And I don’t mean the present day, but the present, not thinking about the past, nor the future, but the present, got it? Ok. A person can either “live” on the present on a long-term period, or on a short-term period. To know how to do it on a short-term would help you understand how to manage your memories. As it, studying, set those memories as if they were old.
Why? Let me explain this better.
Many people have trouble studying for tests, exams, or other things; it doesn’t matter if you’re in high-school, or college, of farther than that; people study in different ways. Some do better memorizing things, some just need to read and understand concepts and others need a pseudo-photographic memory to accomplish the task. As far as I know every person have its own way, being impossible, or almost impossible to change it, as they are used to one or another.
Yet, setting new concepts and information as an old memory won’t change your way of learning. But how can you do that? Being that something you do almost automatically, you actually don’t do anything on purpose. The only thing you need to know is that it is possible.
What’s the relation between memories and knowledge
As many people study memorizing, it’s clear that you learn as your memory works. Not that you have to remember all that stuff you’ve studied your entire life. Understanding is better and is what we know for “learning”. But actual learning is the job of our memory, logical mind and creative one as a team. Our memory is like an archive in where everything is stored. Our logical mind is the one that can separate simple concepts, the one than can make you understand a complex machine by understanding the simple parts of it, regardless of how many parts are there, as that’s your memory’s job.
On the other hand, your creative mind will let you think and create some way to explain the whole thing you’re trying to understand, so you can actually understand it. It’s not that the creative part it’s more important than anything, but it is present on every thought, as you create as you think. So the relation is that: memory let you archive knowledge, and not only works as a “read-only” file, but a machine that gathers all kind of information and stores it.
What can setting memories as old memories do for my study?
Have you noticed that while you study, you try to remember everything and organize that on your head? You do. But, as many studies have confirmed, sleeping is what makes short-term memory to transform into long-term memory, as also, sleeping is what makes you “solidify” the new knowledge, by setting “new” as “old”.
Have you ever tried to remember some really old concept and actually remembered it? You can remember old information and explain old concepts, but not as good as you could if it were taught to you the week before, not the year/decade before. Yet, there is a great exception, that applies to some math concepts and other basic knowledge we learnt at some point and we are already using it. Things like add or subtract, multiplying and dividing, as math examples that we use daily even automatically and subconsciously. We can explain better old knowledge than really new one, as the old one is actually grabbed into our heads, while new one is not. Yet, we can explain way better old knowledge that’s still in use than old knowledge forgotten from present-day life.
That’s why setting new knowledge as old one is good: as an old one you can understand (and therefor, explain) better the whole idea, than if that were a new thing (1 day old or less). So every time you’re studying, and mostly if you’re studying the night before, please try to turn new memories into old ones. Trick your mind and learn faster. As a tip, think a lot, some times is good to procrastinate a little bit after you study a little bit, so you can learn, a little bit faster.
