Actually, researchers say that within one hour — yes, just one — people will have forgotten about half of the information you presented.

A good way to gauge this is to ask friends who have recently taken workshops and courses — especially the in-vogue ones such as leadership, mindfulness and happiness — what they have learnt. They will be able to mention only a few points, even if they have taken many courses. We forget information unless it has a practical application and we make the effort to retain it — by repetition or using other memorising or mnemonic techniques.

Do most of us even remember half the stuff we learnt back in school? Given the hustle and bustle of life today, when we are bombarded by information and notifications all the time, it is no surprise that many of us forget even what we did yesterday.

Another common scenario: your smartphone dies, so your friend offers you her mobile for you to finish your call. Of course, if the story is true, that was Einstein and he had better and more complicated things to remember. Since none of us are Einstein, we should put more effort into memorising and retaining information.

Some studies have shown that memory-related games are healthy exercise for sharpening our brains and can help fortify it against memory related illnesses such as dementia.

If you don't repeat it or use it, you forget it very quickly. The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve shows that just one hour after learning we forget more than half of the learned information. In order to keep the information in your head for a longer time, you need to try to put it into your long-term memory.

Forced memorization is not very effective in this case because your brain can't make sense of the information quickly and form strong associations. If you want to remember things for a long time, you need to extend the memorization period. It should be as long as a few days or even weeks. Use body language when learning. This will help you trigger your muscle memory. Choose only the best materials. Don't use outdated books and methods of learning.

Things might have changed a lot since the books were written. Don't waste your time on something that may turn out to be wrong. Try to understand what you learn. Things that you understand are memorized 9 times faster. Learn the most necessary information. And check out hundreds of mnemonic devices you can use in everyday life or to learn a new subject.

The memory palace is a mnemonic device that's as tried-and-true as it gets—and deserves a section of its own. Invented by orators in ancient Roman and Greek times, the memory palace or mind palace or "method of loci" technique is both effective and enjoyable to use, whether you're trying to remember a speech you have to give, details of a case you're working on a la Sherlock Holmes , or your grocery list.

In fact, four-time USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis —who claims to have an average memory—says that "The number one technique that we top memory athletes use is still and will always be the memory palace.

If someone were to learn one thing, it should be that. With the memory palace technique, you associate a location you're familiar with—such as your apartment, the block you grew up on, or the route you take to work or school—with the items you're trying to remember. It works because you're visually pegging or "placing" representations of what you want to remember in places you already have strong memories of. Imagine yourself standing your memory palace. Your home is a great one to start with, even if it's not a palace.

Mentally walk through this palace noticing distinctive features you can use to store things you want to remember. Each stop on that path is a "loci" you can peg the idea or object to. For example, your front door might be one loci, the table in your foyer a second loci, a lamp in your living room another.

Commit those features to memory so when you think of your palace, the route and objects in it will be imprinted in your mind. Associate what you need to remember with the loci in your palace. If you had a grocery list, for example, at the front door you could picture milk flooding over the door from the inside, like a waterfall of milk. Then you get to the foyer and the table is buckling under the weight of all the chocolate chip cookies stacked on it to the ceiling. And instead of a lightbulb in your living room lamp, you see fluorescent yellow bananas.

It sounds pretty absurd, but as we'll discuss in more detail later, the more visual, animated, and outrageous you can make your memories, the better. Here's a video from World Memory Championship winner Alex Mullen describing in great detail how to "attach" words to objects and locations in with the memory palace technique.

You'll find yourself remembering these 20 words long after you watch the video. Chunking is another mnemonic device that can make large amounts of information more memorable. You probably use it already. To remember or share a phone number, chances are you chunk the numbers so they're easier to remember: "" "" ""--rather than the more memory-intensive "8 8 8 5 5 5 0 0 0 0.

But by grouping information into smaller sets, we can "hack the limits of our working memory," as The Atlantic puts it , to remember more. The chunking technique involves grouping items, finding patterns in them, and organizing the items. You might group items on your grocery list by aisle, for example, or look for connections between events in a historical period to create chunks of them, such as moments in the s that involved the US Constitution.

Chunking works because our brains are primed to look for patterns and make connections. Brain Pickings explains :. Our memory system becomes far more efficient, effective—and intelligent—than it could ever be without such refined methods [as chunking] to extract useful structure from raw data.

To put this into practice yourself, you could group vocabulary words for a new language you're learning by topic, organize items in a list by the first letter or by the number of letters they have, or associate items with the larger whole they might be involved in e. In addition to memory aids or tricks like the ones above, there are also broader strategies that will help you better remember what you come across everyday—techniques that work no matter what you're trying to memorize.

Shattered glass. Stinky socks. Screaming, swaddled babies. When Dellis gave me a crash course on memorization techniques in preparation for the USA Memory Championship, the one thing that stood out to me across all of the methods he shared was how vivid--and often absurd--the images you create need to be to become fixed in your memory.

Visualization is a key skill when it comes to memory. Names and numbers are hard to remember because they're abstract and our brains can't easily latch onto them.

But our brains store and recall images much more easily. You forget this person's name , because you haven't really associated that word with anything about that person maybe it's been stored in your short-term memory, but probably not. You need to connect "Mike" to something more. With the memory palace technique and other memorization techniques that deal with symbols such as letters and numbers , the best strategy is to turn something abstract into a sound and visual representation.

Use the sounds in the word to turn it into an image. In the case of "Mike," you can think of a picture of a microphone. For multi-syllable names, create an image for each syllable. For "Melanie," you might think of a melon and a knee crushing it. Then, the second step is to peg or anchor that image onto the place you will remember it. If your new friend Mike has unusually big eyes, you might imagine microphones bulging out of each of his eyes.

It's similar to the memory palace technique, but instead of anchoring new visual information to a location, you anchor it to a physical feature of whatever you're trying to remember. Animate the images: The more animated and vivid you can make these images, the better. Doing this creates stronger, novel connections in your brain between that word or number and an image. Engage as many of your senses as possible: Remember how the brain begins the encoding process through your senses?

You'll remember abstract things like names and numbers more if you tap into your sense of hearing, taste, and smell. In the Mike example, perhaps you'll hear audio feedback from the microphones. In the Melanie example, perhaps some of the fruit is gushing out of the melon and you can actually smell it. When it comes to numbers, similar techniques apply. You can associate numbers with images, which will help you better remember long strings of numbers.

To remember the number , then, picture a swan swimming past a flagpole to pick at a donut. Memory champions such as Dellis encode double- or triple-digit numbers with images so they can memorize hundreds of digits in five minutes.

For example, 00 equals Ozzy Osbourne, 07 is James Bond. Practice and learn more: This name game can help you train yourself to remember names and faces better. And Litemind explains how the major memory system for numbers works. Put away your laptop. You're more likely to remember notes you write by hand than those you type. There are a few reasons why handwriting is preferable to using your laptop when it comes to memory.

First, the physical act of writing stimulates cells at the base of your brain , called the reticular activating system RAS. When the RAS is triggered, your brain pays more attention to what you're doing at the moment.

When you're writing by hand, your brain is more active in forming each letter, compared to typing on a keyboard where each letter is represented by identical keys. Also, research has shown that when people take notes on their laptops, they tend to transcribe lectures verbatim. Conversely, when taking notes by hand, we tend to reframe the information in our own words--a more active kind of learning.

Perhaps even better: Create mind maps for topics you're learning. It combines the visual element--remember, our brains latch onto images--with handwritten words. Make a note of it: Learn how to take effective notes and combine paper notebooks with digital tools for productivity. You know how you can study for a test or learn something new, like interesting facts from a book, and then immediately forget what you learned?

Unless we actively work to retain that information, chances are we'll lose it--in a matter of days or weeks. That's the natural exponential nature of forgetting, as depicted by the forgetting curve:.

If you want to remember something for the long term, such as vocabulary in a foreign language or facts you need for your profession, the most efficient way to learn that material is spaced repetition.

As Gabriel Wyner explains in his excellent book on learning languages, Fluent Forever , "At its most basic level, a Spaced Repetition System SRS is a to-do list that changes according to your performance. You'll begin with short intervals two to four days between practice sessions.

Every time you successfully remember, you'll increase the interval e. This keeps your sessions challenging enough to continuously drive facts into your long-term memory.

If you forget a word, you'll start again with short intervals and work your way back to long ones until that word sticks, too. This pattern keeps you working on your weakest memories while maintaining and deepening your strongest memories. Because well-remembered words eventually disappear into the far off future, regular practice creates an equilibrium between old and new.

The way to defeat forgetting is to use a spaced repetition system, with your own physical flashcards or with an app such as the Anki or Pauker. Digital apps are more convenient, naturally, but the act of creating your own cards--including finding images to tie to what you're learning--is a powerful learning experience. For both methods, daily reviews are ideal, but any type of regular routine will help you learn and remember faster.

Pro tip: Wyner shares these tips with us, particularly for learning a new language: Make your memories personal don't just copy someone else's mnemonics and make sure you can actually hear the sounds you're trying to remember. Here's his advice on how to create better flashcards. Finally, there's the old adage that "the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.

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