Increase Your Child's Memory

 

                                    

All of us Parents wants our child to be intelligent and have amazing amount of memory but what do we do to make this possible? A tremendous insight will happen regarding memory if we were to understand exactly why and how does memory increase. 

Whatever you learn, at first it goes into your sensory memory, where it stays for about a few seconds to a few hours. Depending upon how you relate to the information, it travels into your short-term memory, where it stays from about a few hours to a few days and then into your long-term memory where it remains for life. Presently we shall talk only about the long-term memory.

A given piece of information will pass from our short-term memory into our long-term memory if we are able to either associate it with something more obvious or if the piece of information by itself is very outstanding or if the information is repeated on us again and again. 

Thus, the three main steps to convert anything into long-term memory are:

1. Association

It happens when we link information with certain things that we find easier to remember. For e.g. we often link the names of the nine planets, in their particular order, to a statement which goes 'My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets', where the first alphabet of each word denotes the names of the planets which are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto respectively. Similarly, the colors of the rainbow are abbreviated as 'VIBGYOR' to help us remember their exact order of sequence.

2. Outstanding

Outstanding is something which is strikingly different or beyond the normal. Such a piece of information automatically creates a niche in your brain thus allowing you to remember it for life. For e.g. those of us who experienced it, will never forget the rainfall in Mumbai on 26th July 2005. Personally I will never forget an almost fatal fall I had from a cliff or a similar fall I had from a boat into the water. Such outstanding things remain engraved in our life forever and go deep down into the long-term memory like when - Earthquakes, Bomb Explosions are always remembered along with exciting cricket matches which have a photo - finish - India winning the 1983 world cup or 2011 world cup.

3. Repetition 

Repetition is the revision of a particular topic at regular intervals. This is the base of academic learning and involves a very systematic approach for 100 % effectiveness. Whatever your child learns should be reaffirmed after the first 10 minutes, then after 24 hours or 1 day, then after a week, subsequent to that, after 1 month and finally after about 3 months to 6 months. This will ensure that the particular information gets embedded into his long-term memory guaranteeing excellent results.

- By Manoj Lekhi