Remember everything

From my own experience, I know that a huge amount of information falls on a novice developer, especially by mastering the profession on his own. At the beginning, there is practically no knowledge and experience, and new information obtained from books and articles, when assimilated, has nothing to connect with in memory. And, if practical knowledge is constantly in use, then basic, theoretical things are difficult to fit and, without refreshment, quickly enough disappear from the beginner’s head. Realizing this disappointing trend, I became interested in the issue of increasing the speed of reading and the efficiency of memorization. In this article I want to share with you the results of studying this issue by describing the most interesting, from my point of view, moments from several books read.

Brain development. Roger sype

The book addresses issues of increasing the speed of reading and increasing attentiveness. Roger Sipe is a speaker and trainer, which causes a peculiar presentation: emotionally charged and motivating. In spite of the fact that such a manner is not very close to me, having discarded the superfluous, I could find something useful in the book.

The main ways to increase the speed of reading:
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• reading, you do not need to pronounce the text to yourself, otherwise the speed of reading decreases to the speed of reading out loud.
• when moving along the line while reading, our eyes make stops, during which information is perceived by the brain. Cyp claims that the frequency of these stops is laid by nature and is about 4 times per second. So, if we cannot influence the frequency of stops, then we can try to expand the field of view: perceive not one word at a time, but a whole section of the line. The book provides exercises for the development of this skill.
• an increase in the speed of reading also attracts attention, because you are focused on correct perception and maintaining speed, which means you have no time to be distracted.
• For both speed and attentiveness, it is useful to guide a page or ruler on the page during the reading process. The speed of mechanical movement will set the speed of reading, and the object being moved will instinctively attract the attention of the eyes. This technique is familiar to us from school, but here you can use another secret: you need to close not the lower ones from the readable lines, but the upper ones. This will eliminate the possibility of returning to what has already been read for her greater attention mobilization, because you are cutting your way back.

In order to not lose in the quality of awareness of the readable, while increasing the speed of reading, the author suggests such a technique as obtaining preliminary knowledge. This allows you to first immerse the brain in the context of new information, in order to facilitate its perception during high-speed reading.

The author offers the following method of obtaining preliminary knowledge:

1. read the first paragraph
2. read the last paragraph
3. read a couple of sentences from all paragraphs

From my point of view, this fast reading technique is more suitable for quick refreshment of knowledge than for learning a new one. So if you need to "run through" the already familiar material, then it is quite suitable. In addition to the described rapid reading technique, the author proposes a method for forming motivating goals.

How to increase your intelligence. Richard D. Pellegrino, Michael D. Politis

The authors of the book fascinatingly described many features of the brain and sense organs, and did not ignore the issues of memorization. For myself, I made the following advice regarding the acquisition of new knowledge (mainly through reading):

• read better about the same time, because the brain gets used to a certain schedule and is already “ready” to set a new one at the appointed time.
• organization of the reading process: after about 45 minutes of active study with full immersion in the question, the brain needs to rest and digest the information, so it’s better to be distracted by 15 minutes. At the same time, you need to be distracted "correctly": it is better to engage in some kind of mechanical activity, limiting the flow of input information, thereby relieving the brain and memory.
• the inevitable need to repeat the studied information before it is firmly fixed in the memory. And it is better to do it in several stages: the next day, after a week, after a month. For myself, I developed the following tactics of repetition: first, I make small notes on the results of the study. Now there are many applications that allow you to synchronize records on the desktop and mobile devices. And I’m not just rewriting what I read, but retelling it in my own words, which makes me think over and rework the material I’ve just studied. Every day in the transport on the way to work, I look through these notes in the phone. Secondly, by the end of the week I spend a kind of review of the new information received during this period: I just sort through what I learned and look through the notes again.

We improve memory at any age. Daniel Lapp

And finally, I would like to refer to the book (do not be confused by its name), which addresses the general issues of memory organization and effective work with it. The story is slow and clear, without abstruse theories.

According to the book, the key to finding the right information is images, links to other information, and emotional context . For long-term storage and successful reproduction of information, the process of mastering and memorizing new knowledge must be active, it can be called conscious memory . When consciously remembering, you need to carefully consider, weigh, examine the information received from different sides, create figurative analogies, associations, connect emotions, coloring the information itself or images. Conscious memorization is, I repeat, an active and creative process in which curiosity and fantasy are useful.

For successful memorization you need:

1. need or interest
2. attention and concentration
3. organization

Without real motivation, without a strong interest, the brain will not try its best to memorize information. It is like a foundation, and then attention and concentration allow us to properly assimilate information, adjust the focus to what is needed, cut off extraneous and allow to correctly organize new information in memory: build up associative links, supplement it with an emotional component, create images. The more detailed the image, the more familiar and close, filled with the emotional component, the easier it is to search for memories with it, the easier it is to play.

Conclusion

Finally, I want to say that the issues of memory organization and effective memorization are important and very interesting, because in our time for successful work in the field of IT you need to be able to digest, store and, most importantly, be able to reproduce a huge amount of information at the right moment. Effective reading and memorization will help with this! I hope the article was useful to you and you will put into practice the tips given above, or you will start to study independently the issues of memory and develop your own techniques. In the next article I will talk about my experience of using mental images to memorize memory organization and garbage collection in .NET.