Remembering, the bane of all doctors and a highly significant contributor to their success in medical school and beyond.
How often do you try to recall something, only to realize the memory is already long faded and too late to trace back? Even worse, sometimes it feels as if it’s at the tip of your mind and you just. Can’t. Remember.
How often do you make silly mistakes, or do your brain cells feel completely drained, as you struggle to remember?
It certainly must be more difficult to remember.
But is it really?
Say I give you a polynomial equation: 9x^5/9+6x^4/2+x^3/5+7x^2/4+9x+8 = 0, and I ask you to memorize and repeat it back to me in five seconds. Then I ask you to try and forget a formula you’ve known from before – say the root-finding quadratic formula, in five seconds.
Does that first polynomial equation look easy to digest at all? Yet try as you might, you will find it ironically easier to memorize at least partially that polynomial jargon than trying to forget the quadratic formula that you have learnt before.
I am sure the concept of the above paragraph is nothing new to you. However, I am trying to put into concise terms to explain why we cannot give a blanket (general) answer to the question: “is it easier to remember or to forget”. We don’t remember things better just because it’s shorter and less complicated. It also depends on period of exposure – in other words, how long you’ve known it.
We are only human and are not able to over-compromise sleep or take in more knowledge than we possibly can a day. To excel in life, we must make connections with the things we learn. In this case, the transferable skill here is applying what you’ve learnt about memory from this blogpost to your study strategy!
It is learning to expose yourself, regularly but at the appropriate time, to the information you need to absorb. This is done through the well-known method called “spatial recollection“.
Spatial recollection is a scientifically proven method of recalling information through a series of carefully timed re-viewing of the information you need to absorb. It is said that when you’re trying to memorize something, you need to read and reread it the most times in the beginning, then once a week, then once a month perhaps. The neurons in our brains somehow process information in this manner.
Therefore in the beginning, it is crucial to pick your material up and go through it more than once at least. After that, your brain has a stronger hold on the information and it becomes less likely that you will forget it.
I have tried this method and found that it works greatly for me. Try this out in your study strategy, and I’m sure it will do wonders for you!
Rachel's Truth 