Unlocking the Potential of Your Short-term Memory
Memory, it seems, is a rare and precious thing, especially for students who are trying to cram their brains full of textbook facts and figures the night before a big examination. Ideally, students would have been absorbing all the necessary information at regular intervals over several days or weeks, but that cannot always be the case. Sometimes, an all-nighter is inevitable. However, there may be hope yet for these late studiers as short-term memory is capable of helping students retain all the information they need at least long enough to get them through a two-hour examination.
Short-term memory is the type of memory used for the temporary recall of information, whether it is something as short-lived as remembering the beginning of this sentence so that you can understand the end, or remembering something for a day or two before forgetting it altogether. Short-term memory has a limited capacity, and the information can also decay rapidly, but there are ways to help commit items to short-term memory so that you can recall the information almost as easily as if it were committed to long-term memory, according to Georgia Tech University’s College of Computing. Chunking information, or breaking it up until parts, is a good way to make that information easier to absorb. The ease of memorizing bits of information as opposed to a string of information is what makes recalling telephone numbers easier than recalling the same number if it were memorized without the hyphenated breaks. Utilizing sensory memory is another good way to enhance the potential of your short-term memory. Scent has a way of embedding itself into a person’s mind, which is why certain perfumes may conjure up memories of an old girlfriend or certain foods may remind you of your time abroad in Spain. Studying while regularly smelling something like a wooden pencil could help you better recall what you looked over the night before during test time. In addition to the senses and chunking, repetition is another good way to commit something to memory. Reading the same information out loud can also help to remind your brain about how that string of information sounds. Repetition works because the more times a piece of information is recalled, the more accessible it becomes in the brain.
While it would be much easier in the future to study regularly before an examination instead of trying to cram all of that information into your mind at once, there are ways to increase your chances of recall for those times when you have no choice but to study all night.
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