Welcome to the third chapter of the book. This section will deal with those classes of our readers who are in immediate need of a memory boost – students. Though the previous chapters are equally helpful for those pursuing any course in education, this chapter is more specific in nature when it comes to proving useful for students. Students are the kind of crowd you would get everywhere.
It does not matter which country you are from or what sort of standard of living you are accustomed to, if you are a student, you are surely going to benefit from this chapter.
Students, by the very nature of what they are supposed to do, are certainly in need of anything that has been prescribed here. It is their constant struggle to keep themselves updated with facts, figures, theories and ideas. Academics are an important phase of anyone’s life and must not be ignored and left to average performance. If you want to excel in academics, the first requirement that you must cater to is a good and sharp memory.
It is a general complaint of any average student that they are not able memorizes things right on time. Even if they do, they are not able to retain it beyond a particular time, and this time usually stops at the first week after the first reading. Below are enlisted some useful tricks to keep your memory up and running even if the number of times you have read your material is few.
Attention span can be best described as the amount and radius of focus you dedicate towards particular thing. Your attention span is usually measured in seconds and does not exceed three seconds on an average. The amount of time you spend on observing something can also be summarized as your attention span. The more your attention span, the more the time you spend memorizing something.
The very basis of memory improvement is that you spend enough time trying to understand a subject. If you want to improve your memory, you need to improve your attention span. Do not simply turn your head after looking at something that is supposed tone important. Spend enough time observing the thing’s behavior, peculiarities, exceptional qualities and anomalies. When you consume something in whole, you are bound to retain a major portion of it, as opposed to when you consume the same thing in portions and bits thereby retaining only a smaller amount of the same.
Staying Alert
Believe it or not, if you have a bad memory, most probably you are also suffering from a dull mind. Alertness is of prime importance when it comes to memory improvement. When your mind is dull and is shut down by something grave, you tend to stay less alert than usual. A lack of alertness can be caused by a range of factors that need to be eliminated, before you could move further down the lane.
Some the ways in which you could elevate your alert level are: Being alert is only a very general way to enhance memory. Even if you are someone with an excellent memory, you must try to be on alert the entire day.
Being alert involves not just observing everything that comes your way but also registering them in your mental radar to come back to later when it comes up. A student must always be on red alert regarding things that might matter to his academic life. Staying alert involves being attentive in classes, listening to every word the professor is uttering. It also includes staying updated on the recent developments in the field he is a student of. Many subjects are of the nature of changing all the time.
They keep shifting their dynamics from day to day. Such subjects are usually branches of Science since every moment there is a new discovery made, a new theory written, a new element stumbled upon.
Meals
You may not realize it yet but skipping meals leads to a lot of complications for you. Especially if you are a student, your meals matter the most to you. You practically start your day with a meal, i.e. breakfast. The breakfast is the most important meal of your day as it provides you with the energy to drag through the day.
It becomes all the more important for those pursuing academics, since they are always in the hurry to remember stuff. Food gives you the nutrients that help your memory not just pick things up fast, but also retain them for a long period of time. Meals should never be skipped in the rush of studying a lot. A lot of students commit the mistake of skipping meals in their hurry to finish their syllabus. Do not fall prey to the argument that if you skip meals and save time you will be able to study more. It is a gross misconception. When you skip meals, leave alone being able to study more, you tend to forget whatever you have mugged up so far.
Another common folly that students commit while preparing themselves for exams is that they tend to rot things up rather than understanding the concepts and the fundamentals of most subjects. Before you get down to mugging things, remember that this is a subject and a subject is not something that is to rot-learned. A subject has a history, a rich premise, an understanding that goes deeper than a few pages of published material. If you want to excel in studies, make sure that you get yourself familiar with the base of the subject you are trying to master.
It helps a lot when you have grasped the reasoning and the history behind a particular subject. I am speaking from my personal experience here. The more familiar you get with the history of your subject, the better positioned you are to grasp the branching out theories that flow from it. It is only by going to the root of a tree rather than reaching out to the leaves, that you will be able to nurture a tree, Your education is the tree, the pages its leaves, and the history of it its roots. Go to the roots to study the tree.
Familiarity Breeds Memory
A major blunder that students worldwide do is that they start preparing for their exams a night before the scheduled date. I am personally guilty of the same blunder and hence, yet again I am speaking from experience. Allow yourself time to prepare for an exam. You may not realize it but the more time you spend with something, the better etched it remains in your head. Try recalling songs you listened to in your childhood.
You would be surprised at how clearly you remember the tunes if not the exact lyrics. Why else do you think we can so clearly remember some of our fondest memories from our past? It is only because we spent enough time building those memories. Grow familiar to your subjects. This is the most basic way to excel at your subject. Try to pick up your reading material and studying it while you are hanging out in your lawn in a sunny afternoon. This way you not only keep yourself engaged but also slowly but surely get familiar with something you are to encounter after a few months.
Of course, study material related to academics bore most students but try to think of them as leisurely activities and not a burden and then you will be good. Most tedious of all courses can be tackled well if sufficient time is spent studying them. When you are studying your reading material in your leisure hours, make sure you do not focus all your energy understanding every detail given there. You will most likely find it dull that way.
Try speed-reading your subject while on leisure. This way you will find out that despite not getting what has been written, you will at least register the experience thereby creating a by default folder in your mind. The very experience of failing to grasp a concept will create a memory in your mind that in turn will register itself. Hence, even in failures you end up retaining something that is important to you. Grow familiar with your studies in order to create the perfect atmosphere for studying them with ease a night before.
Over time, there have been invented a plethora of literary devices to help student gain mastery over education. These literally devices are each unique in their own ways. Not every student is perfect. Even the top scoring student has doubts and second thoughts of his own. Try chatting with someone who has scored good in some subject and you will discover that they took help of literary devices at some stage or the other. Some of the most used literary devices used worldwide are enlisted below:
Buzzwords
A buzzword is a word that triggers a train of chain of thoughts in your mind. You must have read a hundred scrolls regarding a particular topic and yet when it comes to the moment of performance nothing comes to your mind. However, there is always a bunch of such words that are so fundamental to the topic that their mere utterance or recalling even triggers you to recall the entire topic as you read it. Allot buzzwords to separate topics.
By doing so, you will realize that you have for each topic just one word to recall. Hence, with the help of just one word you will be able to write and memorize the knowledge contained in a hundred scrolls. Buzzwords are really helpful when it comes to retaining stuff that is lengthy in nature. For example, imagine a law student having issues with recalling the punishment prescribed for murder, homicide and suicide.
The word that connects these three offences is ‘life’ and somehow he is not able to recall what these three separate offences stand for. However, if he recalls just one word that is ‘life’, everything that he has read about these three offences comes rushing to his mind. This is how buzzwords help you recall things that are complicated and lengthy to remember.
Acronyms are nothing but new words formed from a group of words. An acronym is usually a fun thing to remember. The ordinary set of words may not make sense to you but when converted into an acronym, they somehow relate to the main subject and are fun to say out loud. This way it is ensured that you enjoy memorizing things in the best way possible. For instance, a student having problems with recalling the nine planets of the solar system could easily take help of the following acronym
My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets
Let us understand how acronyms work. Take the first letter of each word of the above sentence. Mercury. Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are the nine planets whose names can be inferred by simply recalling a mere sentence.
Acrostics
The difference between an acronym and an acrostic is that while in the former, a sentence is formed; in acrostics, a word is formed. The basic underlying principle of both of the devices is the same, i.e. to recall the original words from fun words or letters. Let me illustrate how an acrostic works: You must have studied physics at some point of time in your life.
If you are a student, you must have come across the phenomena of splitting of light into its constituent colors. These colors are seven in number and often prove headache to most students. However, a simple acrostic called Vibgyor could be recalled in order to exactly spell out all the colors in the rainbow. Violet, Indigo, Blue, green, yellow, orange and red are the seven primary colors that can be seen in a rainbow and recalling them has been made easy by a mere word.
Historians who were also public speakers first used the famous Method of Loci. It was a common hindrance for such people when they would not exactly remember what teachings they were about to impart to the onlookers. Having embarrassed themselves scores of times, they devised a method to remember exactly how they experienced it. The Method of Loci is a very practical way to remember things. Here is how it works. Imagine walking from your college to your home. You will come across the grocery store, the neighbor’s house, the local park and various other such landmarks while you are on your way.
Now, repeat this every day when you actually walk back from college to home. Having successfully implanted this route inside your mind, it is now a child’s play for you to remember things. All you have to do next is associate each landmark with something you have to remember for your exams. For example, you could associate your neighbor’s house with the Pythagoras theorem because of the shape and placement of his house.Method of Loci is a beautiful way to not just recall stuff that you tend to forget but also retain them for your life as this is based on something you have personally experienced and devised. The Method of Loci as has been mentioned is entered around one’s personal experiences in life and is bound to vary from person to person. Every person has his or her own forms of executing the method. However, the method has been proved to have worked in most cases and has seen few instances of failures.
A major mistake most students make while studying for exams is that they try to take in everything all at once. You need to grasp the concepts of taking in parts. When you divide your studies into compartments and sections, each to be studied at different time and according to varying moods, you are bound to achieve success. No one has ever succeeded at studying and retaining everything at once. Give your mind some time to recover from the intense studying you have done in the past some hours. Take constant breaks so as to allow your memory to first register everything that went into it. Let the windows of your mind and memory stay open for a while before diving to study further.
Rhymes and Rhythms
Are you familiar with ancient folklores about famous mythological verses like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata? One story says that the sages who told the world about these stories sang them. Now, Mahabharata happens to be one of the longest stories the world has ever heard, with its verses going as long as eighteen thousand pages. Do you know the secret behind how someone could just ‘speak’ the stories to masses?
It was said that these sages simply sang these stories. It has been scientifically proved that when you convert something into a song, with a set tune that does not change the next time you sing it, it sticks with you. Tunes have a certain retaining power to them. When you repeat tunes, they are bound to stay back in your head and with enough practice; they come naturally to you when you try to recall something. Convert your study material that is proving difficult for you, into songs and rhymes.
A good mnemonic device, though not per se, is association. You cannot study in isolation, i.e. when you study you cannot separate its parts into dull individual bits and hope to remember them all in the end. Everything that you read is connected within itself. For example, if you are reading about the French Revolution then you are bound to remember something about the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is called the technique of association. One part is always connected in this way or that to the others.
