We all know that it is important to get exercise to keep our bodies in good health, but what most of us don’t know is that our brains also can get the same kind of benefit by doing mental exercises. Like a muscle, your brain must receive a workout from time to time to keep fit. You can keep your brain in shape by doing some of these exercises for short term memory.

Short term memory is the way that we retain information for short periods of time; things such as addresses, phone numbers, the names of casual acquaintances and so on. We tend to lose this information (thus the name short term memory) when we acquire new information rather than hanging on to all of this more or less useless information forever. Doing exercises for short term memory can increase the capacity we have for this information and the length of retention.

The Peek A Boo Picture Game

One very good exercise for short term memory is to look at a picture; any picture at all will do. A picture form your own photo album, one clipped from a magazine or newspaper, it really doesn’t matter. Look at this picture for a moment or two and then cover it.

Now get a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. Think carefully and try to write down anything and everything that you can remember about the picture that you have just seen. After you’ve exhausted everything you can remember, look at the picture again. Did you miss some things? Did you get some of the details wrong when you tried to remember them? If you do this exercise over and over again, you will train your short term memory and increase your ability to hold and recall these short term memory. Not only is this a fun exercise for short term memory, this can be a good party game of sorts.

Audio Exercises

This works much like the picture exercise. Using audio clips can be a good way to exercise your short term memory too. Any sort of audio clip will work fine; a clip from the news or talk radio, the top ten countdown, whatever you prefer. Be sure to record the audio so it can be rewound however.
Try to remember everything you can about the clip; write the details down after the clip has played, then rewind the clip and check against what you’ve written down. Repeating this exercise for short term memory will also help you to remember the details of things that you hear.

These are just a few of the possibilities for exercises for short term memory. You can practice these anytime at all; the more you do these exercises, the stronger your short term memory will become. If you’re one of those people who tends to forget things immediately, you’ll be glad to know this. If you do these exercises for short term memory, you’ll be able to hold onto those sorts of things a little bit longer.

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