Jemma Spike

And what I mean by a significant way is that you have to show your brain this information is important and worth remembering, either through repetition, recall, practical application, applying it to your personal circumstances or any number of techniques that you may have used in the past or still do use.

Your brain receives hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pieces of information every day.

So your brain needs a signal for what is important.

And that signal is a deliberate behavior like study methods, like repetition, like any of those things that is saying to your brain, hey, this is something we care about.

We want to learn this.

The thing is, there is a hierarchy here.

And the more personal significance you can apply to new information, the better.

And

the further up the hierarchy the method will be, basically.

Recall, like, repetition is pretty low.

But when you start to apply personal information to what you are learning, you start to move up the ladder.

In fact, a 2024 study from Rice University titled Why People Remember found that information that has emotional significance and personal significance has a longer...

essentially like memory shelf life.

And that makes sense, you don't forget your dog's name, you don't forget the girls who bullied you in the fifth grade, or your favorite songs, you don't forget the lyrics to those, because those memories are often encoded differently.

This hack, the hack is encoding the information you're studying in the same way as that personally significant information so that you can recall it easier.

Most people, again, will do the following.

They will take notes.

They will read those notes.

They will highlight those notes.

They will repeat the information in the same form as much as possible.