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Memory Techniques

There are memory enhancing techniques that are very simple to learn and with a bit of effort you can commit things to memory on a virtually permanent basis. The Mind Mapping method already covered generates an output that is much easier to remember than normal text is. Three additional techniques are discussed here.

Memory Pegs

This technique is very useful for remembering lists, especially if you want to remember them in order. Your memory works much better if you can associate whatever it is that you want to remember with something that is already well embedded in your mind. Your memory is also much better at remembering pictures than words. The Memory Peg method takes advantage of both of these facts.

We will provide 10 pegs here that you can use to associate with the items on your lists. There is no reason to limit it to 10 and many people have established 100 or more pegs for themselves. These 10 pegs were selected to rhyme with the associated number, making it even easier for you to establish the pegs in your mind. Read through the following list a few times, until you can remember the peg associated with each number.

1. gun
2. shoe
3. tree
4. door
5. hive
6. sticks
7. heaven
8. gate
9. line (washing line)
10. hen

When you want to remember a list you mentally generate a picture of each item with its associated peg. The more way out, large, funny, colorful you can make the picture the more easily you will be able to recall it.

For example, let us take a shopping list of 10 items and commit it to memory. The items to buy are milk, bread, butter, sausages, mushrooms, cheese, soap, batteries, the newspaper, and a chocolate.

Now work through the list imagining the item together with its peg, and try to make the picture as vivid as possible. Firstly we want to associate "milk" with "gun". Now, you could imagine a water pistol squirting milk, but you want something much more action filled and bizarre than that. What about two milk bottles involved in a cowboy shoot out situation, each with its guns blazing away at the other? They are dressed up with their cowboy hats and spurs. This will stick in your memory much better.

To link "bread" with "shoe" make a picture of a baker, with a big floppy baker's hat, trying to walk with each foot stuck in a giant loaf of bread. Picture him struggling to walk and toppling over. Close your eyes and "see" it clearly in your mind. Associate the "butter" with "tree" by picturing a tree with blocks of butter hanging from it like fruit. The butter is all melting in the sun and dripping all over, creating puddles on the ground.

To link the "sausages" to the "door" think of not just a sausage stuck to the door, but the whole door is made of woven sausages, the door handle is a giant salami and the door frame is made of even larger sausages. There is a dog trying to bite the door. To link "mushrooms" with "hive" imagine a giant hive surrounded by flying mushrooms, buzzing loudly. Each mushroom has lots of tiny little bee wings flapping away madly to keep it airborne.

These first five examples will give you the idea of what you need to do. Now go through the last five items on our shopping list, making funny pictures of them with their pegs. Once you have made pictures for each association, run through the list in your mind a few times to make sure that you can instantly recall each picture as you think of the peg number.

When you need to recall the list, you work through the numbers from 1 to 10. As you think "1" you will automatically think of the peg "gun" and the mental image of the two milk bottles blazing away with their guns will pop straight into your conscious and you have the first item on the list. Now think "2 - shoe" and again the picture of the baker struggling to walk with the large "loafers" will pop into your mind.

Another advantage of this method is that if you need to recall the items out of order it is just as easy. What was the 4th item? Think "4 - door" and immediately you know it was ..... Did that work for you? If not, spend a few more minutes making the pictures as vivid as possible in your imagination. This first example probably took you a few minutes to work through, but with practice it becomes much faster.

For how long can you normally retain a list like this in your memory? When you wake up tomorrow morning try to recall the shopping list. It will come to mind very easily again.

If you need to work with lists of more than 10 items you can create as many pegs for yourself as you need. Unfortunately, after number 10 it is difficult to get them to rhyme like this and it is a bit more difficult to commit the pegs themselves to memory, but once that is done they work just like the example here. It is a strange ability of the human brain that it is able to use this method for many different lists at the same time - somehow it "knows" how to keep the lists separate!

Mnemonics

A mnemonic is a short sentence where each word reminds you of an item that starts with the same letter as the word. This is best explained with an example or two.

Would you be able to remember the sentence "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos"? It is not the most meaningful sentence but it is a whole lot easier to remember than the list of planets, starting from the sun i.e. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. If you were studying this at school you could again take advantage of the brain's ability to remember pictures well by drawing a little picture of your mother with a mortar board on her head and a big plate of nachos in the margin of your notes.

One difficulty in this particular example is that we have two planets starting with the letter "M". We can overcome this with an association that will stick. The closest planet to the sun is Mercury. Probably the most obvious association with the word Mercury is a thermometer. Being closest to the sun, Mercury is the hottest of the planets, so the association with the thermometer will help you to remember this.

Just as an aside - Pluto was previously recognized as the outermost planet, but it has been downgraded from planet status now. In the old days children were taught "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies".

Another common example is "Roy Of York Gave Battle In Vain" which makes it easy to remember the colors of the light spectrum (as in a rainbow) i.e. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.

With a bit of creativity you can easily generate your own. Write down the first letter of each word, one under the other, and make up your own sentence that is meaningful to you.

Acronyms

An acronym is a word made up of the first letter of each of the words that you want to remember. Obviously, if you to be able to swap the order of the words around you can come up with a more meaningful acronym, just as we did with the word SMARTER in the section on Goal Setting. SMARTER stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, Exciting, Recorded. This is an ideal acronym because not only is the word one that we recognize, but it is meaningful in the context.

On the other hand an acronym like RADAR, which stands for Radio Direction And Range originally had no intrinsic meaning, but through common usage it has become more widely known than what it stands for.

Acronyms are generally more difficult to generate than the other memory aids we have discussed, but if you can come up with a good one it will be with you forever.