How to improve your memory in a simple step

Can you remember the plot of the last blog you read? The last movie you watched? Or even the last song you listened to?

Technology has enhanced the way how we lived and has made it simpler for almost any task that requires our mental and physical effort. However, every blessing comes with its curse. We're getting used to relying on a computer every single process that we should be using our brains.

What's the problem?

Over the last few decades, retaining information has been a less valuable skill due to the facility we have to store and retrieve data at any time. "Why would spend time learning something if you might just look for it when you need it?" This is what our brain said.

Research has shown that our expectation of having access to the information later has influenced our recall rate. This effect has been around and growing since we started using the most primitive data storage system. The most available (easy to access) the information is, the most prone we are to forget it.

We also notice a similar effect with those who binge-watched series. A study of the University of Melbort found that people who watch between 2-6 episodes of the same series in one sitting tend to forget most of the situations which happened in the show in less than 1 month.

Watching a marathon of our favorite TV show leaves us with none or low memory usage. Our brain will miss its agility on memory recall as long as we keep it quiet.

How can we keep it the information longer in our mind?

Unfortunately, we can't keep the amount of information we're consuming daily, but what we can do is identify which are those concepts that should be retained. First off, once you finish a chapter, episode, article, or any other kind of information, we need to choose specifically what is the main idea of the author/director and the key points that'd be worth storing in your quick-access memory.

You have to write down those special questions that you want or might be asking yourself shortly. For example:

Let's imagine you have been reading the Lean Startup book by Eric Ries (actually, its a personal recommendation ), the book's idea is explaining how to apply the "lean" methodology in software development or any entrepreneurial endeavor, Therefore, this will be our first special question, What is the lean manufacturing methodology?. Other questions might be base on our interest in the diverse topic around the cases shown by Eric, like Why release an MVP is important? or When should I consider pivot the project?

Wrapping up

Now we realize what are those habit that could affect our memory capabilities and what we can do to improve it. Ultimately, we can use additional references to support your brain in order to get a better and ease recall.

Let me know what do you think about it or what strategy has worked for you?