The time has come for the last revisions before the exams.
As the tension mounts, knowledge scatters in the limbo of memory.
Worse still, some have not yet been assimilated.
We then rush on a mountain of index cards and books which we guess will not be able to get us out of trouble in such a short time.
Because everyone knows that learning is a long-term exercise.
To discover
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Sébastien Martinez, 2015 French memory champion, author of
An infallible memory
(Premier Parallèle) and
Les champions de la mémoire
(Premier Parallèle), to be published in May 2023, delivers his method for remembering everything as quickly as possible without resorting to rote learning, which he says is only effective in the short term.
1. Control your attention
All memorization work begins with concentration work.
For Sébastien Martinez, you have to understand how you lose focus.
Namely, either because of his environment, or because of internal distractors (thoughts, unease, etc.).
“Isolating yourself in a room or using noise-cancelling headphones is essential
,” he explains.
There are then two categories of strategies aimed at directing one's attention.
A first is related to action: walking or doodling can help avoid being disturbed by internal distractors.
And another relates to well-being, to physical fitness: sleeping, not succumbing to the chants of “infobesity” and maintaining social ties, in particular, will make it possible to learn in good conditions.
2. Giving meaning to information
Remember a series of dates, a personality linked to a time, an event… To encode the information, it is necessary to give it meaning.
As the 2015 French memory champion explains,
“the five senses are the brain's only interface with the outside world.
The latter does not work in a binary way, so the challenge is to transform information into meaning in order to stimulate it.”
For example, thinking about the image, or even the sound that a Buddha would make while shouting, allows us to remember that Budapest (associated with Buddha) is the capital of Hungary (associated with "we shout"
)
.
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Similarly, to remember that the coronation of Cleopatra dates from 51 BC.
AD, we can link the number 51 to pastis and Cleopatra to the character played by Monica Bellucci in
Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra
(2002).
The image of Monica Bellucci being poured pastis over during a coronation scene will help to remember this date.
Of course, everyone has their own representations and establishes the links that seem to them the fairest.
3. Correct yourself repeatedly
After the intermediate stage of encoding information, assimilating knowledge requires testing oneself rather than rereading its course.
And this, so that it enters what is commonly called semantic memory.
“The problem with proofreading is that we tend to only reread what we already know to reassure ourselves
,” explains Sébastien Martinez.
So write down everything that comes to mind when you think of a topic.
This is when you have to correct yourself and reread yourself.”
Then, as mentioned by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German philosopher considered to be the father of the experimental psychology of learning, it is advisable to revise one hour after the first learning, one day later, three days later, then a week later, And so on.
"The more we advance, the less there is a need to review
," concludes Sébastien Martinez.