Memory skills that make you smarter

London: Smartness is the key to getting ahead in life. Whether it is the mastery of job skills or tackling regular day-to-day happenings, smartness ensures efficiency and effectiveness.

According to The Independent, memory techniques are said to play an important role in being smart. Memory retrieval is one of the techniques. Here, the person recalls an idea from the memory and therefore strengthen neural pathways associated with the concept.

Psychology experts call it 'testing effect'. They explain it as it becomes easier to remember in the future if you recall it when asked. According to Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel - authors of 'Make It Stick: The Science Of Successful Learning" - elaboration is another.

They explain, "The more you can explain about the way your new learning relates to prior knowledge, the stronger your grasp of the new learning will be, and the more connections you create that will help you remember it later".

Another attributed skill is interleaving. Interleaving is when you work on a variety of things at once. Experts say that you will better your skills if you mix up your examples and try to understand a subject from different angles. Authors write, "By wading into the unknown first and puzzling through it, you are far more likely to learn and remember the solution than if somebody first sat down to teach it to you".

So, incidentally, you could work on finding answers before class starts in an academic setting. In a professional setting, you could supply ideas when stuck in sticky situations. Evaluation of what has happened is pretty important for being a smart individual. Researchers from Harvard Business School found reflective writing to be super powerful. They noted that just 15 minutes of reflection increased people's performance by 23 percent for a group.

Using hacks to recall also adds to smartness. Using mnemonics or images to identify with certain things add to your spectrum of understanding, hence increasing your smartness. "Mnemonics are not tools for learning per se", the authors write, "but for creating mental structures that make it easier to retrieve what you have learned".

Calibrating which means getting feedback about your ignorance about certain things is also important. According to researchers, it is necessary as people tend to suffer from cognitive illusions. So taking a quiz or getting feedback helps you identify your blind spots.