To memorize something, it is better not to write, but to draw

Canadian scientists from the University of Waterloo have found that sketching the information needed for memorization is a great way to improve memory. If you want to remember something better, the best thing is to sketch it.

“We compared the sketches with a lot of other memorization strategies, but drawing wins everyone,” said Jeffrey Wammes, Ph.D., department of psychology at the university. “We believe that the advantage lies in the ability to create a more coherent memory that combines the visual component, motor skills and semantics.”

In the experiment, the students participating in the experiment were offered a list of simple concepts that could be easily sketched (for example, “apple”). They had 40 seconds, during which they could either sketch the subject or write its name several times.

Then they were given an abstract task related to working with music, so that the words they memorized would be transferred to a long-term memory. Then they were returned to the list of words and asked to recall as much as possible in 60 seconds.
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It turned out that students who were sketching concepts in general coped better with the task of recalling as many words as possible. In other cases, a person could recall two times more sketched concepts than the one who wrote them down.

The results were not affected by various variations with attempts to memorize words in written form, such as embellishment of letters, writing down words in a certain order, listing physical properties of objects, etc. The drawings won over handwritten words even when the subjects were given only 4 seconds instead of 40 to sketch.

In addition, the researchers emphasized that the quality of the drawings did not affect the quality of the memorization of words - the technique works regardless of the student’s artistic talent.

So far, the technique has been used only for single words. Scientists are now trying to understand why it works so well, and how it can be adapted to work with other types of information.