If your situation requires a great deal of memorization and recall, you may frequently find yourself wishing for a “photographic” memory or perfect recall. In fact, a genuinely photographic memory is considered a developmental defect, and researchers are finding exceptionally high correlation between perfect recall and autism. If your brain gathers and stores too much information, it overloads, becomes confused, and goes blank—very much the way your computer behaves when you give it too many commands too quickly or attempt to operate too many windows simultaneously.
You can improve your memory with a few strategic techniques and a lot of practice; strictly speaking, you do not want to develop a photographic memory.
Under normal circumstances, your brain sorts, assigns importance to, and stores new information according to the dictates of experience: If information like the new data you collect has proven useful in the past, your brain will enter it into long-term memory; and if information like the new data will affect your survival in the short term, then your brain will store it in short-term memory.
To some extent, emotions affect your memory, too. Data that enters your psychic registers with powerful feelings immediately becomes more memorable than data that registers neutrally. Therefore, because your teachers and supervisors objectively, neutrally, disinterestedly, and unemotionally present most of their “important” information, they immediately impose obstacles to your remembering it. As you work to build your command of their information, you must supply imagery—both sight and sound—and you must generate feelings that will make it memorable.
The photograph: From panorama to punctilious point.
Several popular crime dramas, including all three in the CSI franchise, depend on their locations for much of their drama and intensity. Consequently, as each returns to the plot after commercial breaks, the camera pans over the city and then focuses in tight on the exact setting for the drama. You can control your mind’s and memory’s focus in the same way. Especially when you gather information from textbooks, scan each page before you read it word for word, because textbooks use headers and su-headlines to establish the contexts for the information they introduce. Treat each headline as the source of a question, and recite the most important ideas and details in response to the headlines’ questions.
Practice, practice, practice: developing memory requires constant practice with props, tools, and mnemonic devices. Make and use flashcards, CD’s, PowerPoints, and sample quizzes or series of questions. If a textbook gives review questions or practice tests, do them for the sake of recreating the pressure you feel in a test and for the sake of de-sensitizing yourself to fear of offering an incorrect answer. Make sure you practice with attention to precision and detail; as your coaches consistently remind, “How you practice is how you play.”
Making it memorable: forging the links
As you learn new information and commit new facts to memory, try to link them to material you already know. Studying American history, you will learn how the United States executed the Louisiana Purchase to help Napoleon finance his long war on England. When you subsequently learn about the Lewis and Clark Expedition, link this knowledge to the Louisiana Purchase, which they were the first to explore and map. The more old information links with new discoveries, the more the new discoveries will remain in your brain and well within memory’s reach.