Teams of researchers in Japan believe that they’ve pinpointed the most effective moment while breathing for memorizing new information.

It’s always been funny to me that to this day I can still remember the exact J-pop songs where I first learned hundreds of new Japanese vocabulary items more than two decades ago. I often practiced while singing along to the lyrics again and again, creating much stronger associations than if I were to simply read them in a textbook. It turns out that vocalizing those new words out loud–which involves the process of exhaling–may have actually been the key to cementing them in my memory.

Research teams at Hyogo Medical University Hospital and other institutions in Japan are preparing to publish the results of a research study focused on the connection between memorization and breathing patterns in a British scientific journal by August 8. The study concluded that there is a possibility that memorization is most effective when exhaling, as the speed of recalling newly learned information differed for study participants depending on where they were in the process of taking a breath.

▼ Japanese study tip: Say new words or grammatical patterns out loud and not just in your mind while learning them!

Previously, the relationship between memorization and breathing patterns had only been studied in mice, so this was the first time that human subjects have been involved. Researchers used a method where they inserted a tube in the 30 study participants’ noses to record the flow of air while breathing. They then displayed 40 images of plants and animals in succession to the participants at one-second intervals. After that, they mixed in unrelated images and displayed a total of 80 images one by one, asking participants to identify whether each image was in the original batch of 40 or not.

The results showed that participants were able to more swiftly answer the questions if they had memorized the image when they were finishing to exhale compared to when they were beginning to inhale. They were able to provide the fastest responses while exhaling as well. There was no definitive difference in the percentage of correct answers they provided, perhaps because the difficulty of the topic was low to begin with. Either way, this study opens the door to all kinds of possibilities for exciting further research on effective strategies for memorization.

▼ We would like to propose a further area of study in which participants are asked to memorize information while blowing on their childhood game cartridges.

So the next time you need to memorize some new Japanese vocab, the order of Yamanote Line train stations, or the over 1,000 existing Pokémon names, consider saying them out loud and at the end of an exhale. Just don’t use the technique to do what this guy with a photographic memory did.

Top image: Pakutaso
Insert images: Pakutaso (1, 2)
Source: Livedoor News via My Game News Flash
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