How to memorise and study properly and easily

Recently I was asked on this blog if I could provide tips to aid learning scientific information at a high level. Actually, I intend to write an E-book on the subject and have already drafted much of it to go into depth with the very techniques I teach daily here in Bangladesh.

I developed these ideas over many years and with a lot of research into the current theories around partly because of being a teacher and needing to find the best ways to cram knowledge into my students’ heads but mostly because, frankly, I have the worst memory in the world! These techniques, then, have all been used by me personally and I continue to use them daily.

I found the whole subject of memorising fascinating and have been hooked since my early days after reading (as seems obligatory these days) the incredible Use Your Head by Tony Buzan. I shamelessly add a link to it with this blog and although nowadays the information it contains is a little out of date or simplistic, it is still the ideal starting point for anyone interested in learning how memory works and how to get the most out of your brain. I will also include some other links to books I have read and derived much benefit from. Do check them out.

Despite Buzan’s wonderful work his, and all other books I have read, really do not look at studying holistically and pragmatically from the student’s point of view. Rather they teach a technique (or techniques) and leave it up to the reader to work out how to put it all together for their own study. Few give decent lists of information to get on with practising memorising. If I am a student I probably want to know how to memorise historical dates or chemical formulae, not the wine lists of Bordeaux! Whilst those of us (sad as we are) may thoroughly love doing such memory work for the sheer pleasure of knowing we can bore the pants of someone at a party with our astounding trivial knowledge, the fact is, it is not very useful.

So, the system I have developed (and yes, it is adapted from many previous memory aids) is aimed primarily at students but anyone who wants to use their memory better will benefit. The big problem we have in schools both in the UK and Bangladesh is that how to study and memorise really is not taught properly. They are getting there but we are far from being ready. At my school here I insist on one lesson a week just dedicated to teaching students how to study. We need children learning these techniques as early as possible because the success of this system relies on it becoming a habit. For many this will seem odd, difficult and a lot of efforts but, like anything, it needs practice. Eventually, it becomes totally automatic.

Follow these methods and practise them and you will see a significant improvement to how well you hold information. It should also be much more fun! This being a blog I cannot give an awful lot of information, nor spruce it up in a fancy way but here is my quick guide to studying and memorizing along with some of the thinking behind it and some examples of the kind of studying myself or my students are doing at the moment:

The 10 point system

Before you begin

1)      Have a banana and drink regularly – Bananas more than other fruit give slow release energy and are better than coffee or tea to stimulate your mind. You need to be alert and fresh when beginning any study session. Likewise, when you feel yourself flagging go get a drink of water. Make yourself get it. That way you move, giving yourself exercise, refresh yourself with water which will help you concentrate better and is healthy for you and you will get a short natural break.

2)      Short, medium and long term memory - (learn, practise, revise) – The basic science from the psychologists says that our brains process new information by putting it into ‘short’ memory slots. This lets you remember a 5 digit number for a few minutes but quickly disappears. This is the Learning stage.

To move it into ‘medium’ memory it needs repetition so that it can be held for longer, like for a day or just long enough so you get through that exam at the end of the week. But, once the practice stops, it is swiftly forgotten. A year later and you can’t remember any of it. This is the Practise stage.

To enter permanent or ‘long term’ memory you need to have gone over the new information many, many times over a long period of time. The steps to follow, then, mirror this way the brain works. It means that if you want to know your stuff with confidence before that exam, you need to be getting on with the process of committing it to memory now rather than wait until ‘exam leave’. The sooner you begin, the more practice you get and the more information is stored in your long term memory. You may feel you won’t need that knowledge once that exam is passed but by committing it so deeply it means recall is almost instantaneous giving you both time to spare (for checking) and confidence in exams. This is the Revise stage.

Learn

3)      Short burst activity – it has taken me all day to write this short article but in that time I have also studied some Hebrew, Bangla, read several chapters from four different books, practised the Tobla and Piano, prepared my next lessons, answered 10 important and long emails and finished the draft for a feature for my hometown local newspaper. Ok, ok, I know. I am an obsessive short-burst activity fan but that is because it has become a habit for me. I’ve been working like this for 25 years and not once ever contemplated a better system.

The point is that the brain concentrates well for around 20-25 minutes and then loses concentration rapidly. You can keep it working well by changing focus. A new and very different activity is much better than the traditional ‘taking a rest’ philosophy often taught by schools. For instance, when teaching music I have always recommended that students, rather than give up practise time when exams are nearing, they should increase it! I would recommend that after 20-30 minutes of revision they should go practise the guitar or piano or whatever for 10-15 minutes. Then they should go back to academic revision and alternate in this way for the whole revision session. This way the brain keeps active and does not ‘fall asleep’.

4)      Understand your work – It is vital when studying that you thoroughly understand the principles behind the things you are trying to learn. No point rote-learning what fuels are siphoned off in the fractional distillation of crude oil if you have no idea what fractional distillation actually is. Don’t wait for your teacher to tell you – go online and find out for yourself. The more you understand the principles underlying the work you have to remember, the easier it is to remember it.

Practice

5)      Lights, camera, action and painting by numbers – The single key secret to memorising as is recommended by all good books on memory is to make pictures in your mind. We see picture much, much better than we remember words so turn everything into a picture. The funnier, the sillier and even the ruder the better (no one will know!). Anything to help keep it in your mind. As a result you find yourself smiling or giggling a little when you remember some important fact. This is where really understanding your subject comes in as important. If you are memorising bones of the body, for instance, which are usually named with Latin words that give a clue to their position or function or are named after a person associated with them, then knowing this helps you get a strong picture.

Best of all, where possible, link pictures into stories. Narrate them in your mind and make a silly little story out of them. You don’t just make pictures but you make one flow into another.

Finally, a simple system for remembering numbers (I have a more complex but highly useful one that I will share when I complete the e-book) is to use objects that rhyme with them, thus – one = bun; two = shoe; three = tree; four = door and so on. So, putting it all together and you might get the following:

I see myself in front of a huge tower and can hear lots of bubbling inside. A pipe at the bottom has come from the sea and I can see oil pumping along it into the tower. As I climb the tower I come to a door which I open. I notice the door is creaky and needs oiling. I continue up and open the next one and see a tree with a diesel engine sticking out of it(I didn’t say it had to be sensible!). Next up is a door that reveals an old Paraffin lamp which I use to look in and notice the lamp is actually burning two shoes. Finally I go up one more level where I see a man trying to get his motor bike started. Looking in the petrol tank I see the problem is it is stuffed full of bread buns

Did you spot the numbers 1-4? They were there and this picture actually tells me the temperature for the distillation of the various substances – Lubricating oil, Diesel, Paraffin and Petrol - from crude oil and their uses. Chemistry students (or at least mine!) should be able to see how the story relates. I could tell that story to my seven year old son and know he would have it memorised with only a couple of retellings but there is no way I would expect him to learn the O level standard Chemistry! This gives you a quick example of how easy and powerful this method is.

6)      The Memory house and similar links – This idea has been around a long time and, in fact, the infamous character of Hannibal Lecter is revealed to be using this method himself to both escape into another world in his mind and to explain his vast superior memory. Here we put our memories into rooms assigned for specific subjects. A room for chemistry, another for history and so on. I have adapted this method and use many rooms and houses that are associated, for me personally, with that task.

For instance, despite now living in Bangladesh, I always picture going into my house in the UK to remember shopping lists. This is because I was living there when I first began to memorise any shopping trip (whether for a few items or more than 30) and now my front porch is forever linked with supermarket buying! Likewise, any chemistry data I have memorised is stored in my image of the science lab at my school here in Bangladesh. This is because it is where the majority of my teaching of chemistry is done so it is the logical place to hold it. I have an entire building -a church and its offices in Paris- dedicated to musical history because I spent some time there during my university days and composed one of my favourite pieces of music there. The woman running the music group was also an amazing musician, great singer and easily the best classical organist I have ever heard. I have strong musical ties to that place so I use it for my music!

Another important idea is to cross-reference ideas. Some books refer to this as being a little like the London Underground Tube map. Individual lines or circles of information that cross over or connect to others. For instance, my Chemistry room has story lines for Acid information and for Alkaline/Bases but it also has one for Ions, Metals and Non-metals. Actually often these strands coincide with each other so I make them join up physically in my head, like two streets intersecting each other and then carrying on. This is more advanced and I will give more advice on this in the e-book.

Revise

7)      Now-why-did-I-put-that-there method – It is now important that you revise what has been learnt in your study sessions. Practise is the key but it is best done in short bursts just like the learning. One excellent way is to practise your memory skills at the same time and attach random objects to your revision. So, find things you know you are going to come across regularly like pens, drinks, the toilet (!), your handbag, mp3 player and so on. For each object now picture it attached to just one set of information you have memorised (bones of the skull for instance).

So for my distillation information I might attach a bottle of coke in my fridge. I really picture the image. Now, every time I go to get a drink and I see or use that bottle I will suddenly recall that I need to revise distillation information. The aim is to do so as quickly as possible – whilst I pour the drink for instance. This is like the traditional idea of sticking post-it notes up everywhere except that with that idea you can very easily begin to no longer see them or just read from them without really concentrating because you have done it so often. This method is improved further if you try to put objects in an unusual place where you are bound to see them and think “why did I put that there?” Then you will remember you have to revise that bit of knowledge! So go put your bag in front of your bedroom door when you go to bed. Then, in the morning you will have to move it to get out and instantly know you must recall your memory aid for something. Do it as you have breakfast or clean your teeth!

8)      Short note practice – I am very against the traditional method of writing out the stuff you memorised. No point and it just wastes time. It IS useful however, to make short notes. Bullet point writing means you get the important facts down fast. This is the key point really – how fast can you recall the information? When it is near instantaneous every time you do it then you know you have reached that ultimate goal of committing it to the long term memory. This should give you the confidence to know you will go into the exam and very quickly recall the information even though you may be nervous. The shortest notes possible then and in bullet point form.

9)      Exam practice – The final test is to try doing actual exam questions, preferably in a set time if possible. Work out how long a question should take and see if you can recall the information correctly in that required time. This is the only time you should be writing information out in full as you are practising time management, trying to make sure you can answer the question within the time limit.

10)  When you still can’t quite remember it – At any time along the way that you find you cannot recall the information properly, fully or at speed, go back to stage 1 again begin the process again. This time is should be faster, easier and more secure. If a memory aid has not worked properly, refine it or replace it with a better one. Sometimes two or three different pictures for the same think will help reinforce each other. I memorise around 10-20 Bangla words each day but as most of them only crop occasionally in conversation, the practice time I have for them is limited. I can reasonably expect that up to 80% of them I will have forgotten within a day or two. But each time I come to a word I have forgotten and look up its meaning again, I redo stages 5 and 6 reinforcing or improving the picture further. Eventually – and usually fairly swiftly – the word will stick with little time or effort used and I can feel a sense of progress being made even as I am still learning the word.

Well that is the short guide! As I say, I hope to get an E-book out before long which will go into more detail about each step, give lots of memory examples and tips along the way. The basic ideas here can be applied to most kinds of study – even learning an instrument or drawing! The key benefits to this method are:

·        The process is very swift and gets faster the more you use it.

·        It requires very little or no writing down other than the initial notes you made in lessons or from textbooks (and if you make this a well used habit, then in years to come I see no reason why you could not do away with making any notes at all – many have succeeded in doing this and can recall facts, figures or discussions from meetings held long ago with perfect recall despite not having photographic memories)

·        It makes learning fun (or at least bearable).

·        It enables you to link ideas together in a meaningful way helping you not just memorise but also really understand your subject.

·        It provides an easy approach to revision (in fact, by effectively revising all the time you should not find that before the exam you feel under any pressure to do extra ‘cramming’ at all) and builds itself up as you use it repeatedly.

·        You can learn multiple subjects at the same time without feeling like your heading is ‘bursting’ and it is all ‘falling out’ – a common problem for students who try to ‘cram’ information in. In fact, step 3 indicates that the more (and different) subjects you have, the better!

Maybe you have your own techniques for memorising? Feel free to share a comment about them here. Good luck with your own studying and I hope these tips give you the edge you need to pass that exam!