- Exercise your brain
The popularity of brain training apps has turned the industry into a multi-billion dollar industry. However, do brain training programs really work? There is growing evidence that they are not.
Brain training programs can improve the tasks you’ve been practicing, but they don’t seem to enhance memory, intelligence, or cognition.
However, there are techniques you can use to help you learn to code and recall important information called mnemonics. These methods can become your superpowers when you need to remember someone’s name – for example, at a large event.
A mnemonic method is a shortcut that helps us associate the information we want to remember with a word, image or sentence. It’s a way of remembering information so that it stays in our brains longer and is easier to recall.
Types of mnemonics include:
The trajectory method, which asks you to imagine what you want to remember follows a familiar route. Associate a word or concept with a location of yours so it’s easier to recall later
Acronyms can be used as a tool to remember anything from the colors of the rainbow to items on your shopping list. For example, you can use the acronym “CAKE” to help you remember that you need to collect cheese, apples, kale and eggs from the store
Rhyming can help you recall information such as how many days there are in June: “Thirty days include September, April, June, and November.”
Chunking is a method of breaking up a large piece of information into smaller, more manageable chunks of information, such as breaking a US phone number into three smaller pieces, rather than trying to remember all 10 numbers individually
Imagination helps you remember pairs of words, such as blue water, yellow sun, and green grass. By recalling a specific image, it helps us recall information related to that image
