3 Tips to Help Improve Your Ability to Remember Information

Holding on to new knowledge requires shifting it from short-term to long-term storage in your brain

Beth Howard

Updated April 17, 2025

Diana Haronis/Getty Images

The brain has a huge capacity to store information — the equivalent of 2.5 million gigabytes of memory (or 3 million hours of TV shows), estimates Paul Reber, director of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at Northwestern University. However, your fleeting short-term memory can only hold a few pieces of information before they either become permanent or are lost forever.

The key to holding on to new knowledge is to shift it from short-term into long-term storage. Here are some ways to approach the task:

1. Don’t cram for the exam. Spread out the study of information.

Review material at intervals to commit it to memory. “Massing information all at once is not as effective as if you spread it out or disperse it,” says Colin MacLeod, director of the Memory, Attention and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

“There are students who cram for exams right before the exams, and there are others who read the chapters and do the homework on a steady basis over the course of the term,” says Charles Brainerd, director of the Memory and Neuroscience Lab at Cornell University. “The latter students always do better.”

This strategy may be particularly useful for older adults. In a 2023 study measuring the ability of 141 people to link faces to names, both younger (ages 18 to 29) and older (55 to 87) ages to people benefitted from spacing out their study sessions, as reported in the European Journal of Ageing. Whereas younger participants generally learned more, older adults who had been trained to space out their learning were better able to retain the information they had learned.

Although researchers don’t fully understand the mechanisms, one popular theory holds that spacing out learning leads to thinking about, or encoding, information in different contexts.

“You’re hitching information to multiple contexts,” MacLeod says. “Think of it as creating a path. It's better to have more paths than fewer ones.”

An example is taking a jury to the scene of a crime, which gives the jurors a chance to remember information they’ve received one way in a different way. “It provides another path to the information in memory,” MacLeod says.

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2. Don’t rely on the internet for knowledge.

Online searching has revolutionized how people access new information. But there’s a downside. The “Google effect” refers to the idea that people treat the internet as the repository of their knowledge, rather than remembering the information for themselves.

“When you say to yourself that a piece of information is being handled by a device and [you] don’t have to remember it, you don’t try very hard to hold on to it,” MacLeod explains.

Outsourcing your memory to Google can lead to poor recall. In a 2021 study published in the journal Memory, involving 720 college students and adults recruited online, those who searched the internet for information performed worse on a series of quizzes than participants who received the same information directly, without the internet, suggesting that those who used the internet had stored less new knowledge in their memory.

Ironically, the internet surfers were as confident — or even more confident — that they had mastered the material than those who didn’t search online. According to MacLeod, “If you retrieved a piece of information from Google and you wanted to remember it, you might want to study it a different way.” One way to do that is to say it out loud.

3. Don’t just review new information — test yourself on it.

After you study new information, MacLeod says, you can review it again or you can test yourself on it. “Testing has the bigger impact,” he says.

When you are studying a piece of information again, you run the risk of simply skimming it, MacLeod says. Testing yourself forces your brain to work harder to recall the new intel.

“People tend to think getting information into memory is the whole problem,” says MacLeod. “But as cognitive psychologists studying memory, we know that getting it back out again is every bit as much of a problem. You need to encode the information to put it into memory, but you also need to practice retrieving it. In so doing, you strengthen the encoding.” This process boosts the connections between brain cells, making it easier to retrieve the information in the future.

If you’ve learned new information and you want it to stick, Brainerd suggests asking yourself some questions about it. “Ask yourself, ‘What are the main facts? What's the bottom line?’” Brainerd says. “‘What's the gist of it? What is the author trying to say?’ Testing gives you practice on both the verbatim and gist memories.”

Then, go back and make sure your answers are correct. This lets you address any gaps in your newfound knowledge while securely filing it away in your long-term memory banks.