Scientists find surprising trick which can make you remember things far more clearly
There’s a lot of ‘tricks’ out there which supposedly turbo-charge your memory, from making up stories to visualising images.
But researchers at the University of Waterloo, Canada found one that is ‘surprisingly powerful’ – doing a drawing of whatever you want to remember.
They found that the technique is so powerful that it could even help people with dementia, according to the BPS Digest.
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Researchers found that drawing quick pictures of words (for instance, ‘pear’) led to far better rates of remembering, compared to writing out the word several times or imagining the items.
The researchers found that among older adults (and patients with dementia) rates of recall were far higher with objects they had drawn rather than simply imagined.
The researchers write, ‘Taken together, the evidence…demonstrates that drawing is a robust encoding strategy that can, and does, improve memory performance dramatically.’
