Memory Tricks - no more brain like a sieve
You don't need to have a particularly high IQ or a differently configured brain to have a good memory, but there are some tricks to the trade.

When Eleanor Maguire from University College London studied eight front runners in the annual World Memory Championships these people showed activity not normally active during simple memory tests but in three brain regions that become active during movements and navigation tasks!

Actors use a related technique: they attach emotional meaning to what they say. We always remember highly emotional moments better than less emotionally loaded ones. Professional actors also seem to link words with movement, remembering action-accompanied lines significantly better than those delivered while static, even months after a show has closed.

Helga Noice, a psychologist from Elmhurst College in Illinois found students who paired their script words with previously learned actions could reproduce 38 per cent of them after just 5 minutes, whereas rote learners only managed 14 per cent.

Another technique is to make up a story based on a sequence of interactions between something you are trying to remember and objects at sites along a well-trodden route.

Learn a trick from the "mnemonists" who routinely memorise strings of thousands of digits, entire epic poems, or hundreds of unrelated words. Use a strategy of placing items to be remembered along a visualized route (Nature Neuroscience, vol 6, p 90).

Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and his team has found signs that the neural systems that underlie working memory may grow in response to training. (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 75). Perhaps more significantly, when children completed certain types of mental workouts, they saw improvement in a range of cognitive abilities in addition to those related to the training, and a leap in I.Q. test scores of 8 percent (Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, vol 44, p 177). It's early days yet, but Klingberg thinks working-memory training could be a key to unlocking brain power.

So now you know why at Learning Insights we look so closely at memory among other skills and don't just do a quick test for phonological difficulties in children referred with possible specific learning difficulties, dyslexia, dyspraxia, Non verbal learning Difficulties, ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorders and so on.