Improve Your Memory

Increasing Mental Alertness and Memory Improvement By Associating Linked Information

February 25th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

In our complicated daily lives, we often undergo sensory overload. The brain deals with this very efficiently and can process and store the information very quickly. The difficulty lies when one needs to retrieve the stored information quickly as and when it is needed. Many people find mental alertness and memory improvement can be achieved through the association of linked information. A very useful application of this linking can be used in any social situation; the next time you meet someone new, consciously link that person’s face with their name. You could successfully remember 15+ people’s name in a room using this method of linked association. The only problem with this method is if something interferes with the linked objects - it is one of the most best methods of mental alertness and memory improvement. The way interference may confuse the link association in this example, is if you were to meet two new people with the same name – the challenge would lie is separating the two images you associated with the link.

The three critical methods the brain receives information and puts it in memory are as follows:

• Observation
• Association
• Visualization

Any one or a combination of these methods can help a person recall the information through association. Unfortunately, there is no magic potion or pill that will serve as mental alertness and memory improvement for everyone as they way the information is stored is different.

Computers make recalling information quick and easy as the information is stored in a specific order. The human brain however, cannot always put the information into exact order, depending on the method in which the information was input into the brain. To achieve realistic mental alertness and memory improvement people have to learn how to first store the information and then find the method that works for them in recalling the information.

Forget The Rest, Remember The Best

For many people the sheer volume of information they receive can cause confusion in their attempts to recall the information. As another example of association of words in which other information interferes with the ability to store the information in memory would be when trying to learn two new languages. As a means of mental alertness and memory improvement, learning one language is tough enough but when adding a second word that to associates to the word in the native language, often causes confusion.

There are many different tricks involved in mental alertness and memory improvement such as visualizing certain words. For instance, memorizing a list is sometimes difficult beyond the first two or three words of the list. By visualizing the words, dog for example, and the second word, if it was bone, could be a picture in the mind of a dog chewing a bone.

Taking into consideration the information overload we experience daily, reading, writing or simply just seeing something can often prove difficult. Therefore we can use tools such as association and visualization to help us recall information quickly. It is these mental alertness and memory improvement tools that ensure our brain runs efficiently.