Remember everything: participants of AlmaU Winter school studied the techniques of mnemonics

Should the teacher have a good memory? It seems that shouldn’t, but it ultimately improves learning, allows to save a lot of time to prepare for lessons, increases prestige in students’ eyes. Undoubtedly, ability to remember a large amount of data is a competitive advantage for any person, so the second day of AlmaU Winter School was devoted to  memorization techniques of business and academic information.

Of course, on one hand, modernity with its abundance of gadgets, its search engines and the world wide web gives us the opportunity to remember nothing, at the right moment you just use a smartphone or tablet PC, press the button and it is done: all the information is on the screen. However, does this situation bring us more advantages or disadvantages? The lecturer of AlmaU Winter school Stanislav Müller*, told the audience that in Russia, recently in one of the classes there was an experiment: teenagers were taught certain practices of remembering, using which they had to learn a poem by Alexander Pushkin "Sad time! Feast of the eyes". It seems so easy. But no! Most modern students couldn’t memorize the poem, partly due to the fact that most of words used in it are not nearly used in everyday communication.

So, if before learning special techniques, only one student could hardly perform the task and get 4 – good mark (he was learning the poem for 3 hours non-stop) and after learning the students started to set records, having learned a poem in 12, 10, 8 (!) minutes.

Stanislav Muller told the audience about those methods of mnemonics, which helped them to succeed. Moreover, the participants not just listened to him, but actively used the knowledge in practice. In particular, they memorized information of different complexity and scope using associations (keys), making schematic drawings (this way is good to memorize hieroglyphs), using different types of memory, including emotional, visual, etc.

*Stanislav Muller is a practicing psychologist, doctor of pedagogical sciences, head of the center "City of talents", chief editor of the magazine "Success for all". Creator of unique technology of superlearnability, author of more than 6 bestsellers, lecturer on memory development and personal effectiveness.