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- How to make things more memorable
Your memory is like a big library of electrical patterns. Each one of them is a memory. When your brain recognizes something familiar to the electrical pattern in your library, you recall it.
But to put things in your library, they need to be important. Or at least seem important to your body. Because your cerebellum (long-term memory) doesn’t care about remembering them. Makes sense?
If you have your typical lunch, it won’t be memorable. But if something significant (negative or positive) happens right after your lunch, you’ll remember your lunch forever.
A memory isn’t only saved because of how alert you feel at the moment. Science showed that the ending of a lesson or event plays as big a role in actual learning. Example: you watch a sports match end with a late winner. Then you can remember all the details about the time and place you watched it.
Like, even though you watched the whole game, the goal or point in the last minute, made everything before it more memorable. So the spike at the end made you remember everything before.
If you want to remember things more, you can use this tool. It’s pretty powerful.
Next time you want to learn something. Or you want to remember a certain event. End it with a peak. This way you send a signal to your brain to remember it. So cool!
You can do this with exercise, breathing, music, etc. But a simple thing is to just do something active. ideas: run, listen to upbeat music, drink coffee, eat sugar
Give yourself that dopamine/adrenaline hit. You don’t need huge spikes. The experiments measured relative increases in adrenaline. So it can be anything as long as it’s more stimulating than how you felt while receiving the info or experience.
So , to remember this tool, go spike adrenaline :) kidding.
If you’re in a learning phase, think of one thing you want to learn today (now). And spike adrenaline after it.
If you want to remember things overall, then notice something you’re excited about today. And spike adrenaline after it happens.
To remember things more today, spike adrenaline after learning or experiencing them
Example experiment
McGaugh and Cahill did experiments where they gave people a boring paragraph to read and only a boring paragraph to read. One group of subjects was asked to read a boring paragraph and then to place their arm into ice water after (which increases adrenaline). They found that the boring information that they read previously, just a few minutes before, was remembered as well as emotionally intense information. Even though emotionally intense info is usually more memorable.
You can do this for you too!
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