7 Principles of Memory

The principles below may be applied to every aspect of your daily life: at home, at school, at work, and in your leisure time. Know that memory definitely involves learning, and both are complimentary activities for better survival and achievement in our modern world. 

1.    Learners learn from their behavior. Thus, learner errors should be minimized in order to achieve better memory and mastery of skills.

2.    Learning is most effective when correct responses are reinforced immediately. Feedback should be informative and rewarding whenever the response is correct as discussed above regarding memory and motivation. Punishment may be effective if used but data also shows that it may also inhibit learning than increase learning and memory improvement. It may temporarily suppress an incorrect response, but the response tends to reappear when the punishment stops. Punishment can also be emotionally disruptive and may become an interfering cognitive dissonance in the process of learning and storing of information. For example, children who are punished for making an error while reading aloud may become so upset and distracted by the punishment that they will commit more mistakes.

3.    The frequency of reinforcement determines how well a response will be learned and retained.

4.    Practicing a response in a variety of setting increases both retention of data and the transferability of these data into other information. This means one may involve a constant rethinking of ideas or imaging the self in a reactive activity (silently talking to oneself in order to elicit conscious response) in order to enhance better thinking and memory.

5.    Motivated conditions may influence the effectiveness of positive thinking and memory and may play a key role in increasing the level of performance in memory retention.

6.    Meaningful learning is more permanent and more transferable than memorized learning. Understanding what is memorized is better than just practicing how to become a good memorizer.

7.    People learn more effectively when they learn at their own pace.

Conclusion

At this point, you've learned a bunch of techniques for memorizing things more effectively: forming vivid and funny images, making associations, converting numbers to picture words, and many others.

Remember, there is no "right" or "wrong" way to memorize something; the idea is to simply take the information and techniques you've already learned and adapt them to the specific task or activity at hand.

But above everything else, I encourage you to practice memorizing things every day. Consider this: If someone teaches you how to drive an automobile, and you study the car owner's manual carefully, and learn perfectly everything there is to know about driving a car, that doesn't mean you can jump in a car and start driving flawlessly in downtown New York City! You know what you need to do. Keep on practicing the memory techniques you've learned until they become second nature. Look around you and find things to memorize, such as your cousin's telephone number, your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, the call letters of your local TV stations, the vocabulary words in your school science textbook, your license plate or driver's license, or whatever! Go for it, and remember to have lots of fun!