Everyday we are constantly bombarded with tons of television commercials products that promise to help improve our memory, be it a brand of milk with “special” ingredients or daily consumption of vitamin supplements to boost the brain’s memory. However, it’s always a question to the effectiveness of these commercials gimmicks.

The truth is it’s the memory muscles we trained each day that boost our memory. And you should not be too afraid that your memory will fail you. All it takes is a few simple techniques that will activate your brain cells.

1. Keep your brain running. Exercise your brain muscles as often as possible by remembering facts, figures, descriptions, numbers, addresses, and the like. Connect all you need to remember with stories and mnemonics. Remember that your brain keeps on growing and developing, so you’ll need to feed it. Play some memory improvement puzzles, like crosswords and mind games to keep your brain at a healthy level instead of watching television. Learning new things is a good way to keep your brain muscles strong. You can start by learning a new language or a new musical instrument.

2. Build up your physical body. The more you exercise the more oxygen circulate to your brain and heart. This can help prevent memory loss. Exercise can also help you feel more relaxed even during tense situations; and with relaxation comes a better chance of retaining the strength your memory.

3. Control your stress level. Do you experience that stress can actually make you more agitated and tense, thereby, making you more prone to forgetting things. You have a difficult time focusing on things. Identify things that make you stress and try to avoid them as much as you can. If you still feel under the weather, you might want to seek professional advice and therapy.

4. Seek to eat healthy. Food supplements may help you improve your memory; but, still, there remains no solid proof that these supplements actually work. Eating a healthy diet contributes to a healthy brain. This would help to keep your memory healthy. Try eating these foods as much as possible: blueberries, spinach, berries, and broccoli.

5. Organizing your life. Planning your time well will also help you maintain your memory’s performance. Organize your phone numbers in your address book, place your keys in the same place, your wallet in your bag, and your reading glasses on your neck. You know what I mean. Allocate or create a place where you would find significant items, so that you can find them when you need them. Besides, knowing that these items are where they are reduces the clutter in your head and helps you focus more.

Brain cells naturally degenerate over time. However, with all these hacks and tips, we can slow this process by living a healthy life and giving our memory leeway to perform better.

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I know you love to remember or memorise every single detail in your textbook, but it is virtually impossible. And you do not want to depend on drugs to do this. One effective way to improve your memory is to use the technique called mnemonics.

What exactly is mnemonics? Mnemonics is one of the many memory techniques used to memorise abstract or hard to remember information by changing them in a way so they are much easier to remember.

Complex stimuli are perceived by our senses, and then absorbed by our brains as memories. These memories are actually complex models of the stimuli.

In today’s world, information comes to us in the form of words. Unfortunately, our brains are not used to this type of written words and therefore our brain finds it more difficult to memorise.

Mnemonics enable us to memorise this written information by using strong mental images to encode data. Hence, information becomes easier to remember.

Now, you may ask me how to use it. Just do the following:

1. Use positive and pleasant images to encode the information since our brain is more likely to memorise these.

2. Use images that stimulate your five senses.

3. Your image should be in 3D so they are easier to recall.

4. For certain parts of the image that you think is very crucial, make that part of the image bigger.

5. Input humour into your image, the funnier your image is, the easier to recall.

6. When our information is too complex, use symbols to simplify it.

The 3 main principles of mnemonics are basically imagination, association and lastly location.

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Have you ever been in the middle of a thought and could not remember what you were thinking of? Perhaps you were about to take an exam and forgot all of the information that you thought you knew.

Maybe you were talking to someone and forgot entirely what his name was. If any of these situations sound familiar to you, read on to discover some relatively simple ways to jog your memory and keep everything in perspective.

Many scientists suggest that taking ginkgo biloba will improve your memory by releasing nootropic or “smart cell” properties into your system. If using memory supplements for the rest of your life does not sound appealing to you, perhaps something more hands-on might be more useful.

According to cognitive psychologists, learning and memorization is more meaningful when it is connected to your prior knowledge of something. When the information is presented in a manner in which it can move from your short - term memory to your long - term memory, where it remains so that you can use the information in the future.

One such method of committing material to your long – term memory is through repetition, verbal or written, of new information. This process will pull new information from your short-term memory, where it is temporarily stored to make room for new information, to your long-term memory so that you can remember and use it in the future.

Motivation plays a big role in this aspect of improvement of recognition. As with all aspects of life, if you do not desire to learn the information and commit it to memory, it will move no further than your short-term memory, as your brain will interpret this disposition as meaning that the information in question is not necessary for long-term storage.

Consequently, the use of interactive resources, such as flash cards (which aid in the repetitive process), and learning or memory manipulative make remembering information more interesting and personalized, thus drawing the new material to your long-term memory to be stored permanently.

The key in this particular aspect of memory improvement is that the new information be connected in some way to your prior knowledge of a related concept. Without this knowledge, the new information will make much less sense to you and you will be significantly less likely to remember it in the future.

For example, when learning a foreign language, it is important to connect the new concepts to ones that have previously been learned – that is, concepts that can be recollected and reused – or to concepts familiar to the learner, such as similarities between his native language and that of the target language.

Interestingly, scientists have determined that your memory can actually be improved and memory-loss diseases such as Alzheimer’s be prevented through learning of a foreign language.

The brain is a muscle, and, like the rest of the muscles in your body, must frequently be exercised or it will atrophy. If you follow these suggestions, you will be able to remember almost anything in no time!