You’ve doubtless heard the saying “in one ear and out the other” and maybe other people have even accused you of behaving that way. The same thing can happen with what we read – words can register as you’re reading them but minutes, days or weeks later you have no recall.

You know you’ve read something. You know you meant to remember it at the time. But for the life of you, you can’t remember what it is you read. It’s a frustrating experience.

So how can you remember what you’ve read?

The first thing to remember is that not everything we read is important. Yesterday’s weather forecast was important at the time (maybe) but unless you’re completing an insurance claim it’s highly unlikely to be relevant even a day or two later, so there’s no point in remembering it.

Other stuff is just pure trivia. How Brad Pitt is faring in his latest romance, whether Mel Gibson has bugged the whole world or just a large part of it, that kind of thing. You don’t need to commit it to your long term memory.

And that novel you read recently was fun at the time but you don’t really need to know how to cast a spell at Hogwarts in real life, so it’s fine for that memory to be consigned to your mind’s recycle bin.

The trouble is, your brain often has a job knowing which things to store and which not to store.

So you can likely quote your junior school teacher’s catch phrase and some of the obscure things that fascinated you as a child but recalling the figures from the latest business report you need to quote, that’s another matter.

Your mind goes blank the wrong time. Far too often!

Our memory is a fragile thing. We have so much information to store that retrieving it at will often seems an uphil struggle.

There are various tricks you can use to help the problem.

Think back to your schooldays: you’d revise before an exam. This has the effect of bringing the memories back to the surface although it also depends on the time since you last looked at the material. Our memories are a bit like the magnetic tapes of old – they fade over time.

Unless we take steps to stop the fading from happening…

Revision is an excellent way of doing this.

So is assigning a “hook” or trigger for the memory.

If it’s important enough to remember, figure out some kind of trigger to help you retrieve the information. Mnemonics work well for this and you may well have used them before. Others find that associating an image with the thing they want to remember is a good idea.

The main thing is not to try to remember everything. Assign an importance factor to what you read and maybe make some notes as you go along so you can refer back to these and literally refresh your memory.

Hypnosis can also work well to keep your memories fresh.

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Category: Self Help
Keywords: remember everything,how to remember,remember what you\’ve read