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How to Improve Memory

Attempts to improve memory are not new. For centuries, man has been trying out ways and means to improve his memory because he has realised the importance of having a good memory. Mnemonics, a method still used for efficient memory, was devised by the Greeks a long long time ago.
While there are many methods that keep appearing from time to time; there are some, which have proved their efficacy. They remain popular because of the ease and practicality of implementing them. Of these, mnemonic, link system and pegging are the most popular.
One thing that needs to be mentioned here is that there are no quick fix methods available for improving memory. These methods have to be practiced with sincerity and regularity in order to apply them effectively. Just as with any self-improvement process, memory improvement needs consistent efforts and takes a little time to make an impact. So, don’t expect overnight results or you will be disappointed!
Memory Improvement Techniques
Mnemonics
The Ancient Greeks developed basic memory systems called Mnemonics, a name derived from their Goddess of Memory, Mnemosene. In the ancient world, a trained memory was an immense asset, particularly in public life. There were no convenient devices for taking notes, and early Greek orators delivered long speeches with great accuracy because they learned the speeches using Mnemonic systems.
using Mnemonic systems.
The Greeks discovered that human memory is largely an Associative process - which works by linking things together. For example, think of a pineapple. The moment your brain registers the word ‘pineapple’; it recalls the shape, colour, taste, texture and smell of that fruit. All these things are associated in your memory with the word ‘pineapple’. Any thought, action, word, statement, or whatever, can trigger another, associated memory. When you recall what you had for lunch yesterday, that may remind you of something someone said during lunch, which may recall the memory of some background music which was playing, which may evoke something which occurred ten years ago, and this can go on and on. These associations do not have to be logical - they can be completely random or absurd. In fact, the more absurd the association, the better the recall.
Association, Imagination and Location
The three fundamental principles underlying the use of mnemonics are:
l Association
l Imagination
l Location
Working together, these principles can be used to generate powerful mnemonic systems. Once you have absorbed and applied these techniques you will understand how to design and apply these principles to your field and to devise your own powerful, sophisticated recall systems.
Association
Association is the method by which you link a thing to be remembered with something personal. Although I am outlining some associations to you, it is much better to formulate your own associations as they reflect the way in which your mind works.
What you need to remember is that things can be associated by:
l Being placed on top of the associated object
l Crashing or penetrating into each other
l Merging together
l Wrapping around each other
l Rotating around each other or dancing together
l Having the same colour, smell, shape, or feeling
An associated image is that image that you visualise and connect with the item you are trying to remember.
For example: if the number 1 item on your shopping list was goldfish, visualising a 1-shaped spear being used to spear a goldfish to feed a starving family will link the number 1 with a goldfish.
The Principle of Association forms the basis of all the memory systems. The principle is: “You can remember any new information if you associate it to something you already know or remember.”
Most of us have actually used this principle of association all our lives, even though we might have done so subconsciously. Do you remember the shape of Austria, Canada, Belgium, or Germany? Probably not.
What about Italy? If you remember the shape of Italy, it is because you’ve been told at some time that Italy is shaped like a boot. You made an association with something already known - the shape of a boot, and Italy’s shape couldn’t be forgotten once you had made this association. Biology students have used the slipper shape to remember the shape of a Paramecium.
There are many other common uses of the Principle of Association. Students are told to think of VIBGYOR (Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red), in order to help remember the colours of the rainbow. Most of us have used BODMAS (Bracket, Off, Divide, Multiply, Add, Subtract), to remember the sequence of solving maths equations.
All these examples of association are limited to the extent that they work only for one specific thing. When you have learnt how to associate consciously anything you want to remember to something you already know, then you will have a trained memory. It is really as simple as that.
An Exercise
For your first exercise in Association, let’s assume you want to memorise these 10 unrelated items in sequence: banana, car, newspaper, sausage, pen, tree, watch, tie, television, and
football. In order to do this, you are going to consciously apply the basic memory rule defined earlier, but with an important addition - You can remember any new information if you associate it to something you already know in some ludicrous way.
First, picture a banana in your mind. You can’t apply the rule yet. Now we come to the next item - car. If we assume that you already know banana, you can now apply the memory rule. You simply need to create a ridiculous picture, or image, in your mind’s eye - an association between banana and car.
In order to do this you need a ridiculous, far-fetched, crazy, illogical and absurd picture or image to associate the two items. What you don’t want is a logical or sensible picture. For example, a sensible picture might be someone sitting in a car eating a banana. Although this would not be something you would expect to see every day, it is in not in any way bizarre or impossible.
An impossible, crazy, picture might be - a gigantic banana is driving a car along the motorway, or you open a car door and billions of bananas tumble out and knock you over. These are ludicrous, illogical pictures. What you need to do is select one of these pictures, or a crazy image you thought of yourself, and see it in your mind for just a fraction of a second. Be careful not to picture the words ‘banana’ and ‘car’. You need to see the action you’ve selected - the huge banana driving the car, or the mountain of bananas tumbling out of a car, or whichever image you’ve decided on. See that picture in your mind’s eye for just an instant, right now.
The next item on your list is newspaper. Assuming that you already remember car, you now need to form a ridiculous association in your mind between car and newspaper. For example, you open a newspaper and a car leaps out of the pages and knocks you over. Or you are driving a huge rolled up newspaper instead of a car. Or you are driving a car when a massive sheet of newspaper appears in front of you, which the car rips as you drive through it. Choose one of these images, or one you conjured up yourself, and picture it clearly for a split second.
Sausage is the next item to remember, so you now need to form a ludicrous association between newspaper and sausage. You could picture yourself eating rolled up newspapers and eggs for breakfast instead of sausages and eggs, or you are reading a gigantic sausage which has lots of news printed on it, or a paperboy is walking along a street pushing very long sausages through letterboxes instead of newspapers. See one of those crazy images. Next on the list is pen. Associate it to sausage. See yourself trying to write with a sausage instead of a pen, or you cut into a sausage with a knife and fork and gallons of ink shoot out of the sausage into your face. Picture one of these scenarios clearly in your mind.
The next item is tree. Picture millions of pens growing on a tree instead of leaves, or a colossal fountain pen is growing in your garden instead of a tree. Be sure to see the image clearly. Watch is the next item on the list. Picture a tree with lots of branches which are wearing giant wristwatches, or you look at your watch and see that there is a tree growing out of it, with roots curling up your arm. Select one of these images, or one of your own, and see it for an instant in your mind’s eye.
Tie comes next. See yourself wearing an elongated wristwatch instead of a tie, or an enormously long tie is tied around your wrist instead of a watch, so long that it drags along the floor. The next item to be remembered is television. You might picture yourself with a television hanging around your neck instead of a tie, or you switch on the television and a vast, horribly spotted tie bursts out of the screen, unrolling itself for yards and yards. Select a crazy association between tie and television, and see the picture in your mind. The final item on the list is football. See a football match where the players are kicking around a television instead of a football. Or you are watching a football game on television when millions of footballs suddenly burst through the screen and hit you in the face. Picture one of those images.
If you have really tried to see all those pictures, you will now remember the list of ten items in sequence, both forwards and backwards. Try it now. If you miss one or two, simply go back over the list and strengthen your associations.
Imagination
Imagination is used to create the links and associations needed to create effective memory techniques. Confusing? Well, let me try and put it in a simple manner. Imagination is the way in which you use your mind to create the links that have the most meaning for you. Images that I create will have less power and impact for you, because they reflect the way in which I think. To have a stronger impact, you have to visualise and imagine your own images.
The more strongly you imagine and visualise a situation, the more effectively it will stick in your mind for later recall. Mnemonic imagination can be as violent, vivid, or sensual as you like, as long as it helps you remember what needs to be remembered. You have already seen in the example given earlier as to how it works, and you must have already tried it out, too.
Location
Location provides you with two things: a coherent context into which information can be placed so that it hangs together, and a way of separating one mnemonic from another: e.g. by setting one mnemonic in one place, I can separate it from a similar mnemonic located in another place.
Location provides context and texture to your mnemonics, and prevents them from being confused with similar mnemonics. For example, by setting one mnemonic with visualisations in the city of Uttar Pradesh in India and another similar mnemonic with images of New York or Tokyo allows us to separate them with no danger of confusion.
So using the three fundamentals of Association, Imagination and Location you can design images that strongly link things between themselves and with other things, so that it allows you to recall those images in a way that does not conflict with other images and associations.
Using Mnemonics More Effectively
When you are creating a mnemonic, e.g. an image or story to remember a telephone number, the following things can be used to make the mnemonic more memorable:
l Use positive, pleasant images. The brain often blocks out unpleasant ones.
l Exaggerate the size of important parts of the image.
l Use humour! Funny or peculiar things are easier to remember than normal ones.
l Similarly rude or sexual rhymes are very difficult to forget!
l Symbols (e.g. red traffic lights, pointing fingers, etc.) can be used in mnemonics.
l Vivid, colourful images are easier to remember than drab ones.
l Use all the senses to code information or dress up an image. Remember that your mnemonic can contain sounds, smells, tastes, touch, movements and feelings as well as pictures.
l Bringing three dimensions and movement to an image makes it more vivid. Movement can be used either to maintain the flow of association, or can help to remember actions.
l Locate similar mnemonics in different places with backgrounds of those places. This will help in maintaining similar images distinct and unconfused.
The important thing is that the mnemonic should clearly relate to the thing being remembered, and that it should be vivid enough to be clearly recalled whenever you think about it.
TIP – Association, Imagination and Location are the keys to successful Mnemonics.
The Link System
The Link Method is one of the easiest mnemonic techniques available, but is very powerful as well. However, it is not quite as reliable as a peg technique, because images are not tied to specific, inviolable sequences. The Linking method is a permanent memory method and is a very easy method to master. It functions quite simply by making associations between things in a list, often as a story. The flow of the story and the strength of the visualisations of the images provide the cues for retrieval.
The Link System can be used to memorise any information, which has to be learned in sequence. Speeches, presentations, stories, jokes, recipes, and formulas are all examples of things, which must be learned in sequence. The most common problem experienced by people trying to learn the Link System is to make their mental pictures sufficiently ridiculous to make strong and memorable associations. It does take a certain amount of
imagination to form ridiculous pictures in your mind. Children have no trouble in forming silly or absurd pictures - they do it naturally.
Unfortunately, as we grow up, most of us tend to use our imagination lesser and lesser, and so it becomes a little rusty.
However, that capacity for imagination we had when we were children is still there - it just needs a little bit of greasing and oiling. Applying the systems given in this book will automatically provide the exercise that your imagination needs. So don’t worry if at first you have to apply some effort to create those ludicrous mental pictures. After a little practice, you’ll find that you can do it quickly and easily!
Five Principles to Help You
There are five basic principles you can apply in forming your mental pictures, which will help you make your associations strong and long lasting. These are quite similar to the ones suggested in the mnemonic system.
1. Out of Proportion – In all your images, try to distort size and shape. In the first exercise, you were told to picture a ‘Huge’ sausage or a ‘Gigantic’ tie. Conversely, you can make things microscopically small.
2. Substitution – In the first exercise, we suggested that you visualise footballers kicking a television around a football pitch instead of a football, or pens growing on a tree instead of leaves. Substituting an out of place item in an image increases the probability of recall.
3. Exaggeration – Try to picture vast quantities in your images. For example, we used the word ‘billions’ (of bananas).
4. Movement – Any movement or action is always easy to remember. For example, we suggested that you saw yourself cutting a sausage and gallons of ink squirting out and hitting you in the face.
5. Humour – The funnier, more absurd and zany you can make your images, the more memorable they will be.
Applying any combination of these five principles when forming your images will help make your mental associations truly outstanding and memorable. At first you may find that you need to consciously apply one or more of the five principles in order to make your pictures sufficiently ludicrous. After a little practice however, you should find that applying the principles becomes an automatic and natural process.
An Exercise
Your second memory training exercise again involves memorising a list of items in sequence, but this time we’ll make the list more practical.
Assume you wish to memorise the following shopping list of fifteen items:
Chicken, Pumpkin, Detergent Powder, Cornflakes, Milk, Tomato Sauce, Shampoo, Green Peas, Pastry, Car Polish, Newspaper, Bread Loaf, Tea Bags, Soap, and Eggs.
Of course, it’s just as easy to jot down your shopping lists on a piece of paper, as it is to try and memorise it. But how many times have you reached the supermarket or shops only to realise that you’ve left your list on the kitchen table, or in the pocket of a dress, which you decided not to wear after all?
Any way, let’s assume for the moment that you wish to memorise the above list of items. You are going to memorise the list of items in sequence, using the Link System. Of course, it is not important to know a shopping list in sequence - you simply want to remember all the items. But, if you don’t memorise the list in sequence, and particularly if it’s a long list, how else will you be sure you’ve remembered all the items? (Actually, there is another method of memorising all the items, using the Peg System, but we’ll come to that later!)
O.K., let’s begin with the exercise of memorising the above- mentioned shopping list. The first item is Chicken. Before moving on to item two, consider for a moment how you can be sure that you will remember the first item in any Link. After all, there is nothing to associate it to. The answer is to associate it to the subject of your Link - in this case the supermarket. For example, picture yourself opening the supermarket door and millions of chickens flying out, knocking you over. If you can picture that ridiculous image, or a similar ludicrous picture clearly in your mind for just an instant, then you will remember that first item on your shopping list.
An alternative method of remembering the first item of any Link is to think of any item in the middle of the Link, and work backwards through your associations. This must eventually lead you to your first item. For the moment, let’s assume that you know the first item, chicken. The second item is pumpkin. Now, form a ridiculous association between chicken and pumpkin. You might picture a chicken trying to lay a huge pumpkin instead of an egg, with a contorted expression on its face. This is rather a crude picture, but one that is likely to stay in your mind. See that image, or a similar zany association between chicken and pumpkin in your mind’s eye, right now. Remember that the ludicrous associations suggested here are only suggestions. If you come up with your own images then so much the better - you are increasing your Initial Awareness.
Now, continue with your Link. The next item is detergent powder, so you might picture yourself trying to wash some clothes in the washing machine and instead of the detergent powder you have put a gigantic pumpkin in the washing machine. As you start the washing machine, the pumpkin breaks into a million pieces and the seeds scatter all over the clothes.
Next comes the packet of cornflakes. To associate that item to the previous one, you could picture yourself adding detergent in milk, instead of water and you can also see the white frothy bubbles floating all around the house, in your mind.
The fifth item is milk. You might picture yourself pouring from a milk bottle, but instead of milk out come hundreds of cornflakes. See each one of those cornflakes squeezing itself painfully out of the bottle, so that it bursts into a thousand pieces when it finally squeezes through the neck of the bottle.
Next comes the tomato sauce. Imagine yourself piercing the cap of the tomato sauce bottle, when gallons of milk squirt out, soaking you from head to toe.
The seventh item is shampoo. Picture yourself pouring some shampoo over your head, but instead of shampoo, a whole lot of tomato sauce comes squirting out of the bottle, until you are knee deep in the red mess. The next item is green peas; so associate that item to shampoo. You could see yourself lathering your hair with shampoo, when dozens of green peas suddenly start sprouting out of your hair. See that association, or one you thought of yourself, for just a split second. Remember, you don’t have to see the picture for a long period of time - you just need to see it clearly for a fraction of a second.
You are now just over half way through forming your Link of fifteen items. Before continuing, just pause and review the associations you have made so far. Look back over the associations suggested up to this point, and consider how the five principles of Out of Proportion, Substitution, Exaggeration, Movement, and Humour have been used in the suggested images.
O.K., let’s continue with the ninth item in the Link, pastry. To form a ludicrous association with green peas, you might see yourself cutting into a pastry with a knife and fork. Suddenly a huge green peas plant sprouts out of the middle of the pastry, so tall that it shoots right through the ceiling.
Next comes car polish. See yourself trying to clean a car with a pastry, instead of a tin of car polish. Picture yourself dipping a cloth into that pastry, and covering the car with the icing. See that image clearly.
The eleventh item is the newspaper. A zany association here might be - you open the newspaper to the middle pages, and an arm holding a duster covered in car polish zooms out of the newspaper and polishes your face, causing you to splutter and cough. Next, associate the newspaper to bread loaf. For example, imagine yourself trying to make sandwiches out of the newspaper, instead of the bread loaf.
Then come tea bags. A ridiculous picture here could be - you are trying to push a gigantic bread loaf into a teapot. The fourteenth item on your shopping list is soap. See yourself perhaps washing your face with tea bags, and getting into an awful mess. To complete your Link, associate soap to eggs. You could picture yourself eating a bar of soap out of an eggcup for breakfast, instead of a boiled egg. As you eat the soap out of the eggcup, your mouth fills up with soapsuds!
If you have really seen all those crazy pictures in your mind’s eye, you will now know the shopping list in sequence, both forwards and backwards. As stated earlier, there’s no reason why you would want to know the list in sequence, but it’s an extremely useful exercise in practising the techniques of Association and Linking.
Now test yourself by writing down the fifteen items on a sheet of paper, both forwards and backwards.
In Association of Ideas — you were forming Links of items, which had no logical connection. The system works even better when you apply it to lists of items for a practical reason. If you really want to remember a particular list of items, then you will concentrate on it harder - your Initial Awareness will be increased. Make an effort to try some Links over the next few days. If you find linking fifteen items fairly easy, then try Linking thirty, or more. Once you have mastered the basic technique, there is no limit to the number of items you can Link in this way.
The Two Approaches to Link Method
In Link Method, you can use two approaches – the pure linking or the story method. The above example was just pure linking but you can weave a story around the items to make the learning more interesting and permanent.
Although it is possible to remember lists of words where each word is just associated with the next, it is often best to fit the associations into a story: otherwise by forgetting just one association, the entire list goes out of mind.
The Story Method
Given the fluid structure of this mnemonic, it is important that the images stored in your mind are as vivid as possible. Significantly, coding images are much stronger than those which merely support the flow of the story. Adding images to the story expands this technique. However, this system has its own limitation; after a certain number of images, the system may start to break down.
Purpose
The main purpose of the story method is to remember a list of objects, however long, in a certain order, and to be able to recall them in the same order, or even reverse order.
How it Works
It is done by inventing a story to link each item in the list to the next in the form of a chain.
Method
The best way to illustrate how incredibly simple but efficient this method is, I am going to provide a list of seemingly unrelated objects, and show you how to invent a silly story to connect them all together. When I thought of this list, I did not even think about how to link them together but it wasn’t difficult, at all, to weave a story around the list. Here it is:
l Book, scissors, cat, butterfly, cheque, horse, sausage, mirror, videotape, flowerpot, microwave, tree, garden hose, joystick.
l I think you would agree that to remember this list in the correct order requires a definite plan of action.
Here is the story I made up to link them together:
I was reading a very interesting book in bed last night. It was a magic-trick book, because the pages had been hollowed out to contain a pair of scissors.
The pair of scissors had a mind of its own, because it was chasing a longhaired cat to give it a trim. The cat was pawing at a butterfly, which had peculiar wings made out of a large cheque. As I watched, the cheque floated down and rested across a horse.
The horse was particularly enjoying eating a large shiny sausage. The sausage was shining like a mirror.
The mirror was in the shape of those copyright protection holograms you get on videotapes. It was very large videotape, because one of the spools supported a flowerpot, and it was spinning wildly.
The pot was rather cold, so I put it in the microwave to heat it up. As I opened the door to the microwave, it became a door in the bottom of a tree, like you see in cartoons. The tree had some special branches in the form of a garden hose, to keep itself watered. The hose had become knotted at one end; it had got itself into a tangle playing games with a joystick.
What a load of nonsense, you are probably thinking, but if you take a few moments to memorise the story and visualise the events as I did, you should be able to recall the list in word-perfect order. What’s more, you will probably remember the story next week and next month!
The Link Method is probably the most basic memory technique, and is very easy to understand and use. It is, however, one of the most unreliable systems, given that it relies on the user remembering the sequences of events in a story, or a sequence of images.

Do let me know your comments.

Last updated: 25/06/03

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