5 Tips to Improve Your Memory

Monday, May 28, 2007 at 05:28pm by David Askaripour in Life

Associate things:

When you are at an entrepreneurial gathering you are bound to meet plenty of new entrepreneurs. A myriad of names will be running through your head all night, so how will you remember them all? Well, of course you’ll have their business card, but that alone won’t imprint their names in your head. One trick is to associate each person’s name with an object, a certain thought, or any abstract thing that helps you to remember. For example, say you meet someone named “Tom Salvia”… in your head, associate “Tom Salvia” with a more familiar name to you such as “Tom Cruise.” Now what you are doing is building a neural connection in your brain between those two names and it’ll help you remember your new friend Tom.

Relax:

Science has proven that when you are relaxed and free of stress, your mind is better equipped to absorb memory. So relax, take a few deep breaths, and clear your mind.

Heck, even some good ol’ yoga can increase your memory:

Yogic exercises are also helpful in improving memory power and reduce forgetfulness. Practice the yogic exercises with the feeling that the memory power is improving and forgetfulness is reducing. (source)

Be passionate:

If you are truly passionate and enthusiastic about what you are learning it’ll be easier to remember. If you just met another entrepreneur who is explaining his theory on water molecules and you couldn’t give two sh*Ts about molecules, then I doubt that you’ll remember that conversation. However, if you meet someone that starts talking about his new web app and you, too, happen to be into web apps, then you’ll automatically retain more of that conversation — simply because you’re interested in the topic.

Create a list:

Write things down! Sure, sounds simple but it really works. When you write things down you are visually capturing them in your mind and reinforcing weak memory ties in your mind.

Drink some of this stuff:

Ginko biloba, green tea, and ginseng. These various herbs, supplements, and teas improve blood circulation to the brain and provide your brain with an abundant amount of powerful memory-enhancing antioxidants. *Please consult your physician before consuming any of the mentioned supplements.

So start now and work on improving your memory while you are young. An article from Psychology Today teaches us that our memories begin to cluster when we are younger:

Memories tend to cluster in the years between ages 10 and 30, says David Rubin, Ph.D. He offers several possible explanations. Perhaps we recall events from our teens and twenties because so many of them were “firsts,” and their novelty made them memorable. It may be that the emotion and excitement that accompanied these events vividly I imprinted them on our minds. Or perhaps our early attempts to establish stability provide a sort of template for adulthood. Possibly, it is nothing about the memories themselves that make them better remembered, but how they are stored in the brain. We’re at our sharpest mentally when we’re young, and so have more mental resources to efficiently encode information. That, in turn, makes them easier to retrieve–and reminisce over–later on.

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