Turinys
We forget passwords from personal accounts, leave the keys on the bedside table in the hallway, remember an important meeting five minutes before it starts. Is it possible to tune your brain to work without bugs? Certainly! It’s all about training.
Why does memory deteriorate? There are many reasons: stress, lack of sleep, the head is busy with mortgage calculations, and there is absolutely no time to eat normally. In addition, we trust many processes to a smartphone — our memories are stored in it: favorite photos, necessary files, phone numbers; the navigator shows us the route, we think not in our minds, but with a calculator.
In everyday reality, we no longer need to rely only on our own memory. And everything that is not used is lost. And the memory does not go away alone. With it, we leave a restful sleep and concentration.
You can return the ability to memorize and even make it a point of pride with the help of “fitness for the brain,” neuropsychologist Lev Malazonia encourages us. Only we will train not biceps and triceps, but visual and auditory memory. At the end of the workout, we will pay attention to working with “heavy weight” — we will improve long-term memory. Here’s what a neuropsychologist suggests.
We train visual memory
Since childhood, we know that «it is better to see once than hear a hundred times.» How to remember what you once saw and attributed to the “important” section? Here are two practices.
«Artist without a brush»
Have you always wanted to draw? Create drawings without canvas and brushes, using only your imagination. Look at your favorite hibiscus or any item you like. Close your eyes and imagine it in every detail. Remember every detail and mentally apply strokes to your masterpiece layer by layer. Imagine how new objects, colors appear in the picture. Open your eyes, face reality.
«Highlight in the text»
Take an unfamiliar book, newspaper, even a social network feed will do. Let the fragment be small. For example, like this paragraph. Open the text, read it and immediately close it. Try to remember the essence of what was written. In the process of training, gradually increase the fragments of the text. And after a couple of weeks, add a twist: think of an arbitrary letter and try to remember how many times she met in the passage.
We train auditory memory
If you’re a student, a regular planner, a podcaster, or an intelligence worker, then listening to memory is an important superpower for you. Add a couple more practices to your workout.
«Hearing»
You will need an online narrator or any application capable of reading text at the desired speed. Copy a piece of text with at least ten words. This may be a list of terms on the topic under study, the names of colleagues, cities of the world or interesting facts. The application will voice it and save it to your smartphone. You will get the opportunity to play this short track at any time to practice memorizing it by ear. Listen to the audio recording until you completely memorize it. You can’t look at the printed text. We train auditory memory!
«In the Footsteps of Miss Marple»
Do you walk and know perfectly well how many steps a day will improve your health? While walking in the park or on the way to the office, continue to train your memory and in a couple of months you will become a listening genius. Where to begin? Listen to what passers-by say, remember random snippets of phrases. After the walk, remember the sequence in which you heard these phrases. The peculiarity of the technique is that the phrases are not connected in any way — associations and visual images will help to remember them. Therefore, at the same time you will develop associative thinking.
We train long-term memory
If we regularly repeat what we once remembered, these memories are stored in long-term memory and are restored even after injuries. Let’s pump this kind of memory.
«Like now…»
Remember in detail what you ate for lunch yesterday, repeat the events of the day in chronological order. Remember those with whom you met, their words, facial expressions, gestures, clothes. This will lead to real (scientific) magic: you will soon begin to accurately reproduce useful information that you could not remember before.
«X minus one»
Let’s play. In ordinary cards — but in an unusual way. Take the deck so that the cards are face up, look at the very top. Then move it to the end of the deck and call it out loud (and you are already looking at the next one at this time). Move the second card to the end of the deck and name it while looking at the third. Soon you will be able to name not only the previous, but the pre-previous or even earlier map.
We fix the result
Sometimes we start to do the exercises, but a week or two passes, the impression of novelty is erased, progress slows down. Remind yourself at this point that it is easier to maintain a skill by constantly maintaining it. The easiest way to maintain what has been achieved is to repeat the training regularly, in the end, turn it into a ritual. Choose one practice that you love the most, adapt it for yourself and do it daily. For example, every day before lunch, remember what you ate yesterday. Try to remember, approaching the house, what brand, color were the last three cars that you passed by. Little rituals make a big memory. Now you will definitely succeed.