How to better retain new information

reading time: 2 minutes

Three days ago, I tried to memorise 15 Japanese kanji while my 8-month daughter was busy learning to switch from a crawl position to sitting upright without any help. By night time, I tried to challenge myself by re-writing those kanjis and…I could only remember 2 of them. But my daughter? she now can sit upright from a crawl position by herself, although it still takes her a world-record time of 25 seconds per switch. BTW check out this really good book by Emily Martin that I recently bought for my baby. Highly recommended.

I find it remarkably interesting that there are moments when I learn something new and that concept remains sticky on my brain, while at other occasions, my brain just doesn’t function. And if you were curious about what it looks like when my brain ‘functions’ the way I want it to:

And as usual, I was curious to see if there is anything that influences our memory when learning new concepts. I wanted to find out the answers to, “why doesn’t my brain learn faster at some situations?” After doing some reading, I filtered these two papers that I have to share with you:

1. A July 2025 Journal of Neuroscience study had researchers flashed meaningless squiggles at volunteers, then immediately showed a photo designed to either make them happy (like cute puppies), neutral (a chair), or disgust (like rotten food). The next day, the “puppy shapes” were remembered way better and fMRI scans showed the brain literally replayed those shapes more strongly.

2. A June 2025 Cell paper tracked dopamine in neurons millisecond-by-millisecond while people learned tricky reward rules. It was found that dopamine doesn’t wet the brain like what I’ve been told; it triggers precise synapses at precise moments. So it’s actually less like a mood bath, and more like a laser pointer.

If you put the two together, we get a stupidly simple recipe to better retain new information: feed the brain a small dose of positivity exactly when the new information lands, and dopamine will do its job by marking the relevant synapses for you.

And as a science-educated dad, I literally put these to the test and here’s what happened:

Step 1: Prepping my dopamine boost. Before I studied another set of 15 Japanese kanji, I asked my wife to share a few hilarious reels on Instagram. She knows my humour taste. The goal of these videos is to reinforce positivity when I actually do my study.

Step 2: Drop the reels, and immediately study. The moment the reel ends, I fired up the DuoLingo app on the phone and grinded through those 15 ‘squiggles’ with absolutely zero distraction.

Step 3: Micro-celebrate the win. Every time I correctly recalled a kanji, I did some mini celebratory action like a “yes! (with a fist on my chest!)”. I did this to test the second paper’s main idea, which tells us that my small celebration should produce a second, smaller positive blip that tags the just-activated synapses again.

And the result….I was able to recall 10 out of 15 kanji!!!! 👀

If you wanna test this out by yourself, just remember that the joy must be real. For example if you’re gonna look at reels like I did, those should really make you laugh, or at least smile. You can’t fake it. Secondly, keep the dopamine hit to a minimum. You don’t wanna overshoot and turn it into a procrastination session. And finally, you’ve got to have a good night sleep at the end of the day, or otherwise it’ll all be wasted.

BUT WAIT! What about negative emotions? Do those worsen our memory after learning something new?

Nopeeee. The first paper found that the “rotten food” shapes performed no better nor worse than the neutral ones.

Does this work for kids? Yeap. Totally.

Can I stack caffeine on top? Hmm..caffeine does make you more alert but it doesn’t create emotional valence. The dopamine hit has to be something that sparks joy!

What about listening to music? If the music you listen to genuinely lifts your mood, do it!

If you’ve read up to this point, well done! You now possess a new knowledge that can help better recall new information in the future. And if you are as curious as I did, you should definitely try the experiment yourself and tell me what happened.

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With love,

Krish