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Sharpening your memory: how better listening helps

1.  When listening to a presentation or a seminar try to rephrase the speaker's words into your own in your mind. This way you are directly involved and you are more concentrated towards what the speaker is saying. As such during this process, you are actually processing the information in a language more comfortable for yourself.

2.  In addition, you can try to pretend to yourself as if you are telling a friend of yours what the speaker is saying. This way you remember much better the main points of the speaker.

3.  While listening to someone in a seminar, a conference, or a presentation it is very important that you separate the right facts from the wrong. On the same time, it is very important to keep oneself from adjudging the character of the speaker. If you develop a negative feeling towards the speaker, your mind will automatically start discarding all the information received. This happens because even if some of the speaker's points are valid your mind processes them as false and discards them immediately.

It is very important to separate what is true to your belief from what is exactly true. Your belief may be your own opinion but some of the speaker's facts may be verifiable from an external source. Which cola drink is better than the other is just a matter of opinion but they all are equally harmful is a fact.

4.  During a lecture sometimes, we lose track of the theme because we could not understand something in the middle and were shy to ask for clarification. This way we understand some part of it and don't understand some. This causes a break in the concentration and we thus lose interest in that subject. Therefore, it's always better to ask questions to maintain a rhythm in study. If your doubt is clarified, you'll find the remaining portion also easy to understand.

Also sometimes, during lecture, we understand what is being said but all of a sudden, a question pops up in our mind that “what if some factor was changed” or the like. Never feel awkward to ask such doubts. All these questions go a long way to clear your doubts and thus maintaining your interest in the subject. The more interested that you are, the easier it is to understand and remember the subject.

5.  It is always helpful to keep a notebook or a scribbling pad while listening to a seminar or a presentation. You can note down and write the important points, the points that you don't agree with, the points want the speaker to clarify or any such thing. You'll realise that when raising the points that you wrote down you remembered most of them. This happens because while you were writing down those points they were sub-consciously being absorbed by your brain.

So go ahead, listen to every conversation with utmost concentration, and keep the following points in mind. If you follow the above-mentioned points, you'll never miss out anything in a conversation or speech.