It has to be mentioned that a very important role in our memory has the attention. It is easier to remember if when concentrating on something, you give it a personal meaning or association.The most simple and frequent ways to create that personal interaction are the repetition and elaboration.
Repetition can create familiarity, lead to understanding. Repetition is often seen as a boring and usually as an effort to simply memorize rather than understand,but for many persons with learning difficulties, repetition is indispensable.
Elaboration implies the creation of a valuable circumstance for the experience by bringing together visual, auditive and other info related to the fact. When surfing on web gathering information about that fact, the person is creating more entry points for that part of information.
These techniques help us to get a better memory at a behavioural point, not at the basic brain structure. As a person gets older, her brain's "working" speed slows down - this is the main cause it is harder to learn and memorize new things. With age our brain also becomes less flexible, what means it is harder to get used to new learning scheme.
There are a very few exercises that possibly could speed up a little the brain's processing activity, but even if the speed of processing has slowed, there are strategies to use for increasing the learning performance.
Concentration, focus, alertness, heightened awareness and motivations are most a matter of attitude. The most problems with memory have a very little to do with the memory itself. They are the result from a failure to focus on a given fact.
When trying to remember something, focus only on it. Switch off the TV or radio - any speach or sounds automatically gain a part of our brains attention capability, it's not necessarily for you to realize it.
If you learn something new, remember to take some breaks as the information for different facts can interfere with one another when you are studying them.
Our brain is remembering things going by their meaning, but if we'd spend a little effort extra up front for creating the meaning, it would need less effort later for recalling it. When we read or hear a word, we do not already know - for instance, "phocine" - the brain needs to work harder. First of all we have to recall how to spell it - even look in dictionary; also we will see that is has the meaning of "seal-like", and its pronunciation is "fo-sine". So, the image of a seal in our mind is linked to the sound of the word and its spelling, forming memory links. when there are more links, its easier later to recall the word.
It is important to imagine things, to see their picture in our mind when trying to remember them. The Visual memory has a big role in our brain.
