How to memorize for exams - What they didn't tell you in School

Use your cave man brain to remember for tests…

Let’s do a quick memory test. I want you to look at the following list of words. It’s a list not unlike something you might have to memorize for a test, in this case a Geography test. Scan the list 3 times and try to remember as many of the words as you can. Ready…go…

Pyroclasts, Plume, Recrystallisation, Sedimentary, Sovereignty, Terranes, Topography, Volcanology, Weathering, Tombolo

Now forget about the words for a minute and read on. I’ll test you soon…

I can’t tell you how many students I’ve heard say that their mind just went blank in an exam. They memorized the info, but in the exam hall it just wasn’t there anymore. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience. Maybe you think you just have a bad memory. Guess what? You do! Everyone does!

Humans are not designed to remember long lists of information about very specific things. Our need to remember long lists of things about geography, English poetry, biology, trigonometry, engineering, you name it, is a very new phenomenon.

For tens of thousands of years, humans lived as hunter gatherers. When we think of the stone age ‘Cave Man’ we tend to think of a simple-minded, primitive sort of person. He wasn’t as advanced as us, right?

Wrong! Hunter gatherers were every bit as intelligent as us. In fact, if you were to meet one, you’d be amazed at how brilliant a person you were talking to.

Why? Because hunter gatherers had to know everything. They had no Google. They had no gas company. They had no nightly news. They had no hospitals. They had no electricity, cars, libraries, torches, radiators, YouTube, washing detergent…

To survive, they relied on one thing – the power of their own mind. If it wasn’t razor sharp, they died. The stakes were high, all day, every day. There were no ‘days off’ for our hunter gatherer cousins.

They had to know everything about everything. They had to know about which berries were good, and which berries would make them sick. They had to know the behavioural patterns of wild game and how best to track them. They had to know about the seasons. They had to know how to fish, climb mountains, cross deserts, avoid bears, co-operate socially, tell stories, and stay warm in freezing conditions. They were geniuses! They didn’t have the time or the luxury to write a thesis on romantic poetry.

But as people began to farm (the agricultural revolution) they didn’t need to know as much about everything anymore. They had time to specialize in a subject. This was problematic. We hadn’t evolved for this degree of specificity. To study one thing in such specific, minute detail was to go against our nature. We were designed to remember things about the world around us; things we came into contact with every day. Learning about abstract ideas was new. Studying was hard!

That’s why learning long lists of things for tests can be such a struggle for us. We weren’t designed for this. Remembering lists of things that we don’t encounter every day is just not something that we did for thousands of years. That’s why remembering long lists of words relating to geography is so hard. When was the last time your survival relied upon remembering the rivers of Europe or categorizing different types of erosion? The information might help someone else eventually, but it won’t really change your own day to day life.

Think back to the list of words you looked at earlier? How many of them can you recite right now? If you’re like most people, you might get a few. But chances are, you’ve forgotten most of them already.

The solution to better remembering long lists of information is to relate them to things you already know about. In Psychology, this is known as free association and it’s an incredibly powerful and effective way to remember lists of abstract concepts. Concepts you might need to know in an exam for instance. Look at the video to learn how to remember the following list of words in minutes and remember them forever…

Meandering, Plate Tectonics, Erosion, Doming, Exfoliation, Endogenic, Faultline, Hydrothermal, Igneous, Precipitation

Using this technique, you’ll remember them much faster and the information will stay. You’ll never have to say “MY mind just went blank” ever again. You’ll know how to use your genius Cave Man brain to the best of its ability!

Here's another example...

TTYL,

David

#MemoryTips