Why you need to hot-pink Post-it note your CIPS revision!

I’ve recently been reading a fantastic book on memory called Why We Remember by Dr Chanan Ranganath.  Now I know I am a massive geek, and this is probably not on your reading list but I wanted to give you some tips that he mentions that will help you when creating your revision notes.

Ranganath mentions that we should think of memory like a desk cluttered with crumpled-up scraps of paper.  If you scribbled your online banking password on one of those scraps of paper, it would take a good deal of effort and luck to find it. He argues that this is very similar to the job of remembering.  But if your password is written on a hot-pink Post-it note, it will stand out among all the other notes on your desk and you can find it pretty easily. Memory works the same way.

So how do we make memories that stand out in our cluttered minds? The answer is two fold: attention and intention.

1. Attention:  Attention is our brain’s way of prioritising what we are seeing, hearing, and thinking about.  Our attention is scattered, so when revising make sure you are in a quiet space, without noise such as the tv or music (brown or pink noise can be effective but at a low volume)
2. Intention: the key element though is intention.  To create a memory that you can locate later on, you need to use intention to guide your attention to lock on to something specific. 

So how does this apply to your notes?

• Colour code – green for sustainability, red for risk, apply colours in a way that is meaningful to you
• Memory palaces – I once had a student that used memory palaces in the most effective way, he anchored pieces of information (such as 5 things a contract needs to exist) to the different rooms in his house.  He pictured his walk to work and the streets he passed, or buildings were linked to pieces of information on a given topic.
• Use random examples to create dopamine – this is what we do in our videos and Diamond package lessons, by using random examples that disrupt normal patterns and expectations you are more likely to remember, so whatever your special interest be it Harry Potter, Below Deck, John Wick or the Avengers you can use this to create intention.

Make your very own Hot-Pink Post-it note!  We have a free mini-course on memory, which you can have for FREE here .

Good luck with creating those notes