Keep It Inside your Brain

Shoutout to geralt and Pixabay.com

When learning things, many people think that the problem is to absorb the information, but It's quite the opposite, the real inconvenient is to prevent your mind from forgetting things once time passes.

This is a reality that we all face, and there are countless theories that explain how we forget things, such as just deleting information with time, new information taking the space of old data or forgetting the cues that trigger memories.

But this time, we're here to explain what we can do to prevent these things from happening. That's why, we'll go over some essential techniques for retention. If you are ready to stop forgetting things, keep reading.

Let's begin!

Spacing

The problem with the information we acquire is that sometimes, the intervals we put between learning sessions are either too long or too short. Having classes one time a month or every 2 hours won't assure you learn things efficiently and you'll find that when time passes, you'll forget quickly.

However, the solution is to space the intervals where you learn information. This can be seen easily in language learning software such as Duolingo, where you're asked questions from previous lessons in spaced intervals with a technique known as spaced repetition. However, this technique works better with single-answer questions and topics and not with subjects where we need to explain the progress.

Proceduralization

You might ask yourself why you remember riding a bicycle better than high school math, and the answer to that is the following:

Procedural Skills are remembered for longer than active recall skills.

But what are procedural skills?

We can call procedural skills those that we use in the practice of accomplishing a task: A procedure. Let's take as example riding a bicycle again. There is a set of steps that we have to take into account to drive a bike such as getting in the bike, grabbing the handlebar, keeping our equilibrium and turning by moving these handlebars.

However, you shouldn't get confused. With enough practice, any skill can turn into a procedural skill, as you internalize the procedure to get a correct output or solution through you efforts. Thus, the more you practice, the easier It will be for you to retain the information.

Overlearning

Just as the more we practice, we internalize the skills and we retain them for longer, If we use the same skills in harder topics, It'll also be harder for us to forget. This is the principle of overlearning, where If we go a little harder and use to skills to get much better results in harder topics, It will keep the information fresh in our brains.

So, then next you time to learn something, try to take a step further and use It to resolve the harder things. This will ensure that you keep the information.

Mnemonics

This is a technique used with regularity in language learning, where we convert words into images and symbolic figures. For example, when you're trying to learn something, you might take the pronunciation of a word such as Prost, which is salute in German, then Check out the pronunciation (Pros-st). The next thing you can do is imagine a professional, image that you can evoke in your mind when you try to remember things.

These are all the skills that you can use to remember things for longer. I hope you could have derived value for this article and that you can put in practice these strategies so you can keep your mind a stronghold of information

Thank you for your support and good luck!