How to Improve Memory Power: 9 Techniques With Real Evidence

Short answer: Improve memory with spaced repetition, active recall, elaboration and sleep. These four do more than everything else combined. Memory supplements and "brain training" apps have weak evidence; the techniques below have strong evidence and cost nothing.

1. Active recall

The most important technique, and the one most people skip because it is uncomfortable.

Instead of reviewing information, try to retrieve it from memory before checking. Close the book and write what you remember. Cover your notes and recite them. Ask yourself the question before looking at the answer.

Retrieval strengthens memory far more than review does. The effect is large and has been replicated for over a century. The reason people avoid it is that it feels harder and exposes gaps — which is precisely the mechanism doing the work.

2. Spaced repetition

Review at increasing intervals rather than all at once. A rough schedule: one day, three days, one week, two weeks, one month.

Memory decays predictably, and reviewing just as something is starting to fade produces the strongest strengthening. Reviewing material you still remember perfectly is close to wasted effort.

Combine this with active recall and you have the two highest-value techniques in learning, which is why flashcard systems built on both work as well as they do.

3. Elaboration

Connect new information to what you already know. Ask why it is true, how it relates to something familiar, what it contradicts.

Memory is associative. An isolated fact has one weak retrieval path; a fact connected to ten things you already know has ten. This is why experts absorb new information in their field so easily — they have somewhere to attach it.

Practically: after learning something, explain it in your own words to someone else, or write it as if teaching a beginner. If you cannot, you have not understood it, and you will not retain it either.

4. Sleep

Not optional. Memory consolidation — the transfer from fragile short-term storage to durable long-term memory — happens largely during sleep, particularly deep sleep and REM.

Studying and then not sleeping properly undoes much of the studying. Pulling an all-nighter before an exam is close to the worst possible strategy: you impair both the consolidation of what you just learned and your ability to retrieve it the next day.

A short nap after learning something measurably improves retention. This is one of the few pieces of study advice that is both pleasant and well supported.

5. The memory palace

The technique competitive memory athletes actually use, and it is genuinely powerful for ordered lists.

Pick a place you know well — your home. Mentally walk a fixed route through it. Place each item you want to remember at a specific location, as a vivid, strange, exaggerated image. To recall, walk the route again.

It works because spatial memory is exceptionally strong in humans and largely automatic. You remember the layout of your home effortlessly; the technique borrows that capacity for arbitrary material.

The images must be odd. Ordinary images do not stick. Bizarre, moving, emotionally striking ones do.

6. Chunking

Working memory holds roughly four to seven items. Chunking gets around this by grouping items into larger units.

A phone number as ten separate digits exceeds capacity. As three chunks it fits comfortably. Chess masters do not have better raw memory than novices — they see meaningful groups of pieces where a beginner sees twenty separate objects.

Test your own span with Box Memory, then try deliberately grouping the sequence rather than memorising each step. Most people gain two or three steps immediately.

7. Interleaving

Mix topics within a study session rather than doing one thing to completion.

Blocked practice — twenty problems of the same type — feels more effective because performance during the session looks good. Interleaved practice feels worse during the session and produces substantially better retention and transfer. It forces you to identify which approach applies, which is the skill you actually need later.

8. Physical exercise

The evidence for exercise improving memory is stronger than for any brain-training product. Aerobic exercise is associated with better memory performance and with growth in the hippocampus, the structure central to forming new memories.

Even a single session of moderate exercise improves memory performance shortly afterwards. If you have twenty minutes and are choosing between a brain-training app and a brisk walk, take the walk.

9. Reduce interference

New learning interferes with similar recent learning. Studying two similar subjects back to back causes more forgetting than studying two different ones.

Practical fixes: separate similar material in time, study the hardest thing when freshest, and avoid learning something new immediately before sleep if you want to consolidate what came earlier.

What does not work

• Most memory supplements. Evidence for over-the-counter memory pills in healthy adults is weak to non-existent.
• Passive rereading. Creates familiarity, not memory.
• Highlighting. Among the least effective techniques studied.
• Learning styles. Matching material to a supposed visual or auditory style has not shown benefit.
• Brain-training games as memory improvement. You improve at the game. Broad transfer is weak.

That last point deserves honesty on a games site: play Memory Match and Box Memory because they are enjoyable and because they let you measure your working-memory span, not because they will make you generally more forgetful-proof. The techniques above are what actually move memory.

Related reading: how to memorise faster and how to improve concentration while studying.