HOW TO REMEMBER
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The law of overlearning states that the more thoroughly study material is learned, the longer it is remembered. Material well learned is remembered better than material poorly learned. Do not repeat what you wish to remember until you barely know it, but until you know it really well.
A helpful point in remembering a chapter of a book is to go over the outstanding facts in one's mind after dosing the book. Think about the subject-matter with a view to reconciling it with what you have learned previously and logically arranging it in your mind for future reference. Adopt the habit of frequently revising the material you have learned. For example, a student reports: 'I go over my lessons time and again till I have learned them off by heart.' The simplest method of remembering names employs this principle of overlearning. Whenever you meet someone, get his or her name correctly. Give your full attention to it when you are introduced. Ask the person to repeat or spell it if you don't catch it the first time. Make a point of repeating the name several times during the course of conversation. For example, don't just say 'How do you do?'; say' How do you do, Mrs Postlethwaite?'. Give yourself an incentive to remember their names by taking an interest in people. Associate a particularly difficult name with something else which you can remember. For example, a man whose name was Altkastell invited his friends to think of him as 'Oldcastle'. When you think you have memorized a fact, it will repay you to go on repeating it a little longer. You remember a thing better if you continue to study it even after you have thoroughly learned it. Whatever time you spend on learning something, spend half as much time again on overlearning it. Something you learn in ten minutes will be remembered better if you repeat it for another five minutes after you know it. A group of students repeated lists of nouns until they knew them. Another group repeated them for half as long again. After two weeks the latter group remembered more than four times as much as the former. The degree of improvement in memory, however, is not uniformly proportional to the number of extra repetitions. A smaller number of extra repetitions is bound to result in an improvement. The further improvement from a large number of repetitions may not justify the time and effort spent on them, unless the material must be remembered