9 ms·

How to Train Your Brain to Remember Everything

216 points by daegloe 15y ago

sycren 15y ago
I understand how some of these techniques work like creating a story for remembering the order of a stack of cards but surely it depends on how you think as in some people are good at remembering language, others pictures or feelings..
Zarathust 15y ago
I still have no clue about how to remember 500 random numbers.
- ahelwer 15y ago
  Associate the thing to be remembered with a bizarre visual, then imagine going through some place familiar (say, your house) and putting these bizarre visuals in order along a tour. For stuff like decks of cards and long numbers this is very difficult and requires practice. But there are easy examples you can do to show you the power of this method. For example, I tried memorizing the basic layout of the electromagnetic spectrum about two years ago. This was accomplished in about five minutes and I can still recall everything with clarity at this very moment.
  - shasta 15y ago
    Seems like I read an article recently that covered this in more detail. Very recently...
    - jkolko 15y ago
      http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything/dp/0143120530/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333328812&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Rememberi...
  - kinleyd 15y ago
    For things like decks of cards, long numbers and really, anything perceived to be difficult, you just have to have an intermediate step that converts the abstract aspects into something you can visualize. For numbers, I've partly described the "peg" system in a comment above where you assign sounds to the numbers 0 to 9, then make words that reflect the number sequence with the matching sounds, using vowels to fill in. For cards, it's a similar approach: For example, for the diamonds suit you begin each member with the letter d and join it with the appropriate number ( 2 : n, 3 : m etc) so that two of diamonds becomes DeN, the three of diamonds DaM etc. Using this kind of mnemonic to represent the cards it becomes very easy to visualize and remember them. I've done this and astounded people by calling out the order of a deck of cards in sequence - forwards and backwards, the card in any random position in the deck, and the position of any random card. A lot of fun, and a lot more useful in practical applications that call for a good memory.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
mashmac2 15y ago
2007 USA Memory Champ from the high school division here- Yes, it's very difficult to become a national champion (or be competitive at that level). However, these skills really do help in real life at a much less intense level - grocery lists, names and faces, cough card counting... lots of practical applications.
- hobin 15y ago
  Can you apply it to mathematical formulae et al. as well?
  - res 15y ago
    I'd also like to know this, though I imagine it's possible. I've been thinking about what sort of things I'd like to remember with these methods, and I feel that the Periodic Table would be a good, fun place to start.
    - evoxed 15y ago
      Absolutely. I used a rhythm mnemonic in middle school to remember pi to 106 digits in middle school, and that was the day of the quiz (it was extra credit in... geometry for some reason). Actually the more you practice these techniques on completely ordinary and mundane things, the easier it becomes when attempting formulae, tables, and graphs. Saving your memory for "important things" will only deprive you of essentially free practice. The periodic table is actually a good place to start as long as you don't overwhelm yourself, so for example start with the names of the elements in order, then the numbers will associate, and you can keep building with recursion. OR you could begin with smaller blocks if you're more comfortable absorbing a lot of different information at once, which can sometimes work much better.
- flocial 15y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I'd be interested to know how it carriers over to other parts of your professional life if you program as well.
georgieporgie 15y ago
I really like Quantum Memory Power by Dominic O'Brien: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-Champion/dp/0743528662/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-Champion/... I listened to it while working out over the course of several weeks and, despite not putting much effort into it, was able to improve my ability to remember short lists (e.g. groceries) and names. With more focused practice, I'm sure it would lead to excellent results. The only flaw in it is that some of his social references are a bit dated. In the imagery exercises, you'll probably want to substitute your own, updated names and faces. :-)
- tripzilch 15y ago
  The other flaw is that, without even clicking the link I already know it has nothing to do with "quantum" except for being a cool scientific-sounding technical buzzword.
feral 15y ago
Something has always bothered me about the type of memory technique mentioned in the article. There's a sense, in which it is a 'junk' association, to associate 'zero' with Ozzy Ozbourne eating a bat's head. Do I really want to have many such associations in my mind? Is there a cost? Our brains are bounded in volume, energy, complexity; there have to be limits and costs? I've always been wary about such mnemonic techniques, on these grounds - but I don't know if this caution makes any sense. Anyone?
- lincolnq 15y ago
  I am not sure, but I do know that your brain is making associations with everything you experience, whether you like it or not. Might as well use those associations for something useful.
  - gscott 15y ago
    I thought of a simpler technique the other day that uses triggers like fear or pleasure. Fearful incidents people tend to remember very clearly. Imagine you have a big test and need to do a lot of memorization you could turn it into a fearful experience that will really burn it into your memory but without making dozens of crazy associations. Take a hammer, spread your fingers open wide on a table. Start saying out loud the things you need to memorize while hitting between your fingers with the hammer. I have not tried this myself but I am guessing that the information will be written to the brain as part of the fearful experience making the information easy to pull up for a test.
    - larrys 15y ago
      I think if you did that enough it would go the way of the crazed runner chasing dog technique that I used a few times. It goes like this. You are running and a dog chases you. So you run toward the dog acting like a lunatic. I've tried this and the dog does run away. But only the first time. The second time (that I tried) the dog was on to it and continued the confrontation.
    - pkghost 15y ago
gouranga 15y ago
These things are all good but I have found it ruins your ability to perceive signal versus noise. Everything seems to be a trade-off - the mind included.
- burke 15y ago
  Could you elaborate on this a bit? I'm curious.
dbuxton 15y ago
There is a cool startup that does a lot of the boring legwork of making up memorable images to help with language learning: http://www.memrise.com/ http://www.memrise.com/
- jimmyjim 15y ago
  Wow, I see so many startups doing things with language-learning... I don't think I've seen one better executed than the one you've just linked. Wonderful in many ways, I hope they keep creating content. Thanks for the link!
- scoot 15y ago
  There was a fantastic site for learning Chinese that had you draw the word shapes and compared them to the correct form, but I didn't bookmark it, and never managed to track it down again. Anyone?
  - creamyhorror 15y ago
    It could be Skritter. Memrise is really an implementation of the Heisig et al approach to memorizing Chinese characters - imagine their components to be images/shapes of things which they mean, and use those mnemonic images to recall the characters' meanings. Which is, unsurprisingly, the original basis of most Chinese characters anyway, although they've undergone a lot of evolution in the intervening millennia. Unfortunately I'm past the stage that I need to use mnemonics to remember characters, but it's certainly a useful tool for those starting out or at intermediate levels.
    - scoot 15y ago
      That's the one - thank you!
- ramblerman 15y ago
  wow this is a tremendous resource
grot 15y ago
The argument I find most compelling for learning the memory palace technique is that building a memory palace is a creative act (Yes, like Picasso). One must be creative to construct a memorable palace for something as mundane as a grocery list, and what's vivid works. (Joshua Foer argues just this, persuasively too, in his book "Moonwalking with Einstein"). (begin sort of random tangent) I've tried using the memory palace technique to memorize poetry, and I found the clashing images somewhat disconcerting. On the one hand, there was the imagery of the poem, and on the other, there was the image I had created. Often times, I had to create completely new images, totally unrelated to the substance of the poem, in order to remember it. And well, somehow the images I created always involved a lot of...boob.
- tripzilch 15y ago
  > somehow the images I created always involved a lot of...boob. yet another advantage of these systems, I suppose. A "perk", if you will.
losvedir 15y ago
> In my memory palace, I walked through my house, starting at my front door, and placed these familiar people or numbers on my furniture. > So for a grocery list, the example goes, imagine a container of milk overflowing on your doorstep, and when you get inside, perhaps two giant steaks attacking you in your foyer. Continue to your living room to find pretzels dancing on your rug. To people for whom this works: how vivid exactly are you imagining these things? I think I'm like this guy[1]; basically, I can't close my eyes and "see" anything, much less "imagine walking through my house." I think the memory palace technique is supposed to help you remember things like this: you "walk" (via imagination) into a room and see a crazy scene full of memory prompts. Right? But... how automatic is seeing that scene? I can memorize "a wet lion on my bed" or something, but then I'm just memorizing it, so why shouldn't I just memorize the original thing? And if you can walk into that room and see the lion, and then go, "oh yeah, a wet lion, that means an Ace of Spades" can't you just imagine a poster on the wall with an Ace of Spades on it? I guess, basically, the memory palace technique seems so far from useful it makes me question how my brain works vs. other people's. [1] http://dfan.org/visual.html http://dfan.org/visual.html
- bmelton 15y ago
  Sometime last year, I read "Moonwalking with Einstein" which, despite not having been as educational as I would have liked (there are other books for that though,) was a great read, and did have some instruction in it. One of the lessons in the book is was to memorize the memory champion's grocery list which contained some items I'd never remember on my own (pickled garlic, for example, I've never had or heard of). My daughter and I walked through the list, doing as instructed in the text, and instructing my daughter to do the same. I never performed an image replacement (e.g., the ace of spades actually equals something else,) but did try to abstract the items. For example, for pickled garlic, I imagined a car-sized jar of pickles, but the pickles were garlic shaped. Instead of cottage cheese, I imagined (as instructed) Charisma Carpenter bathing in a large cottage cheese tub. To this day, both I and my daughter can remember the list perfectly, by walking through the house and looking how we should. I haven't gone much farther with it to the degree that I would have had to encode a lion into an ace of spades, but just exaggerating the image itself into a more memorable form works for me. I also have the same lack of visual imagination, but following the instructions in the book exactly as offered worked perfectly. One of the catches though, is that numerous memory champions will tell you that becoming really good at mnemonic memory is really a game of who can be more imaginative. Some routines (like memorizing a deck of cards) can become rote, as you already have the cyphers in your head, you just have to encode them. The more advanced mnemonists have partial encoding techniques such that one mnemonic image can encode a 3 or 4 card sequence. That doesn't take imagination, just discipline... but encoding things, on the fly, that you haven't predetermined the pattern to, is a game of imagination. That said, you might suck at it, as I sort of expect to suck at it myself. Regardless, there are other, less imaginative techniques that may work well for you, and allow you to permanently remember things you would wish to.
marakas 15y ago
How many times can you use the walk-through-your-house technique without reducing the strength of the associations ? I can see how useful it would be to use it once - milk on your front doorstep, steaks attacking you in the foyer, it makes sense, but what about the next time you want to remember something? Perhaps, the next time I want to remember a sequence of numbers starting with zero and I will have Ozzy Ozborne on my front door step. After that maybe I want to remember something else and I might have something random on my front doorstep like a mental image of Jack Bauer with a gun .. After a few goes at doing this how will I remember what is supposed to go on my front doorstep at all ?? Does anyone have experience of this ?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Ryan_Shmotkin 15y ago
The number one reason for 'poor' memory is actually lack of concentration. The reason you start forgeting the name of the person just introduced to you is that you are thinking of a 100% other things, like what to say, do I know him, what to do. All the excercises in the article will help you 'pause' and really concentrate on what you want to remember. Even the first tip: Once you hear a new name, immediatelly try to think of someone you know with the same name. Will improve your 'name memory' greatly. (Not because you know someone else, but because you took a second to concentrate on the name)
wamatt 15y ago
Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=trying-to-forget http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=trying-to-f... Just sayin.. :P
crpatino 15y ago
I have read the original article and found it deeply lacking. Not in the sense that it misrepresents the facts, but more like it fails to acknowledge the underlying assumptions and motivations that give those fact a meaning. //----- In theory First of all, what is being described seems a lot like the "Art of Memory". It is a technique whose modern incarnation was developed mostly during the Renaissance, based on older techniques of the ancient roman schools of rhetoric.[1] If that is the case, we need to put the Art of Memory into a context and remember that it pre-dates Gutenberg and his printing press (let alone any sort digital media). So, the way I see it, its a little bit like running. We have all this professional and olympic athletes, who we admire and subsidize so they can devote full time to their art, who represent the maximum levels of human physical achievement. Now, to expect those athletes to run longer and faster than a car would be obviously ridiculous, and to expect that the whole society ditch their cars and begin running everywhere is beyond impractical. However, most people would agree that it's a very sad state of human existence to be unable to move oneself without motorized assistance for a few hundred, or even a few dozen, meters. With memory, it is the same thing. These memory athletes may do amazing things but it'd be foolish to expect them to store and recall as much information as a computer. Still, having a good memory is a very human thing that everybody can do, and we are reaching to a point where cloud computing and hand-held devices are not empowering us to remember and handle even more information, but to be complacent and not to bother with it. //----- In practice Now, when we are talking about the particulars of how this things are remembered... There are some points... first, some people here has commented that it is harder to remember all this crazy imagery that then payload data in the first place. As others have pointed out, the crazy imagery works because it is loaded with strong emotions that trigger responses in our brains that simple digits cannot. This is part of the answer, the other part is that imagery is meant to be reused over and over again. As it is described in [2], you have to pay the cost upfront. You build what is essentially a sort of ideographic alphabet with which to encode new information in the future. I assume you could go the other way around and load our native alphabet and guarisms with a bunch of strong emotions... but it i not how the method evolved historically. Other important flaw that I find in the original article is that it fails to stress the fact that these new symbols are (or should be) a personal fabrication. It is not like everybody has to cramp their heads with imagery of Ozzie Osbourne chewing off bat heads. If there's a number of competitors doing that, it must be a (very recent) defect in the teaching of the technique. Its like the students are literally blindly copying their teacher's symbol table; instead of developing a personal, and more effective, one of their own. By example, the author of [2] is a sorts of fan of Tolkien, and his mental imagery is filled up in characters from LOTR. I have very recently started to use this technique, but its very clear that I shouldn't pick the same work of fiction to base my own symbol table. Instead, I am using Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". So it is not that we clutter our heads with useless stuff. We ought to "recycle" the stuff that has already found its way in. To continue with the example, may mind has attached emotions to "Theodore Nott, Chaotic Lt." (as depicted by Dinosaurusgede [3], nonetheless) in a way that "Theoden of Rohan" will never reach. So, I use that when trying to pinpoint the phoneme "Th" instead. //--- Links [1] Art of Memory I. Introduction and historic development. http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/1/ars-memorativa.html http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/1/ars-memorativa.htm... [2] Art of Memory II. Description of one technique. http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/2/ars-memorativa.html http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/2/ars-memorativa.htm... [3] http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/Potter-s-Chaos-Legion-177373507 http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/Potter-s-Chaos-Legi...

216 points by daegloe 15y ago

I understand how some of these techniques work like creating a story for remembering the order of a stack of cards but surely it depends on how you think as in some people are good at remembering language, others pictures or feelings..

Zarathust 15y ago

I still have no clue about how to remember 500 random numbers.

ahelwer 15y ago
Associate the thing to be remembered with a bizarre visual, then imagine going through some place familiar (say, your house) and putting these bizarre visuals in order along a tour. For stuff like decks of cards and long numbers this is very difficult and requires practice. But there are easy examples you can do to show you the power of this method. For example, I tried memorizing the basic layout of the electromagnetic spectrum about two years ago. This was accomplished in about five minutes and I can still recall everything with clarity at this very moment.
- shasta 15y ago
  Seems like I read an article recently that covered this in more detail. Very recently...
  - jkolko 15y ago
    http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-Everything/dp/0143120530/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333328812&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Rememberi...
- kinleyd 15y ago
  For things like decks of cards, long numbers and really, anything perceived to be difficult, you just have to have an intermediate step that converts the abstract aspects into something you can visualize. For numbers, I've partly described the "peg" system in a comment above where you assign sounds to the numbers 0 to 9, then make words that reflect the number sequence with the matching sounds, using vowels to fill in. For cards, it's a similar approach: For example, for the diamonds suit you begin each member with the letter d and join it with the appropriate number ( 2 : n, 3 : m etc) so that two of diamonds becomes DeN, the three of diamonds DaM etc. Using this kind of mnemonic to represent the cards it becomes very easy to visualize and remember them. I've done this and astounded people by calling out the order of a deck of cards in sequence - forwards and backwards, the card in any random position in the deck, and the position of any random card. A lot of fun, and a lot more useful in practical applications that call for a good memory.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

mashmac2 15y ago

2007 USA Memory Champ from the high school division here- Yes, it's very difficult to become a national champion (or be competitive at that level). However, these skills really do help in real life at a much less intense level - grocery lists, names and faces, cough card counting... lots of practical applications.

hobin 15y ago
Can you apply it to mathematical formulae et al. as well?
- res 15y ago
  I'd also like to know this, though I imagine it's possible. I've been thinking about what sort of things I'd like to remember with these methods, and I feel that the Periodic Table would be a good, fun place to start.
  - evoxed 15y ago
    Absolutely. I used a rhythm mnemonic in middle school to remember pi to 106 digits in middle school, and that was the day of the quiz (it was extra credit in... geometry for some reason). Actually the more you practice these techniques on completely ordinary and mundane things, the easier it becomes when attempting formulae, tables, and graphs. Saving your memory for "important things" will only deprive you of essentially free practice. The periodic table is actually a good place to start as long as you don't overwhelm yourself, so for example start with the names of the elements in order, then the numbers will associate, and you can keep building with recursion. OR you could begin with smaller blocks if you're more comfortable absorbing a lot of different information at once, which can sometimes work much better.
flocial 15y ago
Thanks for sharing! I'd be interested to know how it carriers over to other parts of your professional life if you program as well.

georgieporgie 15y ago

I really like Quantum Memory Power by Dominic O'Brien: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-Champion/dp/0743528662/ref=sr_1_1 http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-Champion/... I listened to it while working out over the course of several weeks and, despite not putting much effort into it, was able to improve my ability to remember short lists (e.g. groceries) and names. With more focused practice, I'm sure it would lead to excellent results. The only flaw in it is that some of his social references are a bit dated. In the imagery exercises, you'll probably want to substitute your own, updated names and faces. :-)

tripzilch 15y ago
The other flaw is that, without even clicking the link I already know it has nothing to do with "quantum" except for being a cool scientific-sounding technical buzzword.

feral 15y ago

Something has always bothered me about the type of memory technique mentioned in the article. There's a sense, in which it is a 'junk' association, to associate 'zero' with Ozzy Ozbourne eating a bat's head. Do I really want to have many such associations in my mind? Is there a cost? Our brains are bounded in volume, energy, complexity; there have to be limits and costs? I've always been wary about such mnemonic techniques, on these grounds - but I don't know if this caution makes any sense. Anyone?

lincolnq 15y ago
I am not sure, but I do know that your brain is making associations with everything you experience, whether you like it or not. Might as well use those associations for something useful.
- gscott 15y ago
  I thought of a simpler technique the other day that uses triggers like fear or pleasure. Fearful incidents people tend to remember very clearly. Imagine you have a big test and need to do a lot of memorization you could turn it into a fearful experience that will really burn it into your memory but without making dozens of crazy associations. Take a hammer, spread your fingers open wide on a table. Start saying out loud the things you need to memorize while hitting between your fingers with the hammer. I have not tried this myself but I am guessing that the information will be written to the brain as part of the fearful experience making the information easy to pull up for a test.
  - larrys 15y ago
    I think if you did that enough it would go the way of the crazed runner chasing dog technique that I used a few times. It goes like this. You are running and a dog chases you. So you run toward the dog acting like a lunatic. I've tried this and the dog does run away. But only the first time. The second time (that I tried) the dog was on to it and continued the confrontation.
  - pkghost 15y ago

gouranga 15y ago

These things are all good but I have found it ruins your ability to perceive signal versus noise. Everything seems to be a trade-off - the mind included.

burke 15y ago
Could you elaborate on this a bit? I'm curious.

dbuxton 15y ago

There is a cool startup that does a lot of the boring legwork of making up memorable images to help with language learning: http://www.memrise.com/ http://www.memrise.com/

jimmyjim 15y ago
Wow, I see so many startups doing things with language-learning... I don't think I've seen one better executed than the one you've just linked. Wonderful in many ways, I hope they keep creating content. Thanks for the link!
scoot 15y ago
There was a fantastic site for learning Chinese that had you draw the word shapes and compared them to the correct form, but I didn't bookmark it, and never managed to track it down again. Anyone?
- creamyhorror 15y ago
  It could be Skritter. Memrise is really an implementation of the Heisig et al approach to memorizing Chinese characters - imagine their components to be images/shapes of things which they mean, and use those mnemonic images to recall the characters' meanings. Which is, unsurprisingly, the original basis of most Chinese characters anyway, although they've undergone a lot of evolution in the intervening millennia. Unfortunately I'm past the stage that I need to use mnemonics to remember characters, but it's certainly a useful tool for those starting out or at intermediate levels.
  - scoot 15y ago
    That's the one - thank you!
ramblerman 15y ago
wow this is a tremendous resource

grot 15y ago

The argument I find most compelling for learning the memory palace technique is that building a memory palace is a creative act (Yes, like Picasso). One must be creative to construct a memorable palace for something as mundane as a grocery list, and what's vivid works. (Joshua Foer argues just this, persuasively too, in his book "Moonwalking with Einstein"). (begin sort of random tangent) I've tried using the memory palace technique to memorize poetry, and I found the clashing images somewhat disconcerting. On the one hand, there was the imagery of the poem, and on the other, there was the image I had created. Often times, I had to create completely new images, totally unrelated to the substance of the poem, in order to remember it. And well, somehow the images I created always involved a lot of...boob.

tripzilch 15y ago
> somehow the images I created always involved a lot of...boob. yet another advantage of these systems, I suppose. A "perk", if you will.

losvedir 15y ago

> In my memory palace, I walked through my house, starting at my front door, and placed these familiar people or numbers on my furniture. > So for a grocery list, the example goes, imagine a container of milk overflowing on your doorstep, and when you get inside, perhaps two giant steaks attacking you in your foyer. Continue to your living room to find pretzels dancing on your rug. To people for whom this works: how vivid exactly are you imagining these things? I think I'm like this guy[1]; basically, I can't close my eyes and "see" anything, much less "imagine walking through my house." I think the memory palace technique is supposed to help you remember things like this: you "walk" (via imagination) into a room and see a crazy scene full of memory prompts. Right? But... how automatic is seeing that scene? I can memorize "a wet lion on my bed" or something, but then I'm just memorizing it, so why shouldn't I just memorize the original thing? And if you can walk into that room and see the lion, and then go, "oh yeah, a wet lion, that means an Ace of Spades" can't you just imagine a poster on the wall with an Ace of Spades on it? I guess, basically, the memory palace technique seems so far from useful it makes me question how my brain works vs. other people's. [1] http://dfan.org/visual.html http://dfan.org/visual.html

bmelton 15y ago
Sometime last year, I read "Moonwalking with Einstein" which, despite not having been as educational as I would have liked (there are other books for that though,) was a great read, and did have some instruction in it. One of the lessons in the book is was to memorize the memory champion's grocery list which contained some items I'd never remember on my own (pickled garlic, for example, I've never had or heard of). My daughter and I walked through the list, doing as instructed in the text, and instructing my daughter to do the same. I never performed an image replacement (e.g., the ace of spades actually equals something else,) but did try to abstract the items. For example, for pickled garlic, I imagined a car-sized jar of pickles, but the pickles were garlic shaped. Instead of cottage cheese, I imagined (as instructed) Charisma Carpenter bathing in a large cottage cheese tub. To this day, both I and my daughter can remember the list perfectly, by walking through the house and looking how we should. I haven't gone much farther with it to the degree that I would have had to encode a lion into an ace of spades, but just exaggerating the image itself into a more memorable form works for me. I also have the same lack of visual imagination, but following the instructions in the book exactly as offered worked perfectly. One of the catches though, is that numerous memory champions will tell you that becoming really good at mnemonic memory is really a game of who can be more imaginative. Some routines (like memorizing a deck of cards) can become rote, as you already have the cyphers in your head, you just have to encode them. The more advanced mnemonists have partial encoding techniques such that one mnemonic image can encode a 3 or 4 card sequence. That doesn't take imagination, just discipline... but encoding things, on the fly, that you haven't predetermined the pattern to, is a game of imagination. That said, you might suck at it, as I sort of expect to suck at it myself. Regardless, there are other, less imaginative techniques that may work well for you, and allow you to permanently remember things you would wish to.

marakas 15y ago

How many times can you use the walk-through-your-house technique without reducing the strength of the associations ? I can see how useful it would be to use it once - milk on your front doorstep, steaks attacking you in the foyer, it makes sense, but what about the next time you want to remember something? Perhaps, the next time I want to remember a sequence of numbers starting with zero and I will have Ozzy Ozborne on my front door step. After that maybe I want to remember something else and I might have something random on my front doorstep like a mental image of Jack Bauer with a gun .. After a few goes at doing this how will I remember what is supposed to go on my front doorstep at all ?? Does anyone have experience of this ?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Ryan_Shmotkin 15y ago

The number one reason for 'poor' memory is actually lack of concentration. The reason you start forgeting the name of the person just introduced to you is that you are thinking of a 100% other things, like what to say, do I know him, what to do. All the excercises in the article will help you 'pause' and really concentrate on what you want to remember. Even the first tip: Once you hear a new name, immediatelly try to think of someone you know with the same name. Will improve your 'name memory' greatly. (Not because you know someone else, but because you took a second to concentrate on the name)

wamatt 15y ago

Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=trying-to-forget http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=trying-to-f... Just sayin.. :P

crpatino 15y ago

I have read the original article and found it deeply lacking. Not in the sense that it misrepresents the facts, but more like it fails to acknowledge the underlying assumptions and motivations that give those fact a meaning. //----- In theory First of all, what is being described seems a lot like the "Art of Memory". It is a technique whose modern incarnation was developed mostly during the Renaissance, based on older techniques of the ancient roman schools of rhetoric.[1] If that is the case, we need to put the Art of Memory into a context and remember that it pre-dates Gutenberg and his printing press (let alone any sort digital media). So, the way I see it, its a little bit like running. We have all this professional and olympic athletes, who we admire and subsidize so they can devote full time to their art, who represent the maximum levels of human physical achievement. Now, to expect those athletes to run longer and faster than a car would be obviously ridiculous, and to expect that the whole society ditch their cars and begin running everywhere is beyond impractical. However, most people would agree that it's a very sad state of human existence to be unable to move oneself without motorized assistance for a few hundred, or even a few dozen, meters. With memory, it is the same thing. These memory athletes may do amazing things but it'd be foolish to expect them to store and recall as much information as a computer. Still, having a good memory is a very human thing that everybody can do, and we are reaching to a point where cloud computing and hand-held devices are not empowering us to remember and handle even more information, but to be complacent and not to bother with it. //----- In practice Now, when we are talking about the particulars of how this things are remembered... There are some points... first, some people here has commented that it is harder to remember all this crazy imagery that then payload data in the first place. As others have pointed out, the crazy imagery works because it is loaded with strong emotions that trigger responses in our brains that simple digits cannot. This is part of the answer, the other part is that imagery is meant to be reused over and over again. As it is described in [2], you have to pay the cost upfront. You build what is essentially a sort of ideographic alphabet with which to encode new information in the future. I assume you could go the other way around and load our native alphabet and guarisms with a bunch of strong emotions... but it i not how the method evolved historically. Other important flaw that I find in the original article is that it fails to stress the fact that these new symbols are (or should be) a personal fabrication. It is not like everybody has to cramp their heads with imagery of Ozzie Osbourne chewing off bat heads. If there's a number of competitors doing that, it must be a (very recent) defect in the teaching of the technique. Its like the students are literally blindly copying their teacher's symbol table; instead of developing a personal, and more effective, one of their own. By example, the author of [2] is a sorts of fan of Tolkien, and his mental imagery is filled up in characters from LOTR. I have very recently started to use this technique, but its very clear that I shouldn't pick the same work of fiction to base my own symbol table. Instead, I am using Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". So it is not that we clutter our heads with useless stuff. We ought to "recycle" the stuff that has already found its way in. To continue with the example, may mind has attached emotions to "Theodore Nott, Chaotic Lt." (as depicted by Dinosaurusgede [3], nonetheless) in a way that "Theoden of Rohan" will never reach. So, I use that when trying to pinpoint the phoneme "Th" instead. //--- Links [1] Art of Memory I. Introduction and historic development. http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/1/ars-memorativa.html http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/1/ars-memorativa.htm... [2] Art of Memory II. Description of one technique. http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/2/ars-memorativa.html http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/2/ars-memorativa.htm... [3] http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/Potter-s-Chaos-Legion-177373507 http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/Potter-s-Chaos-Legi...