I talk about memory quite a lot on here, as it’s a concept that is fascinating to me. I frequently talk about using Anki to improve what I remember, but that’s ultimately just brute-force practice. It’s a good thing, and I use it every single day, but understanding more of the science behind memory is always interesting.
While listening to a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, host Shankar Vedantam was interviewing Daniel Willingham, the author of “Outsmart Your Brain” on ways to improve memory. During the interview, Willingham shared the results of study that really surprised me: if you hear something and you consciously think “I want to remember that”, it improves your odds of remembering it by 0%!
I wasn’t sure it would help a lot, but if all you do is wish to remember it, nothing happens in your brain to actually make that a reality. Instead, you need to actually put in the work to help build a memory around the concept at hand. As Michael Nielson has shared, “memory is a choice”. If you can’t remember things that you wish you could, it’s mostly because you don’t care enough to make it happen.
Solving that issue goes far beyond the scope of this blog, but there are a lot of things you can do:
- Repeat someone’s name when you first meet them.
- Use tools like a memory palace to remember a long list of items.
- Use tools like Anki to help with other individual items.
- Actually study for that next test, using tips like the ones that Willingham shares in his book.
If you want to remember something, the “want” isn’t going to get you very far, so it’s worth putting in the effort actually help your brain to remember it in the future.
