If You Have A Bad Memory, I’ll Help You Fix It In 28 Minutes

[0:00]If you think you have poor memory, you're probably wrong. The issue is not that you have poor memory, but poor memory handling. And in this video I'm going to teach you exactly how your memory really works according to neuroscience. And six practical evidence-based strategies that you can use to immediately start improving your memory, even if you've always struggled with it. Now, I myself have always had a poor memory. I forget the places that I've been to, I forget the restaurants I've eaten at. If you ask me to remind you about something later, I definitely am going to forget to remind you. Yet, I have completed medical school with multiple distinctions, I finished the Masters, ranking first in my cohort. I can memorize the exact order of two decks of cards in about 15 minutes. I memorized word for word my over 2,000 word Ted X talk in about an hour. I can recall research articles and books that I've read weeks or even months later. And as a learning coach, I in my workshops, I even do demonstrations where I learn a topic that a member of the audience has been struggling with, right in front of them, live, in minutes and then teach it back to them from memory. So how can I do all of that when I have a poor memory? Well, this is why I say it actually comes down to memory handling. And to understand what I mean by memory handling, we have to start by realizing that the way that most people think memory works is completely wrong. Here's what most people think happens with memory. Information comes into your brain, you try and remember it. And depending on the quality of your memory, if you have a good memory, you will remember it. And if you have a bad memory, you will forget it. And this is pretty much wrong on every level. In reality, when you look at research on memory, most people have very similar levels of raw memory capacity. Even memory champions who have these extraordinary memory feats like memorizing like hundreds or even thousands of numbers in a sequence, they're actually just using certain strategies. And if you or I learn those strategies, practice those strategies and use those strategies, we too would be capable of those memory feats. Interestingly, even when you look at people who haven't trained memory strategies, but just naturally have exceptional memory, it turns out that they are just instinctively using certain strategies without having deliberately trained on them. And it is actually very rare for someone to have a naturally much better memory while doing absolutely nothing different to the average person. And this is what memory handling is about. It's about taking the new information and then doing something with that information in the right way so that it is stored as memory. So it's not actually about just trying to remember something and the quality of your memory dictating whether you remember it or forget it. It's about whether you handled it in the right way or not. When you handle it in the right way, you remember it. When you handle it in the wrong way, you forget it. And we can control and train ourselves in how we handle it. And so the question is, how should we handle it so that we have better memory? Well, to answer this question, we have to ask which type of memory are you talking about? If we simplify a lot of complicated research, you have two main types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. And if you feel like your short-term memory is especially bad, then again, you're probably wrong. Some of you might have seen this movie called 50 First Dates. Uh, basically there's this guy going out with this girl, uh, and this girl has short-term memory loss. And every single day this guy is basically reintroducing himself and winning her over, uh, over and over and over again. That's why it's 51st dates. And it's just like, you know, a cute romcom movie, but it's also just completely wrong about short-term memory. And in fact, almost all media and mainstream representations of short-term memory are completely wrong. Short-term memory is much, much shorter than a day or even an hour. Some of the earliest research done on short-term memory is by the famous Herman Ebbinghaus in the late 1800s. He's responsible for the famous Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve. And in that research, he found that short-term memory actually only lasts seconds. And now with about 150 extra years of research on memory, we realize that he was actually pretty close. It does get a little bit complicated in that the duration of your short-term memory depends on how complex the information is or how familiar you are with it. But generally, it's about 15 to 30 seconds long. So if I'm reading something on a page, and two minutes later, I'm at the bottom of the page, and I've forgotten what I read at the top, that is not a failure of short-term memory. Two minutes is long-term memory territory. So most of the time when we feel like we have a poor short-term memory, what we're actually noticing is just rapid decay of our long-term memory. And what good memory handling does is that it stops the new information from decaying so quickly. Instead of decaying so rapidly that it's lost from your long-term memory within one or two minutes, we can extend that, so you're forgetting after one or two days or one or two weeks or months even. But here's an interesting question. If your short-term memory is only 15 to 30 seconds long, what is the point of having short-term memory? It is such a short amount of time, why even have it in the first place? And this is where it gets interesting because what you do during that 15 to 30 second window of your short-term memory is actually what dictates how well it is stored in your long-term memory. And I'm going to show you exactly what I mean by this, using Play-Doh. I'm personally looking forward to a lot because I haven't played with Play-Doh in years. So, this box that I'm drawing here, this represents your short-term memory. And then this red box here represents forgetting or decay. Basically, it's gone from your brain. This blue box at the top represents your long-term memory. I'm going to represent new information coming in using these chunks of Play-Doh. Man, that's a nostalgic smell. So new information enters into my senses, my eyes, uh, when I'm reading something, my ears when I'm listening to something, and it enters into my brain. And the first place it's going, in an oversimplified way, is in that short-term memory. And I now have 15 to 30 seconds in this short-term memory to do something with this and mold and handle it in such a way that it makes something that makes sense. And I have no idea what I'm doing right now, so the shape it's forming is not really that clear and then that's what I created, which is, uh, not very great. So this is not super meaningful as a shape and as a result, unfortunately, it is going to land up in the forget pile. So, now let us, uh, read the next paragraph, listen to the next, uh, part of the video, take in some more information. And again, 15 to 30 seconds, uh, we're going to make some kind of shape here. Okay, let's make a circle. That's kind of a little bit more like a meaningful shape. All right, that is a little bit more memorable, a bit more meaningful, that goes into my long-term memory. And this process continues for the next piece. All right, for this one I think I'm going to try to build like a a snowman. Let's see if I can do that in time. Hey, not really a snowman, but it's a, it's something. Maybe like three perfect sheep poo in a line. Uh, I think that's still meaningful enough. But let's say now I'm, uh, taking in the next piece of information. I'm not really paying much attention to what it's saying. Uh, I'm just kind of passively going over it again and again and again. And then the time is going to pass. I haven't really done anything with it at all really, so there we go. And we're going to forget it. And that is really what memory handling is all about. It is about being purposeful and deliberate in the way that we are molding and shaping this information to make sense out of it, to turn it into something that we feel has meaning. And when we can successfully do that in the short 15 to 30 second window after first encountering that information, while it stays in our short-term memory, then that passes through into the long-term memory. And it's for this reason where the short-term memory kind of functions as this workbench, where you where you're working with this new information. Giving us the opportunity to actually do something with this that, uh, especially more modernly in research, rather than short-term memory, we also call this working memory. Which I think is actually a better word. So, now that we understand this model, what are the strategies that we can actually use to handle the information a little bit better, so that we can shunt things into the long-term memory a bit more efficiently? These are your six practical takeaways. Number one, you can actually handle memory more efficiently by increasing complexity. So, if this information comes in and I'm not doing anything with it, this looks like reading it again and again, trying to just memorize it through repetition, maybe just writing it again a few times. Or literally just intending to understand what you're reading or listening to. These are not very complicated processes. And so in your brain it's basically just doing this. There's not really much transformation that's happening. But now let's say that the process I'm going to use is as soon as it comes in, I'm going to divide it into two shapes. I'm going to make two different types of shapes with each piece. That's a sphere, this one I'm going to turn it into like a uh a pyramid, and then I'm going to put the two shapes together. So I'm going to put that on that and look at what kind of shape it makes. Hey, it kind of looks like an ice cream cone. So I'm going to turn this into more like a ice cream cone shape. Nice. And so do you see, I was able to transform and do more of this because I'm actually actively engaging in a more involved, intricate process. And so with learning new information, it's a very similar thing. Instead of just reading the information and the paragraph that comes in, we are extracting keywords, looking for the key concepts. We can try to simplify and re-explain that concept in easier, more intuitive words. We can try to create analogies out of it, or we can try to connect it to something that we already know about. You can evaluate how important this is for the purposes that you're reading it for. What kind of problems might you be able to solve using this information? Maybe you're trying to read it in a way that allows you to teach it again to someone. All of these perspectives and strategies can all be effective techniques. Every single one of the things that I mentioned are strategies and techniques that you can start using next time you're learning any new information that are going to engage your brain more actively. And allow you to actually manipulate and transform this raw data into something that is a little bit more meaningful for your brain. And if you keep this in mind and you want to see my other videos, you'll notice that a lot of the strategies and techniques that I teach you, they're just about engaging your brain more actively to transform and manipulate this information into something that is more likely to be stored in your long-term memory. Now, practical strategy number two, is to handle it immediately. Earlier, I said that your working memory, or your short-term memory is very short, 15 to 30 seconds. Let's write that down as the as the limit here. 15 to 30 seconds. But this is actually not the only limit. For example, if I got you to to read through a page as fast as possible. And if you're a fast reader, let's say you get through hundreds of words in those 30 seconds, you're not going to remember all hundreds of those words. And that's because your working memory also has what I like to think of as a weight limit. Kind of like when you're boarding a plane and your baggage cannot be over a certain weight. Your working memory kind of has a similar thing. Now, some people talk about it as an item limit. Uh, Hermann Ebbinghaus's in his original research, he sort of said that the item limit, the number of things that you can hold on to in one go in your working memory is about seven items or so. And research since then has also found the sort of between five to nine items. But the complicated part is that it's hard to define what an item really is. For example, let's say you're trying to remember two words, the word syndrome and the word serotonin. So for a lot of people, these would just be two different words. But if you're medical, you would look at those two words and you'd be familiar with this idea of serotonin syndrome, which is an actual medical condition. And so that's really more like one item, if you knew about serotonin syndrome, whereas it would be two items if you didn't know about it. Likewise, if you can see a pattern in the information, it becomes even more complicated, like if I said that my phone number is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. Even though that's nine separate digits, it's trivial to remember all nine of those digits. And so this is why I like to think about working memory as having this weight limit. You can have one really heavy item, like a particular piece of terminology or a keyword that's really conceptually dense and complicated. Every time you read that word, you have to remind yourself, wait, what does that word even mean again? That's one item, but it's heavy. Whereas you could have seven very light items, like seven numbers and digits, or seven very short single syllable words. But either way, the picture that I'm painting here is that your working memory has some pretty significant limitations to it. Not only can it only hold on to information for a very short period of time, but it can only hold on to a certain amount or weight of information during that time as well. And so what a lot of people do when they learn is that they use a strategy of consume everything first, make sense of it later. I'm just going to read through it first, try to understand it, and then I'm going to go over it and then, then that's when I'm going to make sense of it. That's when I'm really going to learn it. But this is actually flawed because it assumes that by going over the material and understanding it, it is actually going to end up in your long-term memory for you to be able to come back to it later. But this is absolutely not the case. What actually is going to happen is that you're going to read it, you're going to understand it. Because you didn't do anything with it, it is just forgotten. And again, and again, and again, this is the reason why you get to an hour, two hours of reading something. You understood everything. Fast forward a couple days where you have to now review to try to make sense of it, you cannot recall anything. You have to basically just go over from the beginning, read it again. And so this is actually just a waste of time. A much better strategy is to just handle it straight away. As soon as it enters into your working memory, do something with it. Use that more complex process. Manipulate it, ask questions about it, start getting curious about it, connect it to something else that you know with your prior knowledge. Create analogies using it, teach it, simplify it. Do it immediately within the 15 to 30 seconds of first having encountered it. And spending 10 extra seconds to actually handle and mold that information, you're going to save yourself the time you would have spent in the future just relearning the thing that you forgot. So that's the second strategy, just handle it straight away. And that ties in perfectly with the third strategy, which is to pause for handling. Imagine you are reading something and you're trying to do something with this information. You're trying to make sense of it, but you're also still reading more things. This one is now coming in here. So now we're trying to work on this one as well. And remember, while we're working on this, this one is slowly slipping away, but we're still reading, so more stuff comes in and more stuff comes in. We are now exceeding the weight limit of our working memory. We're entering into what we would call cognitive overload, where basically it means there are too many things happening at the same time. And once you hit cognitive overload, your brain is sort of just, it's done for. You're not really able to get any effective output out of an overloaded brain. And so the strategy for dealing with overload is to prevent overload. And so by respecting the fact that your working memory is fairly limited, once we have one thing coming in, we pause. We pause the video, we stop reading more. We stop consuming and taking in more information so that we give our brain the space and the time to properly manipulate and create meaning out of this thing here. And then once we have created the meaning out of it, we open that flood gate again and allow the next one to come through. And by having this stop start approach to taking in information and then working on it on your workbench, in your working memory, your learning productivity. The amount of quality memory that you can produce per minute or hour of sitting there and consuming information, starts skyrocketing. Strategy number four, avoid distracting noises. Earlier I said that this is kind of like an oversimplification of certain things. Well, one of the reasons it's an oversimplification is because your working memory can be disrupted, especially by other words and sounds. And you probably already realize this. One of the really annoying things that I I like to do sometimes is if someone is counting or trying to do some kind of mental maths and just stand next to them and start speaking random numbers, like 63, 47, 125. And the numbers coming into their ears, even though they're not paying attention to it, that is occupying a bit of space in their working memory. They're trying to do this mental maths and I'm there annoyingly just injecting my random number into there. And then from here we have to make the decision to just not do anything with it and just let it be decayed. But that's taking precious time and attention and working memory resources. There's only so much space in here that we can do something with. And that's going to impair our ability to continue to really focus on building meaning and uh, shape out of information that we wanted to actually remember. So if you're trying to concentrate on something, and you need to actually be thinking actively, you know, you need to be using this workspace in a productive way, and you notice that you're getting distracted by people talking around you, other types of sounds. Don't just try to push through it or concentrate through it. Just block it out. Get your noise canceling headphones, move to a different environment, give your working memory the peace and quiet it needs to do its job. Now, I know I also have like hundreds of videos and it can be confusing to know where to start. So if you're looking for a single place to just start learning some of these strategies, then what I would recommend is actually my free weekly newsletter. These are short, three to five minute emails that I personally type up, where each email has a practical takeaway or a strategy for you to work on that week. And get sent to your inbox every single week, totally for free. You can unsubscribe at any time, whether you've been following my content for years, or you've just discovered it through this video. I think my newsletter is a great place to start experimenting with a few practical takeaways. So if you're interested in joining, I'll leave a link to sign up in the description below. Okay, practical takeaway number five. Let's say that you have been learning something for a while. You've got a bunch of, uh, meaningful shapes stored in your long-term memory. Great. You did some good work here. You really manipulated it, you worked with it. You've stored it into your long-term memory. Does this mean your memory is good? Not always. Because sometimes, uh, actually quite often, it is not an issue with the storage of the memory in your long-term memory. But rather, it's an issue with the retrieval from your long-term memory. For that reason, practical takeaway number five is practice retrieval. And there are actually many things that you can think about to practice retrieval in the right way. The first one is to actually do it. If you know that you need to be able to perform with this knowledge at a certain level, at a certain level of fluency, actually practice using that knowledge to that level. Otherwise, the fluency will not be developed. You'll find that your recall speed is slow, and sometimes very effortful. And often the process of practicing your retrieval shows you gaps and inaccuracies in the way that you encoded it in the first place. And by practicing retrieval and actually testing your knowledge at the level that it needs to be tested at, it gives you the opportunity back in your working memory to do something with it and correct the memory for re-encoding. While there are many other things that I can say about retrieval practice, um, I won't go into it in too much into this particular video, but the one quick tip that I will give you is to be really careful about the cues you use for retrieval practice. If you need to use your knowledge in a certain type of context, responding to certain types of cues, for example, someone asking you a really complicated question, or asking you to teach it, or discuss it at a certain level. Maybe you need to use that knowledge to solve really complicated problems or make certain decisions. If those are the types of cues that are going to trigger that knowledge to come to the forefront, but the way that you're practicing the retrieval is just through flash cards, those cues are different enough that you're probably not going to get great knowledge transfer. So, yes, you can recall that information through the queue of a flash card, because you've practiced it, but it doesn't translate very well to how you need to actually use your knowledge in real life. That is actually also generally one of the biggest disadvantages of using flash cards as a strategy. The sixth, final, uh, and I would say actually even my favorite practical strategy, is to think on paper. I've been demonstrating, obviously, using, uh, Play-Doh this entire time, which has been really, just a great, enjoyable experience, I have to say. But let's translate this to what it would look like with real knowledge, real information, actual words and concepts. Well, the information that comes in, these are going to be concepts. And that's going to be stored in your working memory. So let's say I'm talking about the topic that I've been teaching right now. So the concepts are short-term memory, long-term memory, working memory, and then there are working memory limits. We've talked about the idea of encoding knowledge, we've talked about retrieving, we've talked about knowledge, decay and forgetting. These are the concepts that I'm going to read about. Now, the equivalent of just doing this for 15 to 30 seconds and eventually it being forgotten, would be like saying short-term memory, what does that mean? Short-term memory, what does that mean? What is the definition? Okay, I understand that. All right, long-term memory, what's the definition? Okay, I understand that. What is working memory? Okay, I understand that. Very, very passive, low level of complexity. Now, the higher level of complexity, more active, manipulative way of working with this would be to say, okay, short-term memory versus long-term memory. What is the difference here? Okay, so short-term memory leads to the long-term memory. Short-term memory is equal to or similar, it's another word for working memory. Working memory has these, uh, limits in it. And depending on the process that we use to encode that, that is going to affect the rate of decay. And when we retrieve information, which happens from your long-term memory, it comes back into our working memory. And when we correct our knowledge, uh, that also helps to re-encode that information as well. So you see what I'm doing here is I'm connecting it together, I'm seeing how it fits. And this looks really messy. I'm not going to remember this mass of of connections. So let me just clean it up. Short-term memory, similar to working memory. This is leading to long-term memory. We are retrieving, and this process of going from short-term to long-term, this we called it encoding. And depending on the quality of this, we're getting decay and this has certain limits. All right, so this one looks a little bit cleaner than this one. And you see what I'm doing here is right now, as I demonstrate to you live here, I am currently using my working memory to think about how they are connected. I'm using my working memory to plan it out and to clean it up. I am creating organization and clarity in my thinking by using my working memory strategically. And that is going to allow this to be encoded into my long-term memory at a higher quality and for longer. However, remember the weight limit, 15 to 30 seconds. My demonstration was longer than 15 to 30 seconds. How was I able to do this when it took longer than 15 to 30 seconds when each of these concepts is quite complicated? And I have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven of those things. Shouldn't I have exceeded my weight limit as well? And the answer is yes, yes, if you were trying to do all of this purely in your head. And this is what thinking on paper means. It means use note taking, use paper, draw things out, visualize, so that you open up a whole new box over here, which is the paper. And you create an offload and a reference for your working memory. Now your working memory doesn't have to spend its precious resources trying to hold on to all of this stuff because it's on paper. I can simply just look at what I've written, and so the only thing that's happening inside my working memory is just when I think about short-term memory versus long-term memory. It becomes more like this. All right, what is the connection between short-term memory and long-term memory? That's what happens inside my working memory. And I realize, oh yeah, short-term memory leads to long-term memory. Great. Now that I've got that, I put that on paper. I don't have to have that in my working memory anymore. I bring on the next piece and the next piece. So my working memory can stay focused and tight on just exactly the key parts that we're working through and how my knowledge is growing is being reflected in the way that I'm thinking on paper. This is called a cognitive offload, and it is the best way of using note-taking to enhance your learning. And if you want to master how to think on paper, you should check out this video here where I talk about just that. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.