10 Ways to Improve Your Child's Memory
Exciting developments in memory research are allowing researchers to view what happens to the brain as it learns. Here are 10 tips to help you become your children's memory coach, so they truly learn everything from school.
by Judy Willis, M.D., M.Ed.
One of the most exciting areas in today's brain-based memory research can help you to help your children remember all those facts, figures, experiences and ideas they're supposed to be learning in school.
Neuroimaging and brain-mapping studies are allowing researchers to view what happens to the working brain as it learns. I've used this research, my background as a neurologist, and my experiences as a classroom teacher to create these learning strategies I call "neuro-logical." Use these 10 tips to become your children's memory coach—and help them truly learn.
1. De-stressors. Stress causes the brain intake systems to send information into the reactive brain—the automatic fight-flight-freeze part of our brain—and prevents information from flowing through to the reflective brain—the higher-thinking conscious brain, the prefrontal cortex where long-term memory is constructed.
De-stress your child's study experience and open up the brain networks that lead to memory storage by establishing enjoyable rituals (favorite songs, card games, ball toss) or surprises (a fun picture downloaded and printed from the internet) before study time.
2. Attention-grabbers. Curiosity opens up the brain's sensory intake filter. Memorable events make long-term memories. Find out what your child will study next in school, and hang posters "advertising" or giving hints about that topic.
Encourage your child to guess what it might be. When the topic comes up in class or in reading, it will grab his attention.
3. Color. The brain only allows in a small part of the billions of bits of sensory information available every second. A filter in the low brain—the unconscious, automatic, animal-like part of our brain—decides what gets in. Color gets through this filter especially well.
Have your child use colored pens to color-code their notes and the words that are especially important.
4. Novelty. A child's alerting system will be more open to processing and remembering information that comes in after a novel experience.
So if you add novelty to a study experience, it will be more memorable. Use video clips from the internet. Feel free to be silly for this aspect of parenting children: pop on a funny hat, put a scarf on the dog, or light a candle right before your child begins to study.
5. Personal meaning. Children must care about information or consider it personally important for it to go through the brain filters and be stored as memory.
Use your child's interests to connect her to the material. Make stories together using the information. Stories are great ways to remember new things because your child's brain grew up hearing stories and the pattern for remembering stories is strong in her brain.
6. Relational memories. The brain keeps information in short-term memory for less than a minute unless it connects with prior knowledge.
Activate your child's prior knowledge by reminding him of things that relate to the new information, such as facts and ideas he's learned in other subjects or activities you've done as a family.
7. Patterning. The brain is a pattern-seeking organ. Once your child has recognized relationships between prior knowledge and the new knowledge, her brain can link the new information with a category of existing knowledge for long-term storage.
Have your child make charts. Use mnemonic devices such as rhymes or acronyms, like the favorite for the points of the compass, "never eat shredded wheat" (or "slimy worms"!). Listing similarities or differences and making analogies also build long-term memory patterns.
8. Mental manipulation for long-term memory. Once the information gets to the higher thinking brain, your child must do something active with it to build permanent memories.
He can write summaries of new information in his own words. To make these even more personally meaningful, the summaries can be in forms that suit his learning style preferences, such as sketches, skits, songs, dances, comic strips, or drawings.
9. "Syn-naps." Neurotransmitters, the brain transport proteins that are needed for memory construction and attention, are depleted after as little as 10 minutes of doing the same activity.
"Syn-naps" are brain-breaks where you help your child change the learning activity to allow her brain chemicals to replenish. A syn-nap can be stretching, singing, tossing a ball, or just moving around the room. After just a few minutes, her refreshed brain will be ready for new memory storage.
10. Practicing via different senses. Information from each of the senses is stored in a part of the brain specific to that sense. If you review material using multiple sensory activities, different neural networks store the knowledge in multiple brain regions. Your child's brain will build multiple pathways leading to the stored memory, which makes retrieval more efficient. And when a memory has been recalled often, this repeated neural circuit activation makes the memory stronger, like exercising a muscle. Practice makes permanent.
Use blocks, buttons or coins to review math concepts. Act out vocabulary words. Read important passages of text out loud. Have your child take to you about the subject matter. Change the location from where your child usually studies—do your review session at the kitchen table or outside in the garden.
The author of five books including How Your Child Learns Best, Judy Willis, M.D., M.Ed., practiced neurology for 15 years before receiving her Master of Education from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She currently teaches at Santa Barbara Middle School.
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