The Art of Memorization 🎭

“Those who memorize everything like a parrot doesn’t mean they understand everything.”

Rajesh Mishra
2 min readDec 2, 2021

We often find it challenging to memorize people’s names or forget things we read or learned related to something.

While we even find it difficult to remember the phone number of our best friend. A Chinese student, Chau Lu, remembered 68000 digits of the mathematical formula, Pi. She took 24hours non-stop to recite the value of pi up to 68000.

According to Dr Hovarth, an Australian Medical Doctor, there are two rules to remember things:

* Repetition
* Focus

  • Repetition: Unless we link it to something, it becomes difficult to remember something. For example, my name is Sam, and if I come across a person whose name is also Sam, it’s effortless for me to remember that person’s name. But the chance of remembering something else in one go is low if it’s a one-off.
  • Focus: We always remember what we focus on. For example, you’re watching a cricket match where your favorite cricketer is playing. There’s a higher possibility that you’ll remember the complete batting spell if that player is a batsman or the bowling spell if that player is a bowler.

Memorizing or remembering is an essential part of a student’s life. As students, we land in a situation where we need to cram before an exam. As per research, students who cram for tests forget about 90% of what they studied within 72 hours.

So it’s believed, and even nowadays, things are slowly changing, that education shouldn’t be to cram the students.

In place of memorizing, you should always focus on deep learning. It helps you fully understand a topic, and you will not forget it.

So, repetition, focus and deep learning are the memory muscle we need.

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Rajesh Mishra

A coder by profession, sharing life experiences with the Words. Learning more about Productivity, Habits, Decision Making and ambitious towards self freedom.