Justin Sung — If You Have A Bad Memory, I’ll Help You Fix It In 28 Minutes
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= About Dr Justin Sung = Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.
Key Insights
If you think you have poor memory, you’re probably wrong. The issue is not that you have poor memory, but poor memory handling. And in this video, I’m going to teach you exactly how your memory really works according to neuroscience, and six practical, evidence-based strategies that you can use to immediately start improving your memory, even if you’ve always struggled with it. Now, I myself have always had a poor memory. I forget the places that I’ve been to. I forget the restaurants I’ve eaten at. If you ask me to remind you about something later, I definitely am going to forget to remind you. Yet, [music] I have completed medical school with multiple distinctions. I finished the masters ranking first in my cohort. I can memorize the exact order of two decks of cards in about 15 minutes. [music] I memorized word for word my over 2,000 word TEDx talk in about an hour. I can recall research articles and books that I’ve [music] read weeks or even months later. And as a learning coach, I in my workshops, I often do demonstrations where I learn a topic that a member of the audience has been struggling with right in front of them live in minutes, and then teach it back to them from memory. So, how can I do all of that when I have a poor memory? [music] Well, this is why I say it actually comes down to memory handling. And to understand what I mean by memory handling, we have to start by realizing that the way that most people think memory works is completely wrong. Here’s what most people think happens with memory. Information comes into your brain. You try and remember it, and depending on the quality of your memory, if you have a good memory, you will remember it. And if you have a bad memory, you will forget it. And this is pretty much wrong on every level. In reality, when you look at research on memory, most people have very similar levels of raw memory capacity. Even memory champions who have these extraordinary memory feats, like memorizing like hundreds or even thousands of numbers in a sequence, they’re actually just using certain strategies. And if you or I learn those strategies, practice those strategies, and use those strategies, we too would be capable of those memory feats. Interestingly, even when you look at people who haven’t trained memory strategies, but just naturally have exceptional memory, it turns out that they are just instinctively using certain strategies without having >> [music] >> deliberately trained on them. And it is actually very rare for someone to have a naturally much better memory while doing absolutely nothing different to the average person. And this is what memory handling is about. It’s about [music] taking the new information and then doing something with that information in the right way so that it is stored as memory. So, it’s not actually about just trying to remember something and the quality of your memory dictating whether you remember it or forget it, it’s about whether you handled it in the right way or not. When you handle it in the right way, you remember it. When you handle it in the wrong way, you forget it. And we can control and train ourselves in how we handle it. And so, the question is, how should we handle it so that we have better memory? Well, to answer this question, we have to ask which type of memory are you talking about? If we simplify a lot of complicated research, you have two main types of memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. And if you feel like your short-term memory is especially bad, then again, [music] you’re probably wrong. Some of you might have seen this movie called 51st Dates. Uh basically, there’s this guy uh going out with this girl uh and this girl has short-term memory loss. And every single day, this guy is basically reintroducing himself and winning her over uh over and over and over again. That’s why it’s 51st Dates. And it’s just like, you know, cute rom-com movie, but it’s also just completely wrong about short-term me
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