I hypothesize that a lot of the problems here are less “forgetting” than “not remembering”—you find yourself needing information that was never committed to long-term storage in the first place, perhaps because it was not tagged as important the first time you were exposed to it.
This is based on my own experience of being “bad with names”: I fixed the problem simply by training myself to think that people’s names are important to me, and to pay more attention when I hear a new one (mentally repeating it to myself, and then using it in conversation as soon as possible). I am now not particularly great with names, but good enough not to be embarrassing, and sometimes even to impress people.
So maybe you would get good results by working on your attention as well as your memory? For me, this is part of the purpose of the writing-things-down habit; I only occasionally refer to my notes because I remember things so much better once I’ve made the effort to write them down, or even just identified them as something I should write down.
I hypothesize that a lot of the problems here are less “forgetting” than “not remembering”—you find yourself needing information that was never committed to long-term storage in the first place, perhaps because it was not tagged as important the first time you were exposed to it.
This is based on my own experience of being “bad with names”: I fixed the problem simply by training myself to think that people’s names are important to me, and to pay more attention when I hear a new one (mentally repeating it to myself, and then using it in conversation as soon as possible). I am now not particularly great with names, but good enough not to be embarrassing, and sometimes even to impress people.
So maybe you would get good results by working on your attention as well as your memory? For me, this is part of the purpose of the writing-things-down habit; I only occasionally refer to my notes because I remember things so much better once I’ve made the effort to write them down, or even just identified them as something I should write down.
Yes, it’s been shown that you remember facts better if you think it will be tested later on.