Study Skills For College Students – Remember Everything You Study!
College is one of the most important undertakings in your life. You can spend 3, 4, 5 hours or more studying every single day! What if you could dramatically reduce your required study time, and remember everything you study?
Well guess what? You have the potential to be able to memorize, and remember, any information you need to, including entire textbooks! Memory is a skill, and it needs to be developed. Just as how you can’t get in physical shape by reading a book, you can’t get in mental shape by reading books about memory improvement. Training is the only way to get into shape, and training is the only way to improve your memory!
If we are to undertake a study of memory improvement, we first need to have a basic understanding of how the brain deals with information. The brain uses several different processes to handle information. The thinking, memorization, and remembering processes.
Thinking Process:
Thinking consists mostly of visual operations in our imagination. Images give understanding. This is such a natural process that you might not even realize that it happens, but information makes sense to us only if it can be represented with visual images. We can illustrate this with the following two sentences:
- The book is on the table. When you read that sentence, an image of a book on a table was generated in your mind. In other words, the sentence evoked images in your mind. This is the reason you understand the sentence. Compare this to our second sentence:
- The qwimjal is on the parchik. You don’t get any images from this sentence. With no visual representation, you don’t understand it.
Memorization Process:
The memorization process is directly connected with the thinking process. If you can represent information with visual images, you can memorize it easily and quickly. It is easier to memorize the sentence ‘There is a book on the table’ than it is to memorize the sentence ‘There is a qwimjal on the parchik’.
Let’s quickly examine just how your brain actually memorizes information. When you read the sentence ‘The book is on the table’, the information is ‘translated’ into visual images in your mind, a connection was created in your mind, and the information was memorized. Connections are created when two images are viewed together simultaneously in your mind.
Remembering Process:
All information is connected. When you remember one piece of the information set, the other piece is stimulated, and you remember.
Let’s look again at our two sentences. If tomorrow I asked you the question ‘What is on the table?’, the connected information element is stimulated, and you would remember ‘book’. If, however, I asked you ‘What is on the parchik?’, there would have been no understanding, no image-representation, and no information connection. With no connection, no recall is possible.
This is a simplified explanation of memory and how your brain works. For free memory-improvement tips, tricks, and techniques, along with more in-depth articles, visit these additional resources: