Strengthen your cognitive skills and learn valuable tips for increasing your memory capacity. While it may seem that there is nothing you can do to strengthen your memory as you age, there are actually a number of strategies you can adopt. This will ensure that your mind stays sharp, no matter what situation faces you and no matter how long you have lived.
A time-tested way to strengthen your memory is to play memory games. This works in the same way that physical exercise helps to build muscle. By exercising the brain, it gets stronger. This improves your focus, concentration, and memory. Examples of good games that boost your memory are crosswords puzzles, brain teasers and word searches.
You can improve your memory through games designed to simulate your brain. You can exercise your brain much the same way you exercise the rest of your body. Exercising your brain regularly helps it to become stronger, which will improve your focus, concentration and memory. There is a diversity of games that are mentally stimulating. Among the best are word games, like word search and crossword puzzles.
Simply writing down information that you want to remember is good exercise for your memory. The act of writing the information down increases blood flow in the areas of the brain involved in memory. Maintaining written records of key information is a great way to strengthen your power of recall.
Avoid unpleasant or negative thoughts to increase your memory. The scientific community states that anyone who has negative thoughts or suffers from a lot of stress normally has less memory retention than people who are not always stressed out. Your doctor may be able to recommend relaxation techniques to improve your stress levels and outlook.
If you’re trying to study, moving to a new location may make your memory sharper. Changing up your environment refreshes your brain, and helps long-term memory become more effective. When it senses a change in surroundings, the mind re-awakens, and once it’s awake it gains the ability to absorb more information.
Include fish oil in your daily diet. If you feel that your memory is slipping, you might not be getting adequate amounts of Omega-3 each day. Boost your diet with pills or tablet supplements containing Omega 3.
If you must remember something, try to associate it with a funny song, mental image, or phrase. Jokes and humor make things easier to remember in your mind, as the area reserved for humor in the brain is the same area used for learning.
Staying socially active can help keep your memory stay sharp. Social activity keeps your mind alert, and improves your outlook on life. Depressed people don’t properly stimulate their mind, meaning their brain won’t get the necessary exercise it needs. When you have stimulating conversations with your friends, this keeps your mind strong, which leads to better memory.
A helpful strategy to boost your memory of information is to visualize the concepts that you want to be able to memorize and recall. If you are studying information from a textbook, photographs and charts can be great visual cue to help in committing the information to memory. If graphs, images or charts are absent, create your own.
A good way to remember complex information is to form pictures in your mind related to information you want to master. If you are using a textbook to study, a good way to visualize information is to use photos and charts. If necessary, you can create charts and grafts of your own to make things easier to memorize.
Ginseng supplements are touted as having memory improving qualities. Ginseng will help your brain better absorb information. It is not only good for your brain but excellent for your health. You should also start drinking green tea to help with any memory loss.
When attempting to absorb new information, make sure you make an effort to draw a correlation between what you’re learning now and what you already know. When you build ties between new and old information, it will help you retain the new information in your memory. Memory thrives on this process of relating a new bit of knowledge to one already secured.
Passing knowledge onto others often promotes improved memory. As an example, if the details about teaching one of your grandchildren how to swim are becoming fuzzy, it helps to tell as many people as you can about the event. It reinforces it in your mind, and makes it harder to forget.
Your library should have a good selection of books on memory improvement that you can borrow. Many well-known psychiatrists have written books to help you improve your brain function and memory. The tools given to you in these books may be what you need in order to help you remember things.
It helps to always think audibly. For example, when you learn something, such as a number, say it out loud a few times. When you repeat new information loud enough for your brain to get the information again, it will help to cement it in your brain for retrieval at a later time. If no one else is around or you really need to remember the information, repeat it multiple times.
By using the above advice, your mind will be ready for all of life’s challenges. A stronger memory gives you the opportunity to connect better with people and hold onto those precious memories you make with them. When you become more involved and use the information that you’ve learned here, you’ll become a more productive person.
To supplement your memory, try to rehearse or relate what you want to remember with things you already know. By associating your new information in short term memory to already acquired information in long term memory, you give it an anchor and help it to become embedded in your brain.