By heart!

“I wanted to do something…” “Why did I come here, what did I need here?” “I forgot something and I don’t remember what.” Probably everyone is familiar with such lapses in memory. Moreover, the further you go, the more often this happens, but in childhood this almost never happens. We are often amazed at children’s ability to remember everything, to notice the smallest details: how can you remember (and most importantly, why do you need to remember this?!) the drawing on the ice cream cup that we bought three months ago? Or where was the gift hidden for the birthday before last? It’s just that young children have had too few events in their lives, so such details do not have time to be erased by later layers of information. And besides, now we take so many photographs that it is difficult to distinguish our own memories from these captured images.

Children, as a rule, have a good memory, and they are constantly forced to train it by memorizing poems, formulas and facts. But the child turns into an adult, intensive training ends, and... how often do adults learn poetry? Not often, but in vain! Learning poetry is useful for everyone. This type of mental activity increases the number of neural connections through which information will subsequently be processed. That is, memorizing helps to train memory, process information, and invent new things.

It is often difficult for us to remember something right away, so schoolchildren are advised to learn poetry not at the last moment, but in advance. This happens because the formation of neural connections takes time from several hours to several days. You can notice how sometimes you learn a poem, but it just doesn’t want to be remembered, sometimes you forget a word, sometimes you change lines, sometimes entire stanzas are dropped. And the next day you wake up, and everything seems to fall into place. And not only with poetry: it’s difficult to force yourself to do new things; following a habit is much easier. But science says habits sometimes need to change; even changing your daily route to work, for example, will be a useful little exercise for the brain.

Poems help improve diction and develop artistry. The first may not be so relevant for adults, but the second is important for everyone. It’s also a challenge to your own laziness. And also a way to demonstrate your own erudition, by the way, including an apt quote.

In general, there are so many benefits from this type of activity that it’s simply a sin to sit with folded arms, let’s go learn something!