Steps to Improve Your Memory.

Have you ever wanted to Improve your memory?

I know I certainly did!, and I'm still working on it.

My interest in this subject took hold when I heard about a book in psychology class and then I promptly borrowed it from the library and read it within the next two days. It's a really short book and only takes a couple of hours to get through. Here's the title and author if interested:

The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory.
by Aleksandr R. Luria

It describes a man with a seemingly limitless memory who describes how he memorizes. They called him "S" in the book. S was able to remember lists of any number of items and then with total recall recite the items backwards or forwards. Even years later he was able to remember the useless lists.

Take a look at the following list of words. They appear to have no relation whatsoever, and if I were to ask the average person to memorize the list, they would have a very very difficult time doing so, because they would attempt to memorize from repetition. This is NOT the way to go about doing it. The way to memorize is to use association. Make the items link together in some bizarre way. The more bizarre it is, the better you'll remember it. In some way you need to use the imagination of a child in order to create the associations.

Who knows, you might even find it fun! I know I did.

Here's the list:

Toe
Toad
Peanut
Pencil
Road
Meatball
Four
Twirl
Box
Food
Card
Kitchen
Tooth
Foosball
Apartment
Argentina
Turtle
Beach
Basketball

Myself?

I memorized this list in about 90 seconds, although this isn't accurate because I also came up with the list....

Here's how I did it.

In my mind I imagined an image of a toad with a HUGE toe (it's easy to memorize because it rhymes) and this toad is currently eating a peanut. In my mind all of this is taking place in a forest even though I don't know why. This is a very weird image if you take the effort to imagine it, which will make it stick in your mind and you'll easily remember the first three items.

The peanut then turns into a pencil. The toad, who was eating the peanut, gets upset at not being able to eat and throws the pencil up over all the trees and it happens to land on a road. In one's mind these images only take a fraction of a second to visualize. The hardest part is coming up with images that stick. And images that work for me may well not be the best images that will work for you. These are just examples of how to do it.

I then see a giant meatball; the meatball is as large as a car, and he runs over the pencil. I look again at the image and see that not one, but four meatballs are present. They all stop to see what they ran over. The leader, who was also the first meatball I see, picks up the pencil and begins to twirl it.

As the meatball twirls the pencil, it gains speed and then the pencil suddenly turns into a box! The meatball then lowers the box and looks inside. Inside the box is a bunch of food.

I had a hard time finding a connection from food to card. This is where I took the longest in memorizing the list. I just couldn't think of one. Take a moment and see if you can come up with one as practice.

After many seconds had passed I had to make a complete change in background. Rather then an empty highway with meatballs rolling down it, I went into a kitchen. Inside the kitchen, there was a party where everyone was eating cards rather than food. After they noticed what they were eating they hurt their teeth. (I had to remember that it was tooth and not teeth when saying the list) This was a bad connection for me because I had an extremely hard time remembering what was first; the kitchen or cards.

If you thought of a better connections please use it.

Next I created an image of people playing foosball, but instead of using a ball, they are using a tooth. I then imaged the people playing to be dark skinned college students with which I could get the connection of apartment and Argentina.

Next I imaged that one of the students loses and yells. I see the sound waves of the yell traveling to a beach where a turtle was sleeping. The yell woke the turtle up!

My final image was of people playing basketball, but instead of using a regular ball, they were using turtles! I could see them dribbling the turtles and shooting them through the hoops.

Once I had all these images, which took a decently quick time to come up with, I could recite the 20 random words both forwards and backwards. This method takes practice, and I would suggest making your own list, or having someone make one for you, and then trying to come up with your own associations between the objects.

Have fun with it and restore your imagination!