Page 159 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

TALK TO YOURSELF

“I often tell my students to talk to themselves instead of just highlighting and rereading.
They look at me quizzically, like I am absolutely insane (which could be true). But I have
had many students come back to me later and say that it really works and that this is now
one of their study tools.”

—Dina Miyoshi, Assistant Professor of Psychology, San Diego Mesa College

Real Muscle Memory

If you really want to boost your memory as well as your general ability to learn,
it seems one of the best ways to do it is to exercise. Several recent experiments
in both animals and humans have found that regular exercise can make a
substantive improvement in your memory and learning abilities. Exercise, it
seems, helps create new neurons in areas that relate to memory. It also creates
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new signaling pathways. It seems that different types of exercise—running or
walking, for example, versus strength training—may have subtly different
molecular effects. But both aerobic and resistance exercise exert similarly
powerful results on learning and memory.

Memory Tricks Help You Become an Expert More Quickly

Here’s the bottom line. By using mental pictures instead of words to remember
things, you can leap more easily into expert status. In other words, learning to
process ideas visually in math and science is a powerful way to become a master
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of the material. And using other memory tricks can greatly enhance your
ability to learn and retain the material.
Purists might sniff that using oddball memorization gimmicks isn’t really
learning. But research has shown that students who use these types of tricks
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outperform those who don’t. In addition, imaging research on how people