I feel like I have a fairly good memory, but recently I feel like I want to increase my abillities. Does anyone have a particularly useful method they use for memorization?
The only method I ever used was useful for tricks and especially important lists of things (like to buy or to do).
Basically it’s the one where you build a list of word associations with numbers. Rhyming helps. Examples: 1=Gun 2=Shoe 3=Tree 4=Door 5=Hive, etc.
To remember stuff you associate as exaggerated a mental picture of the desired item with the key word as you can. Then in playback mode you just recall the weird pictures.
Having too large a set of keywords, or trying to associate too similar things (like cards in the deck or names) can get tricky.
But for a grocery list of bread, tomato juice, bug spray, chocolate syrup, panty liners, toothpaste and shoe strings, it wouldn’t be all that hard.
My biggest trouble was that I kept forgetting the keywords.
For lists, I use a similar technique. Just come up with exaggerated images for each item and put them together in a story. The more sex and violence your story includes, the more likely you are to remember it
hmmm what sort of stuff do you want to remember? Is it stuff that you have to do in the future (prospective memory) or stuff you did in the past or knowledge? Do you need to remember it for the short term or the long term?
If short term, mnemonics and chunking are your friends.
If long term, link it to stuff you already know (this reminds me of…)
If prospective, either link it to a part of your routine that you KNOW you will do on that day, or use a diary/phone or computer scheduler etc.
Pick up a copy of Harry Lorayne’s Memory Book (or any of this other books), they’re chock full of great tips on how to remember anything you could possibly want to remember.
I use the unimaginative tecnique of wrting things down.
Thanks for the suggestions so far. I should have been more specific. I am really looking for techniques for memorizing large lists of data, let’s say a list of 100 names, or 20 random dates. I can handle smaller stuff rather easily, but it seems once I get to a point I have a hard time being succesful.
Why on earth would you want to memorize 20 random dates? Manduck’s approach seems eminently reasonable here.
In Cognitive Psych they talk a lot about the magic number 7 - you can hold about 7 things in your head at one time, any more than that and they start to drop out. What this means is that if you can chunk things into groups of 7 or less (that are meaningful to you), then all you have to remember is the ‘chunks’. For instance, to remember everyone in your office, picture them grouped according to where they sit, or what their title is, or whatever. Make up to seven groups this way, then you can remember the groups - people who sit in the east part of the hallway, people working on X project, or whatever.
The key is to associate it with something meaningful. When I worked in retail I memorized hundreds of PLU codes without thinking about it because in my head 4027 always meant “light roast colombian” (it was a coffee shop, not a torture chamber).
Yes, the chunking technique is also very useful. Find patterns of commonalities between the items that will allow you to put them into groups. If you know how many items are in each group, then you can logically figure out what elements belong in each group.
My recommended technique: periodically “refresh” the data on a geometrically declining time scale.
I.e., refresh the memory after 30 seconds, after 2 minutes, after 5 minutes, after 20 minutes, etc. Pretty soon it’s nicely tucked into long term storage.
Lots of good advice here.
Just a couple of additions that may or may not be useful: I find any technique (eg. writing it out as you remember it) helps, just because you spend time really thinking about the info. For numbers, I’ve occasionally used a number->consonant-sound and fill-in-the-vowels to make words system.
I’ve found that separating the data into groups and just saying the information over and over and over and over until you couldn’t forget it if you wanted to works pretty well, but as ftg said, you need to refresh the data every once in a while.
Actually, it’s a very old question. And there are some very interesting, but very old solutions. If you’re interested in an archaic but fascinating method, you might want to try looking around for something called “The Art of Memory” which traces its roots back to ancient Greece, or further. You can find an introduction to it here.
I used to have a real good memoriztion technique.
But I forget what it is.
Just use Bart Simpson’s way:
Dogs barf solely on Wednesdays, Mabel.
This is a technique that my stepson uses. It involves “memory palaces.”
http://mappa.mundi.net/cartography/Palace/
I am told that the book itself is a little academic, but this site should give you the general flavor of the idea.
I don’t know if it will help to sharpen the memory particularly, but changing your routines in some way helps to sharpen the mind. My gimic is as simple as switching back and forth between the games Spyder and Free Cell.
Someone mentioned storytelling. I am told that that is one of the techniques used by one of the champions of a sort of memory contest that is held nationally once a year.
Zoe,
Thank you very much for the link. The reading was very interesting, and that process makes a lot of sense to me. I will give it a shot, and let you know how it turns out.
moejuck
A technique called the “journey method” is often used by champion memorizers. This method consists of thinking about a trip one is very familiar with - trip to school, to work, whatever. What you do is take note of various landmarks along the way. Then you associate each item you want to memorize with a particular landmark, connecting them together via a story. Then, when you want to recall the items, you simply “imagine” yourself following your route, recognizing the landmarks, and recalling the items.
For example, I use this technique for memorizing a shuffled deck of cards. My journey starts with me getting out of bed and walking to my high school. I pick out 52 unique points along the trip. I then use a card memorization technique and apply it to each point.
Say the first few random cards are as follows:
- 2 of spades
- King of diamonds
- 7 of clubs
- 4 of hearts
To memorize these, I would formulate a story: I get out of bed and see a bloody swan stabbed with a garden implement (2 = swan, garden implement = spade). Then I walk to my door and standing there is a King decked out in all sorts of jewellry (that should be self-explanatory). I make my way to the top of the stairs an enter a large dance club, perched on the edge of a cliff (dance club = club, 7 = cliff edge). I proceed down the stairs where I notice a sailboat covered in blood (4 = sailboat, blood = hearts).
The more violent, sexual, etc. the easier it is to remember.
Sometimes if I have to remember a list of words I make a sentence or 2 with them, even if it doesn’t make sense, but that helps. It never gets very long though. Straining to remember the trick to recalling the useful data, is a waste of time! So whatever the technique, make sure it’s easy for you. I usually take the first letter of each word in a list I need to remember, and make a new word, and then I can recall the list pretty easily.
Example)
List : car, ramp, apple, monkey, photograph
C.R.A.M.P. (and voila!)