For healthy people, a short break immediately after learning something makes a difference to how much they could remember a whole week later the learning took place.New memories are fragile, so even a short break can make a difference to whether they hang around or disappear.

Taking mental breaks

Sleep is thought to help consolidate our memories by replaying or reactivating the information we’ve just learned.That sleep doesn’t have to happen at night. Naps work too, bur mostly for people who are accustomed to regularly taking a nap in the afternoon.

Sleep and memory

Backwards walking (whether real, imaginary, or virtual) can boost your short-term memory. To go back in time, it might help to go backwards in space. Moving backwards through space appears to carry the our minds backward along that subjective timeline toward the point at which the remembered information was encoded, thus improving our recall.

Walking backwards

When we draw something we are forced to consider in more detail and it’s this deeper processing that makes us more likely to remember it. Even writing a list helps somehow, which is why when you get to the shop and realise you’ve left your shopping list at home, you can still remember more items than if you hadn’t written a list at all. However, doing a drawing takes it one step further.

Drawing to remember

When you want to learn something in particular, then physical effort does seem to help, at least in the short-term. In an experiment, people that did 35 minutes of interval training 4 hours after learning a list of pictures paired with locations were better at remembering the pairs than those who did the interval training straight away.

Exercise, but get the timing right

Most of us wish we had better memories. If only we didn't get to the shop, knowing we must buy three things, but only remembering two. If only we didn't go upstairs, only to forget why we went up there. If only we could read information and take it all in easily, instead of it disappearing quickly from our minds.

Sleep and memory

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