Memory
Training Exercises and Resources

One of the biggest and perhaps saddest trends in our era is that attention spans are shrinking. It is primarily fuelled by the explosion of online content, rise of social media and the ever-increasing range of things to obtain and experience. It is great to be living is such a rich world, the like of which we have never had in the entire history of mankind. However, there is a price to pay for anything good and in this case, it seems to be our shrinking attention spans, increased stress and the feeling that there is so much to do in so little time.

To learn how to manage attention, there are several exercises you can go through to reverse the trend and gain more control. In this article, you will be introduced to a series of attention management and concentration exercises that will help you achieve this.

Use this exercise to help the delegates review what they have learned in the course. The aim is to make the review process entertaining and memorable. It is also designed to be competitive so that the delegates work a bit harder to review the content. Ideally, you should go through this exercise at the end of the course.

This is an elaborate memory exercise that can be used for several purposes.

• You can use it to teach specific memory techniques in memorising pictures, names and words.
• You can use it to teach the associations of images with words.
• You can use it to help delegates memorise the characteristics of famous paintings in history. This is ideal for art students.
• You can use it to test delegates on memory recall.

You can easily adjust the difficulty level of this exercise by manipulating the timing and the amount of memorisation the delegates need to go through. You should decide this upfront based on your training needs and the capability of your delegates.

At the end of each training session, it is ideal to test delegate’s knowledge about the topics covered during the session. You can make the process more entertaining by making the test feel like a game. You can apply the questioning format presented here to test delegates’ knowledge about a given topic. The only requirement is that you need to prepare a number of questions before the course.

This fun activity is suitable as an ice breaker. This is a simple randomisation exercise that you can use to get a group of people answer a number of random questions. You will need to write these questions on a football before the course. As each delegate receives the ball he should randomly answer a question based on the setup described here.

Since you have total control over the questions, you can bias the exercise based on your needs. You can use it as an icebreaker with generic questions about delegates. You can also use this for recap to cover what has been discussed in a particular session by asking delegates to answer related questions. You can also use this method as a test.

This exercise helps delegates to practice communication skills. In particular it focuses on observation skills, how to describe something in simple yet meaningful ways and how to provide feedback. It is an ideal exercise for team building as it helps to improve inter-team communication. 

Most people are not good listeners. This is even more pronounced when people get excited about sharing their own views or thoughts and like to express them and share them with others quickly. The problem is that in their excitement they miss what has just been said. Over time this can develop into a bad habit leading to miscommunication and misunderstanding.

This exercise is designed to help delegates practice listening to others and avoid jumping in before they have shown that they have understood what is shared. After a few tries, participants will quickly learn to listen carefully and will significantly improve their communication skills by understanding other people’s positions and avoid repeating what has already been stated.

Research has long shown that visualisation can lead to better recall and learning. As a trainer, you can exploit visualisation to your advantage. One area where visualisation is useful is when recapping on content already covered or at the end of a course. This exercise helps you to take advantage of the power of visualisation.

The visualisation produced in this exercise can also act as a reminder for the delegates and will help to reinforce associations and memory.

Humans have evolved to focus their attention on what matters most. To navigate a complex environment, we have ended up with a kind of brain that vigorously filters out unnecessary information. This filtering mechanism is always active and is essential in managing information overload.

For example, after entering a new environment, you start to pay attention to different things to find what is interesting. You notice the unusual architecture, the odd furniture, the people, the smell and the feel of being in this new place.

If you come back to this environment the second time, you may not scan it as intensely as the first time since your brain “thinks” it already knows about it. Instead, your brain tries to focus on other things, freeing up the processing resources for whatever else you need to do with your brain.

This filtering has its great advantages as it allows us to navigate complex environments without feeling overwhelmed by them. Once we get used to a complex environment, we can start to concentrate on something more focused and demanding.

There is however a downside to this filtering. We are susceptible to miss the obvious even if it is right in front of us. Once familiar, the brain can become lazy in processing new information and attention is simply lost.

To remain focused it is essential to practice paying attention and consciously reverse the filtering process. Several methods are presented here that allow you as a trainer to increase the attention of your delegates especially if they are attending a multi-day course where they are returning to the same training environment.