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.

Discover the 7 Step Study System That Finally Reveals The Secrets to Score As’!

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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When you are given a project in school or at work, do you immediately make a step-by-step list of the tasks that you should perform in order to complete the project? Or, do you do everything that you can randomly and just try to organize and put together the project in the end, when you gathered have enough material?

If you have chosen the first option, then you may not be making the most of your mind’s potential. Making a linear, step-by-step list of the things that you need to do in order to accomplish a goal is much like how a computer’s ‘brain’ works.

On the other hand, if you have chosen the second option, then you have a wider array of choices when it comes to the paths that you can take to achieve your goal, since this is basically how mind mapping works.

Mind mapping is a concept or technique wherein your thinking process will be externally reflected in the form of an illustration or diagram. This was developed by Tony Buzan, who, in his web site www.imindmap.com, encourages people to “unleash the remaining 99% of their brain” through mind mapping.

This concept essentially follows the natural way that the human brain works. For example, when you think of or visualize the color red, your brain instinctively associates the word ‘red’ with apple, blood, cherries, a scarlet shirt that you may have worn at one time – anything that is associated with the color is what comes to your mind instead of just the word itself. So, from just one root word, your brain will immediately associate it with other words to broaden the scope of the topic.

This natural working of the brain, when illustrated on paper, is mind mapping. You can start by writing in the center of a piece of paper one word, representing one idea. From there - through the process of association – you can come up with several branches which all connect to your central idea.

The relationship between the main idea and all the branches that will stem out from the central theme is how the end process will look like. With mind mapping, you can organize your thoughts more coherently, new ideas will be better expressed and developed, you can retain information faster because of the fact that visual illustrations that you mapped out yourself is easier to remember than any list – all these and more are the benefits of mind mapping.

Aside from these benefits, there are hundreds of instances at work and in your home life where you can make use of the process of mind mapping to maximize your brain’s potential and save you a lot of time and effort when planning.

When I was a student, I was always on the internet. Most of the time, it was for the wrong reason - playing games, chatting with friends.

But now, it’s a completely different story. The internet is now a great source of searching for your research materials and provide useful tools for your studies. In fact, if you know where to get essential items, you’ll have more time for yourself.

Here are the 5 hacks you can use…

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