How to develop memory and attention - exercises from psychologists

How to develop memory and attention

Sooner or later the time will come when a person will ask this question.

Memory is a mental process that allows you to perceive, store, retain and reproduce received information

So how then to develop memory and attention and what exercises will help with this? The functioning of the human brain, both adult and child, is similar to the functioning of a computer. Everything that happens in an individual’s life is encoded and sent for storage. In turn, in order not to overload the brain, unnecessary information is gradually erased.

But what to do when you are faced with the problem of remembering the name of a new acquaintance, finding the keys that you held in your hands the day before, or remembering the necessary information for work? Constantly writing in a notebook is effective, but it is not the best solution. Memory can be developed at any age and thereby simplify your life. The same applies to the development of attention. All you need is desire, perseverance and appropriate training and the help of exercises that psychologists have developed.

Ways and methods of memory development

To begin with, it is worth noting that we often train our memory and attention using various everyday situations in everyday life. We remember what we want to buy in a store, try to remember the birthdays of relatives, friends and acquaintances, retell the contents of a recently read book or textbook - all this and much more is good memory training. However, the use of special exercises gives us the opportunity to concentrate on the specific goal of developing a certain ability of our memory.

When talking about memory training, it is important to understand that it is almost impossible to directly train a specific ability to memorize material. Memory always develops in close connection with our attention, perception, thinking, sense organs and other phenomena of human nature. Therefore, most of the exercises below produce a complex effect on our thinking, as well as on our memory as an important component of thinking. For convenience, the exercises are divided into 2 groups: visual and auditory, and together they form an important part of our memory improvement training.

Reasons influencing the development of attention

Any change in a person's abilities has its own explanation. Problems with memory and attention are no exception. There are the following factors that have an adverse effect on the memorization process:

• Absent-mindedness due to an overabundance of information.

This reason is more common among adults. The brain simply does not have time to process and retain the rapid flow of information and forgetfulness develops.

• Diseases that impair memory

These include: diabetes, atherosclerosis, excess weight and high blood pressure.

• Nicotine

Smoking can improve alertness for a short period of time, but the effect wears off very quickly. According to scientific research, under the same conditions, the memory of a non-smoker and a smoker differs significantly in its performance. So, in fact, the ability to concentrate attention for a long time.

• Alcohol also impairs memory

Even with a small dosage of alcohol, a person loses the ability to quickly remember and retain information.

• Medicines for special purposes

Pathogens, sedatives, painkillers, antiviral, anti-inflammatory and antihistamine drugs can even lead to memory loss.

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Types of memory and how they affect the development of attention

The way you remember is directly related to the type of memory you want to develop. 1. Short-term memory. It is necessary when information needs to be remembered for a period of time from a couple of seconds to several minutes. In this case, an effective exercise involves constantly repeating the necessary information out loud or in your head. After the process stops, the short-term information will disappear from your head. 2. Long-term memory . If you need to remember something important for an hour, a year or your whole life, then you need to develop it. You will be helped by methods of mental interpretation, careful and conscious processing of information and finding associations that allow you to connect the knowledge you receive with what you already have.

There is an opinion that the aroma of rosemary and citrus fruits helps improve long-term memory

3. Sensory memory . Its peculiarity is the acquisition of information through the organs of hearing or vision. It is impossible to remember information received by the sensory method. She disappears on her own after a couple of seconds.

Kinds

Human memory is classified according to two main indicators: information storage period and the predominant analyzer.

• Instantaneous - lasts up to 0.5 seconds, and its essence is the reflection of data by the senses without any processing.
• Short-term – exists for short-term storage of the main elements of what is perceived. Its duration is approximately 20 seconds.

It is believed that the average volume of short-term memory is 5-9 units of information. This is exactly how many words, numbers, and images a person can reproduce within a few tens of seconds after being introduced to them once.

• Operational - a type designed to store material for a given period. After solving the task, information can be erased from RAM.
• Long-term – the ability to store information for an almost unlimited amount of time and reproduce it at any time.

Genetic memory is the transfer of information stored in the genotype by inheritance. Thus, representatives of subsequent generations from birth have a complex of unconscious actions, for example, unconditioned reflexes. This is the only type of memory that a person cannot influence through training and education.

Depending on the main analyzer of data coming from the external environment, the following types are distinguished:

• Visual – preservation and reproduction of visual images, the ability to see “before your eyes” (in the imagination) a detailed picture of what is perceived, even when it no longer affects the senses. Without developing this type of memory, you cannot become an engineer or an artist.
• Auditory – the ability to remember and reproduce a variety of sounds. It is especially characteristic of musicians, philologists, and people who study foreign languages. Any scientist, lecturer, or school teacher should be able to quickly perceive the meaning of a text he hears and read, identify the order of logical chains in reasoning, and retell it quite accurately in his own words.
• Emotional – it is also called memory for experiences. It is of practical importance for good memorization of material, because what is associated with the emotional experiences of the individual is more firmly fixed in the brain.
• Motor – especially needed by athletes and dancers to develop complex motor skills.

How to develop memory in children and adults, exercises and advice from psychologists

There are various techniques and life hacks that will help you learn to quickly grasp and better remember the necessary information and concentrate longer.

1. Aivazovsky's technique. Look at the drawing or photograph for a couple of seconds and try to remember all the details. Next, you should close your eyes and try to imagine what you just saw.
2. Learn more by heart. Give yourself the task of memorizing poems, interesting passages from books, quotes, or anything else every week. Try to get creative with this process. It is recommended to come up with associations for difficult places to remember or draw mini illustrations next to each line.
3. Listen to the dialogues of the people around you and try to mentally repeat what you just heard. You can also do a similar exercise while watching TV series or movies.
4. Try changing your usual routes. This way you can gain vivid impressions and see a lot of new things. Start paying attention to what comes your way.
5. Start making up your own stories or poems related to events in your life.
6. At the end of the day, you can ask yourself a couple of questions about the past day. For example, what was the most important thing that happened to you today? What would you like to change?
7. To develop voluntary attention and make this process fun and interesting, you can arrange themed memory games. Have your friends arrange the items at hand in a certain order. You need to remember what is and where it is located. Next, you close your eyes, and the other person swaps objects or even replaces one object with another. You need to remember how it was originally. Children will especially like this method.

The human brain, like his muscles, can and should be constantly trained. The more load it receives, the stronger the neural connections will be and the better and faster it will begin to work. Keep this in mind and don't forget to take a few minutes a day for healthy activities and exercises.

Ways, techniques and means of improving memory

 There are many ways to manage and train your memory. Every person would like to improve their memory, but not everyone knows what is needed for this. The most important rule for improving memory is: “To develop memory, it must be developed.”

The biggest mistake people make, as a rule, is that they want to improve their memory first, and then start using it. Accordingly, nothing will come of this. Only by constantly training, loading and using your memory, all the time, memorizing, reproducing what you memorized before and memorizing again, can you improve your memory.

It is also necessary to “feed” the brain. A starving brain is like a hungry worker - it will not work well. The most important “delicacy” for gray cells is oxygen, and getting it is very simple: once a week, relax in the fresh air for three hours, playing sports, running or just walking. British writer Virginia Woolf said: “You cannot think well, love well, or sleep well if you have not eaten well.” A poorly “fed” brain can never work well.

Monotonous food, chips, white bread and rice will not bring any benefit to your memory, but fruits, vegetables, fish, animal fats and folic acid (in common parlance simply - greens, liver and legumes) will be very useful. By the way, if you think that cigarettes help you unwind, put it out of your head: nicotine interferes with the flow of oxygen to the brain, which means it impairs memory.

Many people consider poor memory to be the reason for school failure. How often parents complain: “Modern teachers overload children!” How often schoolchildren themselves complain: “I just don’t have time to remember everything that is asked to me!”

Of course, partly everything can be blamed on laziness and a lack of cognitive interests, but experts who study the mechanisms of memory unanimously declare that there is no such thing as a bad memory. There are people who are not able to “find a common language with her”, agree on cooperation, that is, make the most of their memory resources.

There are techniques for improving memory based on the principles of memorizing, storing information, and reproducing it. Such techniques are called mnemonic techniques.

Mnemonics is the art of memorization, a set of techniques and methods that facilitate memorization and increase memory capacity through the formation of artificial associations. This is an opportunity to accumulate a large amount of accurate information in memory, saving time, i.e. the memorization process is completely controlled.

Mnemonics is a powerful training of attention and thinking. This is simply excellent gymnastics for the brain, since the brain needs to be trained so that it does not atrophy.

Let's look at some techniques and exercises to develop memory and facilitate memorization.

‒ Formation of semantic phrases from the initial letters of memorized information (“Every hunter wants to know where the pheasant sits” - about the sequence of colors in the spectrum: red, orange, etc.).

‒ Rhythmization - translation of information into poems, songs, lines connected by a certain rhythm or rhyme.

‒ Memorizing long terms using consonant words (for example, for foreign terms they look for Russian words that sound similar).

‒ You need to find bright, unusual images, pictures that, using the “linking method,” are connected with information that needs to be remembered. For example, you need to remember a set of words: pencil, glasses, chandelier, chair, star, beetle - it will be easy to remember this if you imagine them as “characters” of a bright, fantastic cartoon, where a slender dandy - a “pencil” in “glasses” comes to full to the “chandelier” lady who sits on a “chair” on the upholstery of which “stars” sparkle. It is difficult to forget or confuse such an invented cartoon.

‒ Cicero's method. Imagine walking around your room, where everything is familiar to you. Place the information you need to remember in your mind as you walk around the room. You will be able to remember the information again by imagining your room - everything will be in the places where you placed them during the previous “walkthrough”.

If you notice memory deterioration, there are simple ways to improve memory: healthy sleep, proper nutrition and special exercises to train your memory.

A good memory is not a given, but the result of working on yourself. All you need is proper nutrition to improve memory; restrictive diets for weight loss negatively affect brain function and often lead to depression. They create a deficiency of vital nutrients in your body, which leads to memory impairment. You should try to eat a varied and high-quality diet.

Vitamins that improve memory are very useful for brain function. These are vitamin C, vitamin P (Omega-3) and B vitamins. They are found in the following foods that improve memory: honey, nuts, seeds, broccoli, tomatoes, bananas, seafood.

Healthy sleep is important to improve memory. If a person does not sleep enough, the brain does not fully recover, and all its functions, including memory, decrease. In addition, it is very important to sleep at night, which corresponds to the natural human biorhythm. At night, all body cells are restored from the chemicals that come with food, including the construction of brain cells. Night work and chronic lack of sleep can seriously affect your health.

Physical activity is necessary to improve memory. When you exercise or walk, the supply of oxygen to all cells, including brain cells, increases. This improves the functioning of the cerebral cortex. Also, when muscles work, important hormones are released that are involved in brain function and improve memory.

And of course, positive emotions are needed to improve memory. Bad mood, stress and depression have a negative effect on the state of the brain in general and, in particular, impair memory. A good mood and positive emotions, a feeling of happiness and well-being, on the contrary, have a positive effect on the brain and improve memory. Therefore, you need to use any reason to rejoice and improve your mood.

More joy, laughter and smiles!

Literature:

1. Vein A. M., Kamenetskaya B. I. Human memory. - M., 1973. - pp. 191–207.

2. Istomina Z. M. Development of memory. Educational and methodological manual. - M., 1978. - pp. 62–86.

3. Development of memory. - Riga, 1991. Is it possible to train memory? — p.43–47.

4. Lyaudis V. Ya. Memory in the process of development. - M., 1976. Development of memory in the learning process - pp. 220–246.

5. Ippolitov F.V. Memory of a schoolchild. - M., 1978. Tips for improving memory - pp. 28–45.