Whenever I have a problem remembering a name of someone, or the title of a book, movie, song or whatever, I have found my brain seems to store things in an easy-to-access, alphabetical order.
I simply go through the alphabet in my mind…and 9 out of 10 times, when I reach the letter of the name or thing I am trying to remember, it pops into my mind! I am not quite sure how my brain is wired to find things that way. This can be something I haven’t though of in years.
For instance, my brother was visiting a few weeks ago and brought up the nice neighbor lady who lived two doors down from us when we were kids. As it had been easily 40 years since either of us had thought her, it was not on the tip of our tongues - but just going through the alphabet, I got the neighbor lady’s name in less than a minute! My brother was shocked I could remember her name after all those year, and to be honest - I even amazed myself.
So, does the “alphabet trick” work for you?
If not, what other tricks do you use to retrieve information that might have been gathering dust in your brain for years/decades?
Well, it’s not to remember older stuff, but to remember current stuff (like remembering to make a doctor’s appointment or something) - if I say it out loud three times, I always remember it. Mostly I write stuff down these days, though.
About the only trick I have for remembering old stuff is to not sweat it - to send the request for information and then wait for it to come back.
The only one I use regularly is for a few passwords I use often. I generate a password with random characters. To remember it, I make up a nonsense grammatical sentence where all the words have the initials of the password characters, or if non-alpha characters, work the name of the character into the sentence. I sometimes change a character of the password to make a better sentence.
Occasionally for a short shopping list I imagine a nonsense scene using the items I want to buy.
The idea is that the more unusual the sentence/scene is, the more it gets embedded in memory.
I also have a problem remembering someone’s name and I use an old tactic of name association. As an example, I recently met someone named Allison and to remember her name I associated her with a Cheshire cat. Whenever I see her I think about the Cheshire cat from ‘Allison’ Wonderland.
If there is something I need to remember before I got to sleep I associated what I need to do with my shower sponge thing (poof? I don’t know what it’s called) then when I have a shower it reminds me I had something to remember.
I’m not great with names so I like to associate then with something or someone famous, like Mary Queen Of Scots or an actor or a song. For example I once met a girl called Sheree so I remembered her name by singing “Sheree don’t like it, rock the casbah, rock the casbah!” and yes I am well aware they are not the lyrics, but I didn’t know that at the time.
I do the alphabet thing a lot too. It really surprises me given that I am a much more visual than language person.
I find that it’s easier to remember things in threes. So if I need to remember two items, I throw in a third related word to round it out. There’s something about the rhythm of a three word phrase that sinks in better.
For serious memorization, I use an “exponential decay” method. I recall the item in a minute, a few minutes, a half hour, a couple hours, later in the day, the next day.
I’ve never heard of the alphabet thing, but that’s pretty cool!
Visualizing scenes or stories helps a lot for me. I agree, the more details, the better. Music also helps, altering lyrics to the thing I want to remember.
Normal blood calcium levels? 9-10.5, which I remember by thinking of Dolly Parton pouring milk (calcium) into her morning coffee (which, of course, is the blood of life), singing “Nine to ten point five!” to the tune of “Nine to Five”.
Silly, I know. But it’s one of the few lab values I *never *forget. Bet you won’t either, now!
There are some things I just can’t force (or trick) myself to remember, no matter how much I try to associate the missing item with other things.
But there is an approach that works most of the time. It’s very similar in application to a method used in naked eye stargazing: Averted vision.
Instead of trying to “see” a faint object with my eyes, I try to “think” of something “nearby” in my memory. After a few moments (to minutes) of trying to concentrate on the lost memory, I just direct my thought to something else for a little while. Nine out of ten times, within a short period of time (minutes, usually, sometimes hours) it will flash into my awareness.
It takes some strange mind games with myself, and I don’t know how to describe those games, but it does work – for me.
All I’ve got on the topic, but I can give a recent example. I was trying to think of a movie that Dominic West (McNulty on The Wire) was in within the past few years. The IMDb page on West didn’t provide anything familiar to me. After trying to decide what about that movie had made me think it had been West, I began thinking I might have confused his name with someone else’s. So I did a “name” search on “Domenic” and from the list of possibilities I spotted Dominic Purcell. His page had the movie I was trying to remember.
Okay. Not a perfect example. But stuff like that works for me if I have access to the internet whenever the “missing memory” becomes an issue.
As Cat Whisperer, I have discovered that the more I relax about trying to remember the more rapidly something will come back to me. This doesn’t work well when I’m trying to remember a name of someone I just ran into. But for day-to-day tasks it’s fine as very little in my life is urgent any more and I know that eventually whatever I need to do next will occur.
Lists seem of little use as I tend to forget where I put them.
I’ve warned my husband not to disturb anything I’ve set out as that’s one way of prompting myself. Chocolate chips on counter means, “Bake cookies.” Not, “Help yourself.” Heh.
One of my favorite jokes about memory:
I was talking over the fence to my neighbor yesterday. He said he and his wife were taking classes to improve their memory and that their instructor was really good.
“Oh. Who is he?” I inquired, thinking I could use a tune- up in that department.
“Um. Just a minute.” Thinks.
'what’s the name of that flower? You know, it’s red? Got thorns?
“You mean a rose?”
"Yeah. That’s it." Hollers toward house, "Hey, Rose? What’s the name of that memory instructor, again?"
I have a large jumble of similar sounding companies I’m trying to keep track of, along with basic info like quarterly profit, dividend, and so on. I was hopeless in trying to remember which company was what, until I hit on the idea of assigning an imagined “room” to each one. I thought of a building I was familiar with, and every time I wanted to remember something about Company X, I pictured myself in (say) the front hallway of that building, while Company Y would put me in the bathroom and Company Z would put me on the staircase (for example).
I’ve tried explaining this to people, and they always look at me weird . . .
Only 'cause they’re ignorant. The “memory palace” is a classical trick hearkening back to ye olden days before they invented pencils and literacy education.
Association often works, too. “What’s the name of that actor? He was in that movie with that other guy - they went up a mountain, then they had a car chase. It was out about ten years ago…” by the time I’m finished making my chain of associations, the answer will have popped up in my brain. Or I just google it.
I picked up the ‘alphabet thing’ from my dad and I use it whenever I can’t remember something (probably once a week or so). To my recollection (:D), there has not been one time where it worked.
I’ve also tried the funny picture association thing for remembering peoples names (eg. Bob - picture their head bobbing on top of the water; Deborah - her de-bra-ing [removing her bra]). I usually end up remembering their names just by virtue of the time spent coming up with a clever image, or not at all. It’s rare that I actually remember the image at all, let alone derive a name from it.
