Five magical techniques that will restore your perfect memory. Image source: pikabu.ru
Memory is not an innate gift but a skill that can be trained. A psychologist and neuroscience researcher offers five effective techniques, backed by decades of scientific experiments, that help you remember more and retain it longer. The best part: they’re all free, simple, and work starting today.
How Human Memory Works and Why We Forget
To understand how to improve memory, it helps to know how it’s structured. Memory works in three stages, and different brain regions are responsible for each one.
The first stage is sensory memory. It lasts milliseconds and captures “raw” information: sounds, images, smells. Processing is handled by the primary sensory areas of the cortex — visual, auditory, and so on.
The second stage is working (short-term) memory. This is your mental “workspace”: it’s what allows you to do mental math, follow instructions, and understand what you’re reading right now. Working memory is linked to the prefrontal cortex — the front part of the brain responsible for attention, decision-making, and reasoning.
The third stage is long-term memory. It stores information from a few minutes to an entire lifetime. This includes both facts and events (so-called “explicit” memory) and skills and habits (“implicit” memory). The hippocampus and temporal lobes play a key role here — they’re located deep in the brain, roughly at temple level.
You can improve the efficiency of your memory
An important point: working memory is the “gateway” to long-term memory. And this gateway has limited bandwidth, even though it may seem like the brain’s memory capacity is enormous. In 1956, American psychologist George Miller showed that we can hold only about seven “chunks” of information in working memory at once. The exact number is still debated, but the principle remains: working memory is limited, and this limitation affects how well we learn and remember. The good news: these limitations can be circumvented. Here are five ways.
Put Away Your Smartphone: Having a Phone Nearby Impairs Memory and Attention
The first and perhaps most surprising tip from psychologist and neuroscience researcher Elva Arulchelvan of Trinity College Dublin: put your phone far away. Not just face-down on the desk — but in another room.
A series of experiments published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research showed that even when a phone is lying nearby turned off or on silent mode, part of the brain continues to “monitor” it. Resisting the urge to check notifications also consumes mental resources. Researchers called this effect “brain drain.”
A 2023 meta-analysis covering 56 studies and more than 7,000 participants confirmed: the mere presence of a smartphone reduces working memory capacity — even if the person doesn’t pick it up or consciously think about it.
Simple solution: during study or work, put your phone in another room
The solution is strikingly simple: when you need to concentrate, take your phone somewhere you can’t see it. “Out of sight” in this case literally means “more free resources for the brain.”
Calm Down, Stop the Stream of Thoughts: Stress and Anxiety Reduce Memory and Learning
When you’re anxious or overwhelmed by intrusive thoughts, part of your working memory is already occupied — it simply doesn’t have enough “space” for new information. Research shows that stress and anxiety directly reduce working memory capacity and learning quality.
Relaxation and mindfulness practices help here. But if meditation seems complicated, there’s a simpler tool — the “cyclic sighing” technique, studied at Stanford University. Here’s how it works:
- Take a deep breath in through your nose.
- Take a second, short inhale — to fill your lungs as much as possible.
- Slowly and completely exhale through your mouth.
A study published in Cell Reports Medicine in 2023 showed that five minutes of this breathing per day over the course of a month reduces anxiety and improves mood more effectively than mindfulness meditation. Participants in the “cyclic sighing” group reported the greatest daily increase in positive emotions, and the effect grew stronger with each day of practice. The long exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system — the part of the body’s “autopilot” responsible for rest and recovery.
Less anxiety — more free working memory — better memorization.
Chunking: A Way to Remember More Information by Grouping It
Since working memory holds a limited number of “chunks,” the logical move is to make each chunk larger. This is exactly how chunking works — grouping information into meaningful blocks.
You most likely already use this. A phone number broken into parts (+7 916 123 45 67) is easier to remember than a set of eleven individual digits, precisely because the brain perceives it as three or four groups rather than eleven elements.
Chunking in action: grouping information by topic helps the brain process more data
The same principle works in more complex situations. Preparing a presentation with ten examples? Combine them into three or four thematic blocks, give each a short headline and one key takeaway. On each slide — one idea, a couple of supporting details, and move on. By organizing information into meaningful patterns, you reduce cognitive load and help both yourself and your audience remember what matters.
Test Your Knowledge and Memory: The Forgetting Curve and the Power of Self-Testing
In the 19th century, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted experiments on himself and discovered a disheartening pattern: within just 30 minutes of learning, we lose roughly half of new information. After 24 hours, even less remains. He called this relationship the “forgetting curve,” and it has been successfully replicated in modern studies.
But there’s an antidote to this problem — retrieval practice. The idea is simple: instead of rereading your notes, test yourself. Use flashcards, answer quiz questions, retell the material aloud without prompts.
Why does this work? Memory relies on associations. Every time you successfully “retrieve” information from memory, you link it with new cues, examples, and contexts. This creates more “entry points” to the memory and strengthens the neural pathway. Often, when we “forget” something, the information hasn’t disappeared — the brain simply lacks the right cue to find it in its data archive.
