When someone says that he has a good memory he really means that he keeps his memory in practice by using it. When someone else says that his memory is poor, he really means that he does not give it enough chance to become strong. More clearly, our poor memory is our own fault, but not our parents’. The following is what I will discuss about it.

Give yourself time to form (形成) a memory. Memories are very fragile in a short time, and you may quickly forget something as simple as a phone number. The key to avoiding losing memories before you can even form them is to be able to pay much attention to the thing to be remembered for a while without thinking about other things.

Move your eyes from side to side. Studies show that moving your eyes from side to side for just 30 seconds once a day will exercise your brain and make your memory work more smoothly. Try this when you wake up in the morning.

Say things you want to remember aloud. If you’re meeting a person and don’t want to forget his or her name. Just repeat the name naturally after you learn it, “Hi, Sarah, it’s nice to meet you.” This also works to remember an address or a meeting time. Just repeat it aloud to the person who invited you, “The Grand Tavern at 7? That sounds perfect.”

Use chunking. Chunking is a way of grouping things together to help you memorize them. Let’s take a shopping list for example. You can chunk your list by the starting letter of each item (物品)；you need to pick up eggs, bread, butter, coffee and cheese from the store, remember one E，two B’s and two C’s. As long as you remember the correct numbers, you should be able to recall the items in each letter group.

Chunking is what we do when we list a phone number with dashes. Which looks easier to memorize, 8564359820 or 856-435-9820? You probably won’t remember17761812184818651898, but try putting a space after every fourth number. Now you can see that those numbers are years, and you can pick key events from each year to help you remember the number.