Sometimes during reading a book, we happen to
learn a thing interesting enough to feel confident. But we slowly tend to
forget it after we have finished reading the book. We brood over this problem a
hundred times in our life which entails frustration.
People of every age group face the question - How
to preserve the information read from books in the mind forever?
Students face this problem irrespective of the
field they pursue. Normally, they complain of forgetting the details of a topic
they read lately in their textbooks even after going through it a couple of
times. Sometimes, it involves very important stuff which needs to be
remembered.
Grownups learn some intriguing content from a
blog article or a good self-help book and over a period of time they seem to
lose it.
Whether you are an engineer or an analyst you
face issues of remembering the details of your project or find it difficult to
remember the numbers. When we face such problems in keeping our memory intact it
puts a big question mark on our brain and leads to moments of annoyance.
I am no memory expert but it has been proved
that with a little bit of classification of information and proactiveness we
can preserve information in memory for a very long time.
Following are 7 tricks which, if followed,
will definitely help in long storage of meaningful content in your mind -
1. Sticky
Notes – You must have been familiar with this technique for always.
You can preserve information in a very short form in the sticky notes. You need
to ensure that the information stored is not vague and is precise and clear.
An important thing to note here is where you
stick your sticky notes and when to look at them. Most people make use of
sticky notes but fail to even catch a glimpse of them; this is where you can
get an edge over others.
Looking at the information noted in the sticky
notes on Thursday/Friday/Saturday mornings will definitely help, why? The
reason is your mind will be looking forward to the weekends. :)
2. Knowledge Index – I am
not against building a web directory of information or noting all the important
content in a notebook. However, I am going a bit different here with
maintaining a diary; don’t think I tell you to write important information or a
paragraph of an article you find interesting in it, however, I exhort you to
use this diary to create your own indexes.
Start with 3-5 words to describe the info and write the page number of the
book or the address of the website, where you found it, in front of it. Maintaining
this diary is going to do the work of integrating the pointers to information
in one repository. Revisiting the information using it will map your mind with
the index you created and you will end up remembering the information for a
long time.
3. Implementation – Well,
if cooking is your hobby then you must know that how making a recipe - read
from good Cookbooks - couple of times help you remember it every time in the
future. This is the magic of implementation.
If you are fond of self help books you can
bring a big change in your life by implementing the lessons mentioned in the
books and believe me, this is the best way to remember.
Practical implementation is very important. It
helps you to assimilate the essence of information or lessons you get to read
from books.
As an example, Science is there in everything
around us and also inside us, hence, science students can definitely find most
of the topics inside their books around them, they just have to stretch their
thinking a bit to relate the lessons from their academic books with them.
Believe me the results will be very positive.
Please be selective with your topics in
implementing them, you are wise enough to comprehend what to consider for
practical implementation.
4. Non-productive
time – Pay attention to your non-productive time and use it to run
through the information in your mind.
Your non-productive time can be when you wash
clothes or when you wait in the queue at a retail store, when you take a ride
in cab or even when you feel lazy to get up from the bed in winters.
Start a mental discussion. You may face
problems in the beginning but do not desist from continuing the discussion. Mind
is very powerful, it will quickly start relating the stuff with each other and
this way you can form your own network of information in your own non productive time.
5. Infographics – With
the continuing evolution of technology, it is now possible to create an
infographic much faster. As we all are aware of the fact that mind responds
more to the visual content, this is one of the best ways to grasp and remember
the information read from a good book or a wonderfully-written article.
This will surely develop one more skill of
summarizing and transforming the information into graphics for you.
An infographic can be very sophisticated or as simple as a drawing by hand, it’s your choice.
People who would not make use of software can simply draw it portraying the
information graphically.
6. Teaching – By teaching
I don’t ask you to take a professor’s job in a college. When you read something
good from a book or a blog, try to impart the wisdom and information gained to
others but please be absolutely selective
of people you are going to
discuss the information with, as sharing it with the ‘not so interested’
people may lead to creation of a
pretentious and presumptuous image of yours.
If at all you are unable to find people to
discuss the information with, then start writing a journal or a blog. Writing
information or lessons learnt in a journal is not a far cry from sharing it
with people, hence, do not get discouraged.
7. Your own
voice is boon – Most people mention ‘listening music’ as their hobby in their
resumes and that is how they happen to remember a lot of music stuff from tip
to toe.
You must have understood by now where I am
going with this, yes, recording your voice, while reading something important,
in your smart phone makes an audio knowledge bank in your smart phone. If
auditory learning suits you then this approach will help you boost up your
memory in miraculous ways and preserve information like forever.
You can hear these audio records while riding
bike, driving your car or even when you are waiting in a long line of ATM
hoping to withdraw money :)
With this we come to the end of this post.
Hope you enjoyed it!!
HaPPy ReADiNg !!
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