Strengthen Your Memory Muscles

Quick Win

Challenge your brain and improve your memory with an evidence-based strategy known as spaced repetition.

Try This Today

• Choose what you’ll memorize. Use this technique to memorize anything from sales figures for an upcoming presentation to the names of attendees at an event.
• Review the information, then set it aside. Read through everything a few times; you might find it helpful to write the material on flash​ ​cards. Then look away and recite what you can from memory.
• Repeat the process at increasing intervals. Read over the information again, then set it aside again. But this time, wait 15 minutes before you recite what you can from memory. The next time, wait one hour. Once you​’​ve spaced your repetitions out to a few hours, sleep on it. See how you do the next morning. Then try again one day later.

Why

Even if you briefly remember a series of items, like your shopping list, you forget them pretty quickly. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus illustrated this in his well-known “forgetting curve,” which shows that your ability to retain information weakens over time if you don’t repeat it. His research found that repeating info at increasingly longer intervals helps people remember more; subsequent studies have also found spaced repetition to be an effective strategy for beating the forgetting curve.