Learning is one of our most admired human traits. Being quick to pick up new skills can be key to our career success.
Building memory is a complex mix of brain activity and plasticity. However here are some basics that may help and encourage us.
- Experience or create the memory. The events or information are actively processed by our brain and begin to be associated with other things we’ve already processed. The connections established between memories is key.
- Consolidation or reconsolidation happens next. The experience is strengthened in long-term memory. Repeating the original experience helps. Sleeping on it also helps. Good sleep is tied to good memory.
- Recall. Each time we remember or recall an event or bit of information we make connections stronger. A little variation (time, space, location, context) in each recall cycle seems to help as well.
We want to recommend a book we particularly enjoyed some time ago. Moonwalking with Einstein is a very readable look about building memory. Joshua Foer starts with a fun historical perspective of human memory. And then tells the story of how he came to compete in a type of memory olympics, where ordinary people display feats of spectacular memorization.
Remember to take a look at Cogneti’s Safe Food Handler certificate program. We’ve designed some nice learning accelerators into the training app. It’s mobile. And we think it’s built for the way people need to train.