Have you got a big exam coming up and wondering how you are going to remember everything?
The answer is more simple than you think – tell a friend.
Students who are given information and tell someone about it immediately will recall the details better later on, researchers at Baylor University found.
Lead author and psychologist Melanie Sekeres said: “This has to be actively replaying or re-generating the information — for example, by telling someone the particulars, as opposed to just simply re-reading the textbook or class notes and studying it again later.
“A week later, the memory was just as good,” she said. “Telling someone else about what you’ve learned is a really effective way for students to study instead of just re-reading the textbook or class notes.”
In the study, students were shown 24-second clips from 40 films over a period of about half an hour.
The study focused on their retention of both the general plot of the films as well as details such as sounds, colours, gestures, background details and other information that allows a person to re-experience an event.
Scientists studied three groups of undergraduate students, each with 20 participants, who were on average 21-years-old.
After viewing the film clips, researchers asked what they remembered about the films, from several minutes after they were shown the clip up to as long as seven days afterwards.
Dr Sekeres added: “With a cue, suddenly, a lot of those details will come back.
“We don’t permanently forget them, which would indicate lack of storage — we just can’t immediately access them.
And that’s good. That means our memories aren’t as bad as we think.
“We chose mostly foreign films and somewhat obscure clips that we thought most undergraduates would not have seen.
“The clips all contained brief scenes of normal, everyday events that mimicked the kind of events you might experience in a day, such as a family having dinner or kids playing at a park.”
Most research on memory examines how brain damage or ageing affects recall, but “we wanted to look at the normal course of forgetting in healthy brains — and if anyone should have a good memory, it’s healthy young adults”.
She added: “While the strategy of re-telling information — known as ‘the testing effect’ — has been shown to be a really effective study technique time and again, this study is novel in looking at how our memories change over time for a specialised group.”
The study, published in Learning & Memory, while over a longer period of times the students forgot minor details, the group that told someone about the clip soon after viewing it remembered information better over time.
The “replaying” method takes considerable effort, but it can be worth it, Dr Sekeres said.
She added: “We tell students to test yourself, force yourself to tell someone about the lecture.
“Even by writing out some questions for yourself about the information, then later answering them yourself, you are more likely to remember the information.
“Unfortunately, simply re-reading or passively listening to a recording of your lecture in the hopes of remembering the information isn’t a great study strategy by comparison.”
“The brain is adaptive, we remember the important things, for the most part, and we forget the unimportant details.
“You don’t want your brain to search through tons of useless information.
“If there’s something you really want to remember, test yourself — like saying names and recalling, for example, that Jim had the green cap and Susan wore the red dress and brought a casserole.”
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