a crucial element of memory. If you don´t see something, how can you remember it? When you focus on something and process that facts well, you make it easier to remember.
Elaboration and repetition are the most base ways of creating that personal interaction. Elaboration involves creating a rich context for the taste by adding together visual, auditory, and other facts about the fact. By weaving a web of facts around that fact, you create multiple entrance points to that piece of information. On the other hand, repetition drills in the same pathway over and over until it is a well-worn path that you can precisely find.
One base technique used by students, is actually, not that helpful. Mnemonic techniques of using the first letter of each word in a series won't help you remember the actual words. That will make it easier to remember the order of words you know. The phrase My Very Energetic mum Just Screamed Utter Nonsense can help you remember the order the planets in our solar system, but it won't help you recall the private planet names: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.
These techniques do help you heighten your memory on a behavioral level, but not on a fundamental brain buildings level. The main calculate it gets harder for you to learn and remember new things as you age is that your brain's processing speed slows down as you get older. It becomes harder to do more than one thing at the same time, so it's easier to get confused. Your thinking energies may become too rigid, development it harder to alternate learning techniques in mid-stream. All these things mean it becomes harder to focus. Until now, there is minute one can do to significantly heighten processing speed, but there are ways to heighten learning performance, even when processing speed slows.
Focus
Alertness, focus, concentration, motivation, and heightened awareness are largely a matter of attitude. Focus takes effort. In fact, most memory complaints have nothing to do with the actual potential of the brain to remember things. They come from a failure to focus properly on the task at hand.
If you want to learn or remember something, join on just that one thing. Tune out all else. The harder the task, the more prominent it is to tune out distractions. (If person tells you they can do their homework better with the Tv or radio on, don't believe it. Any speech or speech-like sounds automatically use up part of your brain's attentiveness capacity, whether you are aware of it or not.) In other words, it can be hard to do more than one thing at once, and it plainly gets harder as you get older. What will help is to make sure you don´t get distracted until you've ended what you have to do.
Strategy: When you learn something new, take breaks so that the facts won't interfere with one an additional one as you study them. Have you been to a movie double feature recently? then you´ll know that it is hard to remember the plot and details of the first movie immediately after seeing the second. Interference also works the other way. Often we taste that when a friend gets a new phone number the old one is so familiar and automatic for us that it is tough to learn the new one.
Engage
Your brain remembers things by their meaning. If you spend a minute effort extra up front to create meaning, you'll need less effort later to recall it. When you discover a new word - for example, "phocine" - your brain has to work harder"phocine" - your brain has to work harder. First, you have to remember how to spell it long enough to look it up in a dictionary. There, you'll see it means "seal-like" and it's pronounced "fo-sine." Now photo a seal in your mind and repeat the word aloud. Even say "Fo! Fo! Fo!" aloud like a seal barking. The sound of the word, its spelling, the image of a seal, and the barking all work together to form memory links. The more links the better to help you trigger the word later on, when you want to use it to describe, say, a sunbather in a black one-piece.
Strategy: Say you're on vacation in Maui, staying at a beachfront hotel in room #386. How do you remember that? method number one: Pause for a minute to take a thinking snapshot of your room door viewed from an face vantage point. Then, when you return to that same vantage point, you'll know which door is yours. method number two: Stop and think for a minute. You're on the third floor, which is the top floor of the hotel, so the number 3 is easy. Now for the 8 and the 6. The expression "to eighty-six" comes to mind - as in to get rid of, do away with, or throw out. As in what your boss will do to you if you settle to spend an extra week in Maui. Done.
