How to learn information better. How to remember a large amount of information in a short time? What we read

Ekaterina Dodonova

Business coach, blogger, memory development and speed reading instructor. Founder educational project iq230

1. Understand

Very often, people simply try to memorize unfamiliar words and phrases without even understanding their meaning. Perhaps this will be enough for several days, say, to pass an exam. Unless, of course, the lecturer asks you to explain what you mean by ablation and what are the signs of those same chromosomal aberrations from the first ticket.

The brain is great at remembering words that are connected associatively. He discards incomprehensible letter combinations like garbage, not wanting to waste time on them.

For this reason, most people have difficulty learning. A strange-sounding word does not bring to mind pictures that are familiar and understandable to the heart.

Therefore, for better memorization, you must first parse and understand all new terms. Try to feel the word and connect it in your imagination with familiar concepts.

2. Come up with an association

Having imagination is one of the most powerful tools for remembering information. Mnemonics greatly facilitate the process of memorizing important reports, presentations, texts, including those in foreign languages, due to artificial associations.

Let's take the word "Monday". What frames are running on your internal screen? It could be the morning, terrible traffic jams, a thought pulsating in your head, a day on the calendar, a diary page from childhood, or a buzzing office anthill. What do you see?

To make associative connections strong and durable, you can use the five-finger rule. Each finger has its own association, filled with one or another content.

Thus, the necessary information will be imprinted in your memory at all levels of senses at once, which will allow you to use it for a long time.

3. Trick the magic number 7 ± 2

The famous American psychologist George Miller found that short-term human memory cannot remember and repeat more than 7 ± 2 elements. The mode of constant information overload reduces this number to 5 ± 2.

Nevertheless, there is a simple way to deceive the laws of short-term memory: using the method of stories, which involves logical linking of disparate memorization objects into one chain. You may end up with something funny, incredible and completely impossible. real life story. The main thing is that with its help you can remember more than 15 elements at a time.

According to the director's plan, in the next scene you should swim in a pool filled to the brim with semolina porridge. Yes, just imagine this madness in bright colors. Feel with your skin how the semolina sticks to your skin. How hard it is to swim in this warm liquid, although the porridge is not too thick. How the air smells of milk, butter and childhood.

4. Repeat correctly

Our brains can be programmed - this is a scientific fact. It requires awareness and daily work in the chosen direction. Therefore, if you have firmly decided that it is extremely important for you to learn English in six months, then your brain is already tuned in to intensive memorization. But in addition to regular training, regular repetition of the material covered is also important.

Use specific time intervals for best memorization: repeat the material immediately after learning, then after 15–20 minutes, after 6–8 hours (preferably before bed) and the last time after a week.

5. Tune in

Perhaps there is nothing worse when a person thinks about himself in negative terms: “I will never cope with this,” “It is impossible for me to remember this,” “I will not be able to learn such a complex report.” Use only positive statements, programming your brain for work and results.

Tune in correctly, tell yourself: “I remember!”, “I have good memory. I’ll remember,” “I’ll remember and easily retell it in my own words in two hours.” Set yourself up. The resource state of the brain is your area of ​​responsibility.

Knowing the five secrets of memory, you can easily learn to memorize truly complex and versatile materials. In addition, there are many interesting and natural ways for humans to train memory and consolidate the necessary objects of memorization, which Ekaterina Dodonova also talks about in detail in her book.

Happy reading and have a great memory!

Hello my beloved readers.

Have you ever wondered how to quickly remember a large amount of information? How not to forget everything in the morning? How to put all the knowledge acquired in such an intensive way into long-term memory?

All these questions concern every person who has at least once had to memorize tons of materials for an exam, presentation, or simply to improve their own knowledge.

More than once I have come across the fact that many people sit day and night without looking up from their textbooks, trying to remember as much as possible. Does this make sense? Maybe they are doing something wrong? Maybe there is another way out?

Today I want to discuss with you how you can memorize new material quickly and as efficiently as possible.

7 tips on how to quickly learn something that is impossible to learn quickly

• Highlight the main ideas.

No matter how important and great short term, it will always contain at least 50% water. Introductory words and subordinate clauses, examples and the author's rantings are that superfluous thing that can be cut off from the text with peace of mind.

While reading mentally highlight main ideas And remember them exactly. Form a so-called skeleton, on which in the future you will simply apply your thoughts. This method alone will help you reduce the time you spend studying the material several times.

• Don't read the text several times.

Yes exactly. The more times you read the text, the more you begin to dwell on all sorts of unnecessary things and little things. The more you begin to be distracted from what is most important. Our brain is designed in such a way that it is better for you to read it once very carefully, highlighting the main ideas, and then retell it, than to read the same thing ten times in an attempt to remember. This will give much more effect in a short time.

• Don't say words to yourself.

The brain is capable of grasping the meaning of what the eyes see without speaking. So try not to stop at every word while reading, but skim the text with your eyes. Yes, it will be difficult, but it will significantly speed up the process.

If you regularly work with a large amount of information that needs to be remembered or you simply need to develop your memory to the maximum, use advice from Stanislav Matveev- record holder for memorization. This man proved that everyone is capable of more than they think.

• Don't sit still.

Walk around the house. Arrange things in the closet. Knit or cross stitch. Get up and go for a walk in the park. Do any physical task when you are already trying to retell what you read. Scientists have repeatedly noted that physical mobility increases brain performance and productivity. So use what you already have.

• Divide into parts.

No matter how much you want in a day, you are unlikely to succeed. Our brain is simply not capable of mastering tons of material without preparation. Therefore, I advise you to divide everything into parts. Having mastered one part - relax, drink tea, go outside for 15 minutes. All in all, reboot your brain.

Even if you need to master as much material as possible in a day - plan your vacation. From the very morning, plan, for example, at what time you will study and at what time - relax. Schedule lunch and rest times. Then your probability of success will be much higher than if you just get up in the morning and study until night.

• Develop your peripheral vision.

To significantly reduce your reading time, develop the skill read the entire line. So, you don’t have to run your eyes along the line, you will see everything at once. Of course, this cannot be learned in a short time, but if you constantly have to work with large amounts of information, this skill becomes extremely necessary.

You can start practicing now to develop these abilities. It can be a good help in this online Brainapps service . There you can register and use good training equipment.

You can also purchase premium account and take advantage of even greater opportunities (for example, take a professional speed reading course , receive regular training tailored to your level, get access to all training games presented on the site, etc. ).

Spend 5-10 minutes a day on such activities, and within a couple of weeks you will significantly increase the speed of reading one page of text. I experienced this myself.

• Repeat every 2-3 hours.

To avoid losing what you have recently learned from the shelves of your short-term memory, repeat the learned material every 2-3 hours. This will both refresh your knowledge and help move information into intermediate memory.

I hope that among these tips you will find something that will help you not only teach correctly, but also plan your learning correctly. If you have a lot of material to learn, try these methods. Both I personally and many of my students have tried them on themselves more than once.

And if you want to receive even more information about any aspects in English- subscribe to my blog newsletter. The most current and correct information, a lot of interesting and useful things awaits you.

The ability to quickly remember information is not only the key to successful studies. It will always be useful in life: there is a huge amount of information now, and it is quite difficult to cope with it without a good memory. But we can.

We develop all types of memory

The brain is also an organ and also needs training. How to learn to quickly remember information if you have poorly developed visual or auditory memory. Repeat out loud, divide the information point by point and put it together in memory. You can record it on a voice recorder and listen to it while you sleep. It will help too.

Another good way remember and learn something: put it into poetry. Poems can be memorized by setting them to the tune of a song and singing them out loud.

How to quickly remember information using visual memory? Visualize everything you hear. This is the first. Second, sketch out all the information in the form of pictures or diagrams. This will make it much easier to remember. You can also use bright images. For example, when studying laws, you can imagine yourself as a deputy who passes these laws.

You can highlight different topics with different colors. When preparing for a history exam, we highlight in red everything that concerns Peter the Great, in blue - everything that concerns Alexander III, etc. Now look at everything for each color separately and rewrite these points until they remain in your memory.

Connect information to art objects. If possible, associate the date or fact with a movie, book, piece of music, or piece of art. For example, if you know the history of cinema well, you can associate historical dates with the years of release of a particular film, etc. This way the subconscious mind itself will open the floodgates for effective memorization.

Repeat the information you need before going to bed. And after him too. Synthesis of information occurs very actively during sleep and this must be taken advantage of. In the morning all you have to do is repeat. The main thing is to get enough sleep.

We use mnemonics. This includes the search for rhymes to information, and clues, for example, replacing numbers with objects similar to these numbers, and more complex techniques.

Take in everything you read and hear. Try to understand and sort everything out for yourself. You can form your own opinion about the information. Use logic as well as associations. They will definitely remain in your memory.

Getting ready for the exam

Most people once have a question about how to quickly remember information in large quantities before the exam. Here are some tips of varying degrees of interpretation:

• Move! While studying tickets, poems or topics in English (history), do not cram them while sitting, but actively move around the rooms and make circles. Movement does activate your brain and increase your ability to remember. Changing the situation will be no less effective. If you are preparing for two exams at once, it is better to study tickets and topics in different rooms. This way they will definitely not get mixed up and will be stored on different “shelves” in memory. And one more important point. Any aerobic exercise will help you remember anything faster, because it improves memory and blood circulation in the brain. So, before you sit down for your tickets, do some fitness or dance.
• Sleep and get distracted. Even if there is a lot of information, you don’t need to learn everything late at night. In addition, you need to periodically give your brain a break. Take a conscious break, for example, for 30 minutes to call your friends or watch a cartoon. Otherwise, you will be distracted all the time and will not learn anything. By the way, you can also be distracted by writing down all your sad thoughts and all the negativity that has fallen on you lately.

  Not the most joyful way, but it works. The point is that we remember all bad information much better and faster. Therefore, the information that enters our brain after such outpourings of the soul will be automatically perceived by the brain as negative, and accordingly, it will be remembered easily and “with pleasure.”

• More expression. And artistry too. When learning languages ​​and more, invest emotions in all information. Depict everything you are trying to remember with movements or gestures. Perform mini-plays and skits if you need to learn too much. Besides, it will be much easier to remember everything if you shout. Shout out foreign words, poems you are learning, your report. By the way, there is no need to yell at the whole house. Just say everything clearly and loudly. This will also improve memorability.
• Exercise in nature. Everything is simple here. Fresh air It also drives blood to the brain, which means everything is remembered more easily. So, we are preparing for the most extreme exam at the dacha. If you don’t have a summer house, you can simply look at photos of nature for a quarter of an hour before starting to prepare for the exam.
• Throw words around. More precisely, in letters. Let's do it like this. We rewrite the text that needs to be learned, but only without the first letters at the beginning of each word. We learn while at the same time trying to remember these words. At first, however, you will have to look at the original regularly, but then you will only have to look once at the cut version of the text, and you will remember everything right away.
• Structure. If you are too lazy to type or write, everything you need to remember can be sketched out as a diagram. The most important thing is to read the information beforehand and thoroughly understand it. When you have some kind of “flags” in front of your eyes, it will be easier to remember everything.
• To remember an impressive text, you can try dividing it into parts. But not logical, but simply ten stanzas each. There is no need to learn them by heart without comprehension. Take a deep dive and then make a plan for this text. Then you can read the text again in two hours.

Human memory performance depends on many factors. The performance of the brain is based on the individual habits and rhythm of life of a particular person.

Exist general rules brain performance over time. However, the peak of its activity and the rise in memory must be determined more accurately subjectively.

Brain performance also directly depends on the type of biorhythms. Today we are accustomed to dividing people into “night owls” and “larks”. After all, some people really have higher labor productivity during the day, while others only have higher productivity at night.

But most of the “owls” are mistaken about their biorhythm, since an active life simply forces them to join the squad of “night inhabitants”. The same thing happens with larks.

People who like to sleep during the day are simply forced to wake up early in the morning and go to work. Therefore, their real “daytime” biorhythm simply changed into a night one.

In order to really understand at what time your performance is at its peak, you need to conduct an experiment yourself.

To do this, you should write down time periods throughout the day in which you can do one thing with full concentration on work. It is these time frames that will allow you to understand when performance reaches its peak.

After intense work, always give yourself a couple of hours of rest. Otherwise, the next peak of activity may not occur.

American scientists have long figured out how to better remember the necessary information. They came to the conclusion that a book read before bed whose plot is much easier to remember in the morning than if you read it throughout the day.

Psychologists explain this phenomenon by saying that good sleep improves memory quality. This happens thanks to the hormone melatonin.

If it becomes difficult to fall asleep, then you can treat yourself to a light dinner before bed, which will contain foods rich in... It is this amino acid that is responsible for the production of the hormone we are looking for.

Among such products, nutritionists highlight hard cheeses, cottage cheese and milk, and sesame seeds. A sandwich with cheese and sesame bread will fit perfectly into your late dinner and help you fall asleep.

Melatonin itself reaches the brain within an hour, so you need to eat no later than an hour before you go to bed.

The main rule regarding the digitalization of information in sleep is the exclusion of caffeine from the diet taken at night. It negatively affects sleep and impairs memory function. Also, don't overeat or undereat before bed.

Stick to a balanced work and rest schedule. Then there will definitely be no problems with sleep and your memory.

For those who live on a regular schedule, below is information about brain activity will be very useful.

1) From six to eight in the morning he copes well with tasks long term memory. At this time, the information received will be remembered by you easily, quickly and for a long time. What will remain is something that you certainly won’t be able to get out of your head for a long time.

2) From eight to nine in the morning, various tasks related to analyzing and memorizing information are best solved. At this time it comes into effect logical thinking.

3) From nine to ten in the morning is a good time to work with mental activities. By nine o'clock the body has completely recovered from sleep and is ready to begin serious work. This is the time of the most productive work.

4) From eleven to twelve it is better to give the brain a chance to rest. At this time there will be no sense in the work done. IN best case scenario you'll have to do it all over again.

Do some exercise, snack on a cereal bar, take a walk in the park with friends.

5) From twelve to fourteen it is necessary to give the body food to recharge. This time is exclusively for lunch. There can be no talk of any intellectual load.

Otherwise, you will not only miss an obligatory meal, but also cause enormous stress to your body.

6) From fourteen to eighteen begins the second and final apogee for productive work.

However, it is worth considering the fact that prolonged brain loads during this time frame can lead to exhaustion of the body. Will appear later extreme fatigue and sleep disturbance.

7) From twenty to twenty-two best time for relaxation after a hard day at work. Take an evening walk, read a book or listen to your favorite music. The brain is not ready to solve any serious problems at this time.

8) From twenty-two to four in the morning is the best time for a healthy and sound sleep. During these hours, the body rests much better than if you slept from morning until lunch.

By accurately determining your biorhythm and adhering to the basic rules of the brain’s work schedule, you can easily build the effective functioning of your body and the full functioning of your memory.

Tired of taking tests and unable to remember what you read last night? You know you know it, you just can't remember at the right time. In this article, you'll learn how to remember everything you need to know. Here are instructions based on how you learn. The information will be useful to you regardless of whether you want to memorize articles of the Constitution or the number Pi to the 32nd decimal place.

Steps

Auditory memory

Listen. If you are a better auditory learner and can remember information you receive orally, then you likely have an auditory memory. Here are some characteristics that will help determine whether you perceive information by ear:

• You remember in detail everything you hear in lectures or conversations.
• You have a rich vocabulary, you choose words correctly, and it is relatively easy for you to learn new languages.
• You are a good speaker and can have interesting conversations while articulating your thoughts clearly.
• You have a talent for music and the ability to hear tone, rhythm and individual notes in a chord or individual instruments in an ensemble.

1. Take a deep breath. Review the entire volume of information so that you know what you are about to read. If it is too long, break the information into sections.

   Repetition is key. Use repetition out loud to remember the order of things:

   • Read the first paragraph.
   • Say it out loud without a cheat sheet.
   • Read the first and second paragraphs.
   • Repeat both points out loud until you can tell them without looking at the cheat sheet.
   • Read the first, second and third paragraphs.
   • Repeat all three out loud until you remember.
   • Repeat this process until you can tell all three points without a cheat sheet.
   • When you come to the end of the list, repeat it without reading. Say it out loud three times.
   • If you can't say all three times, start over.

2. Take a break. It's important to keep your mind fresh, so when you feel like you've roughly memorized something, take a break for 20 to 30 minutes. During this time, do something you enjoy and do not require effort (that is, something that does not require the use of knowledge), such as talking on the phone or taking a walk in the park. This will give your brain a break and time to move what you just learned into long-term memory. Excessive repetition of new concepts and learning different topics may interfere with this movement process.

   Check what you remember. After the break, check yourself again to see if you still remember everything. If you did everything correctly, the information will most likely be absorbed. If not, work with the section where you are having problems. Then take another short break and get back to business.

   Listen to yourself. First, record on a voice recorder all the information you need to remember, then turn on the recording for yourself when you go to bed. Although it doesn't work very well when learning new, unfamiliar information, repetition during sleep will help you remember information you've already consciously mastered.

   • You can purchase or make your own headband that will hold the headphones on your head while you sleep. This headband is often used by people who listen to relaxing music before bed.

3. Listen to others. If possible and if allowed, try recording lectures with a voice recorder. This will help you fill in the gaps in your notes and hear the lecture again. Often it is enough to listen to it two or three times to remember it without making any effort.

   Move around. Wander around the room, studying and repeating information to yourself. By moving, you use both hemispheres of your brain, and remembering the material will be much easier.

   Look through everything for each color separately, write and rewrite the points until you remember everything you need. By writing each item in the correct color under a heading of the same color, you will reinforce this association in your brain, and it will also help with the next item.

   Post your notes in a visible place, such as on your room door or closet door. Read them every time you pass by. Color-code information and arrange entries vertically, horizontally, or by time.

   Write and rewrite your notes often. When referring to your notes, review the points, rewrite them into a new note, and replace the existing one. If you have difficulty with one of the notes, rewrite it, take the old one and place it in a place where you will see it more often. Change its location from time to time.

   Find a study partner. Draw graphs/diagrams, write out explanations, and teach each other definitions to make it easier for both of you to remember them.

   Highlight what's important. Find the key words that are most important to what you are trying to learn, highlight them, memorize them, and then try to remember the rest. If you are reading an online PDF file, use the keyword highlighting feature. This will help you remember them and also help you quickly find the information you need when viewing the document again.

   Move around. Wander around the room, studying and repeating the information to yourself. When you move, both hemispheres of the brain work, and it is much easier to remember material.

Tactile/motor memory

If you prefer to receive information about objects by touching them, then you most likely have tactile memory.

• You like to feel information, if at all possible, by learning by doing. Here are some characteristics of people with tactile memory:
• You learn best when you do something—movement, practice, and tactile assistance make the information more real to you.
• You gesture actively when you talk.
• You remember events by what happened, not by what you heard, said, or saw.
• You are good at drawing, art, cooking, designing - activities that require manual manipulation of objects.
• You are enterprising and easy-going, and find it difficult to sit still for long periods of time.
• You don't like being cramped, you prefer to be in a place where you can stand up, move around, and take a break.

1. You don't like sitting in class when you could be doing something that will teach you more. You need space to move around, so don't sit in your room with the door closed while you study. The kitchen table may be a better location for your learning style.