Information is power. When you know how to learn faster and remember more, you have a superpower. Learning is only the first step—memorization matters just as much.
For a long time, I just assumed that I wasn’t a good memorizer. In fact, I thought it was one of my biggest weaknesses. Every time I tried to learn something that involved memorization, it took me longer than anyone else in my class, and I would often forget the information before taking an exam or quizzing myself. After struggling for so long and then suddenly having success after some advice from an older sibling, I learned a few principles about how to learn faster and remember more that changed my life.
The biggest key to memorizing information is to chunk it into smaller parts with mnemonics — that is, pairing information with imagery or other sensory cues. The more ridiculous and vivid your mnemonic, the easier it will be to recall later on because those images are much more memorable than abstract thoughts without any concrete connections. If I’m trying to memorize all of the world’s countries in alphabetical order, for example, I might picture a zoo where all the animals are named after countries in Africa (because they’re all “African” countries). Then
There are many techniques for learning faster, remembering more, and improving your memory. Here are some that you can try and see if they work for you:
1. Exercise: Exercise is great for your brain. It not only increases blood flow to the brain and encourages the growth of new neurons, but it also makes you smarter by helping you maintain a “younger” brain longer.
2. Make connections: When you learn something new, connect it with something else you already know—in another subject or area of life. For example, if you’re learning about World War II-era submarines, maybe you can use the knowledge to help solve a problem at work or remember where the item you need is in your kitchen pantry.
3. Use more senses when learning: For example, while reading a textbook, try making flashcards that relate what you’re reading to something else so that when you look at them later, they’ll be associated with more than just words on paper. Or try singing songs to learn the material in a foreign language or listening to music while doing math problems to make them easier to solve. The more senses you involve in learning, the easier it will be for your brain to recall the information later.
4. Be active: When working
If you want to learn faster and remember more, here are some guidelines to keep in mind:
1. Find out if you’re overloaded with information. If you have an exam coming up and a ton of reading to do, it’s likely that you’ll feel overwhelmed by the amount of information you need to learn. However, this feeling is often the result of being too busy with schoolwork and not managing your time effectively. So it’s important to ask yourself: “Where am I getting stuck?” You can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you’re finding that your work is taking longer than usual, it may mean that there are inefficient steps in your learning process, which will require some tweaking or restructuring on your part.
2. Get organized. You can’t create a plan for learning if you don’t know what your goals are and how to reach them. So before you think about how to learn faster, try to organize the information you want to learn so that it makes sense and is easy for you to access later on. This will help you more easily identify the holes in your knowledge, which will make it easier for you to fill them in with new material as necessary.
3. Understand why it’s important for you to remember the information
There are a few ways to learn faster and remember more, but the most important one is to make sure you’re studying for the right reasons. Most people want to learn more in order to get smarter, get better grades, or even get a job. But that’s backward! The first step in learning faster is to immediately forget everything you thought you knew about what it means to learn something.
Before we start: When I talk about “getting smarter,” I’m not talking about growing your intelligence or increasing your IQ or anything like that—if you’re asking how to get smarter, this article isn’t for you. I’m talking about getting better at skills and knowledge that have specific applications in the real world and can help you achieve your goals. For Examples: getting better at math so that you can understand your finances; learning a foreign language so that you can travel; getting better at chess so that you can win at chess; mastering speed reading so that you can read more nonfiction books; learning how to cook so that you can eat healthier foods and save money doing so. In short, achieving concrete goals, whether personal or professional, is what learning faster is all about.
So, how do we do it?
Learn how to learn: Learning faster starts
When it comes to learning, there are a lot of resources out there that claim to have the key to unlocking your potential, but what’s the truth? Is there really a method or technique that will help you learn faster and remember more?
Learning is made up of two main components: acquisition and consolidation. The acquisition is when you learn something new—any new information that your brain needs to absorb and make sense of. Consolidation can be thought of as putting what you’ve learned into storage. When you’re consolidating information, your brain is making connections between different bits of information, cementing them together so they’ll stick in your memory. Consolidation involves several different processes, including rehearsal, repetition, encoding strategies, sleep, and stress management. So basically, when you’re learning something new, you need to repeat it over and over again until it becomes second nature—you need to keep rehearsing it until it’s locked into your memory.
So what can you do to learn better? Well first off, think about the kind of learner you are: Do you learn best by talking things out with someone else? Or maybe you like to take notes while the lecture is going on. Maybe even just listening attentively helps pull everything together for you.
Whether you’re a student or not, learning how to learn is a skill that everyone can benefit from cultivating. Learning how to learn better allows you to learn new information faster, retain it longer, and apply it more effectively in the real world.
The first step is to realize that you already know how to learn, and your brain is already quite adept at doing so. In fact, your brain is so good at learning that it sometimes even tricks you into thinking you didn’t really understand something when you actually have! It’s all thanks to a phenomenon called “metacognition,” which involves your ability to think about thinking. It’s the reason why we sometimes say we “forgot” something when what really happened was that we misattributed our prior knowledge of an idea as proof that we never really learned it in the first place.
Metacognition lets us analyze what works best for us when learning and then repeat those things. For example, if you’ve noticed that whenever you watch a video on YouTube or read a blog post about a new topic, at first it’s hard for you to remember anything about it—but after trying again later with a few minutes’ break in between, suddenly everything about it seems crystal clear—you’ve just used
You may think your brain and memory work fine, but there are lots of ways to improve them. Here’s how to learn faster and remember more.
The first thing you need to know is that your brain never stops learning. That’s right—even as you read this blog post, you’re getting smarter! The only difference between ordinary people and geniuses is that geniuses have figured out how to tap into their brain’s vast potential for learning, and then they’ve learned how to make the most of it.
Here are some tips for doing just that:
-Create a positive mental environment. This one is huge. If you sit down and think about how much work there is to do before you can even get started on the task at hand, your brain will actually have a harder time learning the material! Try looking at the situation in a different light—try not to think about everything you need to do, but instead focus on the fact that you get to sit down and learn something today. Your brain will respond positively and will learn quicker!
-Take breaks. You should take a break after every 10-15 minutes of studying (or working on anything mentally stressful). It doesn’t matter if it takes 5 minutes or 15 minutes—just decide
