Why I can remember why caffeine is good for you.

If it's possible, which it really is, I recommend being interested in the topic that you have to be tested on. And by interested, I mean really interested. Before I made my major mathematics, I thought that I wanted to be a physical therapist. So I was taking anatomy and biology and those kinds of classes. I soon found out that I wasn't interested in those topics very much at all, and definitely not enough to carry me through to a master's in physical therapy. However, I realized this in the middle of a semester and still had to get through it without killing my GPA.


So what did I do? Even though I knew the entire semester (and classes I had previously taken) was ENTIRELY USELESS, the knowledge I was gaining would benefit me in no obvious, practical way, I tried my best to be interested in the topic so that I could get good grades on my test. If I study something and it's boring, I'm very unlikely to remember it. But if I study something and am very interested in it, I'm much more likely to remember it. So even though I had decided to change my major BECAUSE I wasn't interested in biological topics, I MADE myself become interested in it. For example, to this day, I can still (loosely) remember how caffeine works, how it affects your body. I remember it because I thought it was interesting. And I still remember some very specific bone names because I made up stories attached to the bone and its name to make it interesting to myself. I think this is part of why I could eventually do well in math. I love math. It's very interesting to me so it's very easy to remember.


I've read that for information to pass from your short-term memory to your long-term memory it is not a matter of time or of mere repetition. It is a matter of the information becoming meaningful to you in usually some emotional kind of way. So the name of a certain bone is not meaningful to me at all, and definitely not emotionally. But because of the stories I made up to attach to it to make it meaningful, I could remember it much more easily. For example the zygomatic bone on your skull sticks out from your face.

For some, it's very prominent and can make a kind of zigzag shape, kind of. So, the zygomatic bone is easy to remember because it makes a zigzag. Kind of. Another example, I met someone with the last name Iwase. To me, Iwase sounds really similar to shiawase, and this person is in fact a very happy person. So it's very easy for me to remember their name because of this meaningful attachment I've made to the name. When I see the person, I first think of shiawase, and then I remember the true name, Iwase. How caffeine works was easy for me to remember because I'm a big advocate of caffeine and in America people tried to tell me that too much was bad for you. But did you know that some of your natural energy is basically blocked or broken down (I don't remember the specifics) by something, and all caffeine does is block the energy blocker. Caffeine doesn't add artificial energy to your system; it allows your natural energy to be more fully used.


I could keep going with examples, because this is in fact how I remember most facts. But whether it's some vocabulary word or biological process or mathematical formula, just rote memorization is not the most effective way to memorize something. I'd like to suggest that you try making stories or something meaningful to attach to information to make it easier to memorize. And standardized tests are basically a time of dumping onto paper an overload of memorized things. So as this works for me, I hope it can work for you.


▼▽▼▼【講師】Amberly先生のバックナンバー━━━━━━━━
・【Something Interesting】2008.10.22 (Wed)
・【an interesting book】2008.11.28 (Fri)
・【To study methods】2009.01.14 (Wed)
・【The 90%】2009.02.04 (Wed)

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