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Tools and Techniques for Improving your Memory?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "Like many of you, I'm a IT drone trying to complete various tech certifications. My question is simple: how do you manage to remember all this junk? A lot of it comes naturally to me, but remembering which commandline switch does what or remembering some obscure reference to a tool sometimes causes me to blank on a test. Instructor-led courses seem to be a very expensive, very general overview of material, which almost require you to buy your own study guides to get more complete details. After you leave said classroom, you don't remember most of the topic anyway (Dilbert's 'I summon the
vast power of Certification!' come to mind). So I ask the Slashdot crowd: what tools or memory techniques do you use to retain and remember the information you learn?"
Use it a lot, and you won't even have to think about it. My firewalling forces passive FTP, so from now on i'll remember that it's wget --passive-ftp, because I use wget to FTP files and directories frequently. Similarly, i've memorized the fact that du -hc --max-depth=1 in the root directory will give me a nice report on where my GBs are going, because I do that a lot. And I can do ssh/scp in my sleep :)
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
I've never seen anything in the strong science category, but here are some (perhaps placeboes) that have helped me from time to time.
/. during compiles for example :-)) are better able to remember the details of what they are doing. The brain is pretty crummy at task switching.
1) Phosphatidyl Choline is a precursor to acetyl choline a neurotransmitter associated with memory
2) I've used machines and programs (sadly none of which I can reference right now) that produce sound in stereo such that the left and right ears recieve offset signals and this is supposed to help the different sides of the brain communicate. I don't know what, if any, brain effect this has beyond a white noise that helps me concentrate with fewer distractions, but I find this technique to be so successful that the reason I can't reference a program right now is that I burned some of this noise onto a CD years ago and have been using it as needed ever since. The literature on the subject claims that different frequencies do different things and I find this to be true in my case, suggesting that there is more going on than simply white noise blocking out background. For example, one of the tracks on my CD is supposed to bring you down to a sleep like state. If I use this while trying to work I get very strong headaches. Not something I want to repeat over and over, but I've done it a few times to see if it was reproducable. It was.
3) Pressure. Most people don't think well under pressure. Don't fall into the downward spiral of getting pissed that you can't remember something. It will only make it harder to remember more stuff.
4) Concentration. 2 touches on this, but it's a fact that people who concentrate on one task (instead of reading
Someone once told me when I was in college, I think it was one of my engineering professors, that you don't go to college to learn, you go there to learn how to learn. I can't begin to tell you how true that has turned out to be.
At the start of a new project, you're usually at the bottom of the learning curve, now do you memorize all the new specfications there are about the project? No, you research them, understand them, and pool together the resources you will need to find information on that topic. I still open my first year C programming book at least a few times a month, and looking at a man page to get some info on a command line switch is a very common occurence also. Engineering specs. for whatever project I'm working on are always close at hand too. A search on the internet to verify and find out more info on a topic also very common. I think about all the classes I took in college and what percentage of that actual knowledge I use on a daily basis and its probably around 10-20%. Now if I look at all the stuff I've learned since then, enormous. And the more you learn, the more you learn how much more there is to learn. (sorry for all the cliche-like lines, but they're really true)
So basically, what I'm trying to say here, is take the stuff you learn in class as a seed, and then use it to grow from, you don't have to retain all that information, just know that you can find it if you need it at some point.
Hope that helps...
KidA
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -Homer Simpson
Get married. Your spouse will remember all those little things you would rather forget.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
When I forget a command, I start typing a command that sounds appropriate and keep hitting the TAB key (auto completion) until the right command shows up. From that point adding --help usually brings up the switches you need and if all else fails man [command] does the trick. While this will not work on a test, it is a good method when you are on the actual machine.
The only sure-fire method to remembering a certain command is use. I bet no one here has forgotten about ls (to the point that I always end up typing it in DOS too) but some of the other obscure commands that you might use once in a blue moon are easily forgotten so you just need to use them more.
Disclaimer: TAB completion doesn't work in all shells so YMMV.
For Windows 2000 users out there, never fear. You too can have TAB completion with nothing more than a simple registry change.
As opposed to those who took the wine drinking class and forgot how to drive.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Personally, when I had to start a new job and learn unfamiliar technology, I decided to quit smoking pot. That was a couple years ago and I really do feel that my mind is much sharper for having quit. Also, I discovered that the small but ever present gut I had been toting around since high school pretty much went away on its own. I have a feeling it was a munchie-induced gut.
If you don't smoke pot, I still have a tip for you. Good people. Thats right, make sure you have at least a few genuinely supportive and happy people in your life. Your mind can do so much more if it's secure and at ease with your life. My 2 cents.
.sig wanted: Must be concise, funny, and display my cleverness.
Here are two that I've found:
Brainwave Generator - Handy windows program with builtin presets to do all the things you mentioned. This is probably the program you used.
Cool Edit Pro - This software has a Brain Synchronizer built in to allow you to create your own subliminal messages and brain synchronizer sounds.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I always hated things like memorizing which options are on which menus, and what obscure letter combination makes the command-line version do what obscure task.
Those things are all available via reference. Reference books/tools(like `man`) are good things. Actually LEARNING how something works is always better than simply MEMORIZING how to do something specific.
f'rinstance, it's simple to tell someone that you need to chmod 755 a CGI script to get it to work right, but the real value is in learning what those three numbers actually mean, why 7s and 5s and how to apply the concept of permissions to things other than CGI.
I know I didn't really answer your question.. just expressing a beef I have about (pseudo-)education.
These things really drain the old grey matter of it's retentive capacity.
Mind Maps rock. I use them all the time, and they're invaluable, but that is because I'm a very visual person. I think the most important think in improving your memory is to understand yourself better, and figure out what type of learner you are. There are lots of books on figuring out what sort of learner you are, and techniques that different types of learners can use to maximise their retention/input speed. Learning is fun, but learning really quickly is more fun.