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Contents

Introduction

Part One

Understanding Memory

Chapter One What Is Memory, and How Does It Work

Chapter Two What Can Get in the Way of Memory

Chapter Three Test Your Memory

Part Two

Methods for Improving Memory

Chapter Four Overview of General Methods

Chapter Five Association

Chapter Six Visualization

Chapter Seven Chunking

Chapter Eight Method of Loci

Chapter Nine Rhyming

Chapter Ten Acronyms and Acrostics

Part Three

Advanced Exercises

Chapter Eleven Memory Methods of the Experts

Chapter Twelve Conclusion—What Now

Appendix: Nutrients to Boost Memory

Glossary

References

Introduction

It’s time to go to work, but you’ve misplaced your keys . . . again. You have an appointment with your doctor this afternoon, but you can’t remember what time, or what you did with the appointment card. You have to plan tonight’s dinner, but you can’t remember what you had for dinner last night. And what did your niece tell you she wanted for her birthday?

With all the things you have going on in your life, your head feels like it’s spinning. You manage a household, pursue a career, and raise children, but with so many people, places, and things to keep straight, it can be much harder to preserve energy for the smaller details in life, and that makes you feel as if you are losing your mind—literally. If you’ve ever found yourself looking into the refrigerator with no idea why you opened the door, or upstairs when you need to be downstairs, it may have crossed your mind that you should be tested for early-onset dementia.

Instead, it’s real life that’s run amok, and it’s taken your memory with it. You don’t need to resign yourself to relinquishing your power to the calendar on your smartphone; you want to be as self-sufficient as you used to be and remember details that, as of late, are falling right out of your head.

This book will help you do exactly that. The research, memory tools, tips, and techniques in the following pages were developed by experts who started out much like you, and include an ancient Roman poet, a seventeenth-century German linguist, a nineteenth-century psychiatrist, and a parade of “mental athletes”—people who circle the globe to compete in brain games such as memorizing the order of a shuffled deck of cards.

None of these people consider themselves exceptional, but they do share a couple of traits: the ability to create memorable images in their minds, and the willingness to invest their time in strengthening their capacity to remember.

In this book, you’ll be provided a brief but informative understanding of your most important muscle—your brain—as well as how memory can be built up and why and when it atrophies. Also included is a short history of memory techniques and the modern research that has proven its value. You’ll read about six important tools that form the foundation of memory improvement, each accompanied by examples of how these methods are used.

Finally, this book reveals some of the centuries-old, not especially secret methods the top memory champions use to perform feats of cognitive discipline that win world championships.

Still haven’t found your keys? You’re ready to get started—and if all goes well, you’ll never again get frostbite from staring too long at the contents of your refrigerator.

Part One

Understanding Memory

Chapter One What Is Memory, and How Does It Work

Chapter Two What Can Get in the Way of Memory

Chapter Three Test Your Memory

CHAPTER ONE

What Is Memory, and How Does It Work

In a laboratory at the University of Berlin in Germany, in 1879, a young scientist named Hermann Ebbinghaus struggled alone to memorize long strings of nonsense words, such as TIR or XUQ. Remembering words that had meaning would’ve biased the research, as Ebbinghaus could have potentially relied on his own knowledge and associations with the words’ meanings in order to recall them. To further ensure the test was completely random, he wrote these nonsense words on slips of paper, mixed them together, and drew them out of a container one at a time, creating lists of syllables with no specific pattern.

Ebbinghaus developed this research method in an attempt to prove that memory could be studied, even though his peers believed it was impossible. Using himself as the lone subject, Ebbinghaus read through several of the words and then attempted to recite them. He determined how many readings were required to memorize the string, based on the string’s length and the time lapse between readings and recitations. What he concluded was that when a person did not attempt to retain new information, forgetting increased over time—known famously as the “forgetting curve.” Ebbinghaus is also the father of the learning curve.

The published study shed the earliest light on an elusive function of the human mind: its ability to remember. Ebbinghaus’s resulting 1885 book, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, launched a new field of scientific interest, one that led to a stronger and more cohesive understanding of memory and the ways that it can be influenced, preserved, and improved.

Since Ebbinghaus’s day, the study of memory has included everything from neuroimaging to studying the effects of stress, alcohol, sleep deprivation, inactivity, caffeine, artificial sweeteners, vitamins, minerals, Google, and many other influences on how we form memories and remember information.

Even before Ebbinghaus sat alone in his lab with his strings of nonsense syllables, philosophers and scientists puzzled over the workings of the human memory.

More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle postulated that human beings are the sum of their experiences, born as blank slates onto which all of their memories are etched from birth to death. He referred to the memory in terms that became known as the “storehouse metaphor,” one that stood as the standard definition of memory for many centuries. Not until the Greek poet Simonides stumbled on a new theory of memory retention, the method of loci, did the perception of what memory is develop beyond the basic idea of storage and retrieval to the ability to associate objects with the place at which they appear. (For more on the method of loci, see Chapter Eight.)

Research since the days of the Roman Empire continued to reveal bits of information that expanded scientists’ understanding of human memory, with Ebbinghaus making the most significant contribution. The field did not truly take off until the 1940s, when technology allowed researchers to determine what actually takes place within the brain. The renowned scientist Karl Lashley used research on rats navigating mazes to determine that many parts of the brain are involved in storing and accessing memories.

The Canadian researcher Donald Hebb made a breakthrough in the same era, theorizing that memory encoding takes place when connections are formed between neurons and synapses. Scientist Eric Kandel confirmed this theory in the 1970s through his Nobel Prize-winning research with snails. He learned that while short-term memory involves transient changes in the connections between cells, long-term memory requires lasting changes that come from the growth of new connections between synapses and neurons.

While an enormous body of research now exists, memory—like the brain in which it takes place—remains only partially understood. To improve your understanding of the definition and workings of human memory, it is helpful to consider the observations between disciplines.

The Medical Perspective

Medical doctors view memory primarily from a biological perspective, speaking in terms of parts of the brain and neurological processes. You may be surprised to learn that information about brain activities that form memories is fairly vague, even in our scientifically and technologically advanced times.

Scientists know that memory creation begins with a biological process called encoding by way of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. The general definition of the word “encode” is to convert messages; therefore, what you experience through the senses is converted into a memory. For example, think of a person who means a great deal to you in your life—perhaps your father. How do you perceive him? Chances are you remember what he looks like, the sound of his voice, and the smell of cologne you associate with him. You may recall the feeling of a particular shirt against your fingers, or the strength of a hug. You also may remember how your father makes you feel emotionally: the pleasure of a shared joke or a loving glance, or the anger of a confrontation. Each one of these perceptions are separate until they travel to the part of the brain called the hippocampus, where they are combined together to form a complete memory of this person.

According to researchers who study the brain, the hippocampus—located deep in the center of the brain, under the cerebral cortex—acts as a sort of biological scout, determining which perceptions are worth saving as memories and which are not. After this first screening, the hippocampus determines what short-term memories it should retain and encode into long-term memories.

The hippocampus does not actually store the memories, however. All of these disparate perceptions break down into bits of information that are stored in different parts of your brain. Meaning that while you might not be thinking about your father in a particular moment, the smell of a passerby’s Old Spice will trigger the part of the brain that retains smell and the association of Old Spice with your father. What results is not just a memory of the smell but also a cohesive memory of your father.

How the brain takes a perception from one part of the brain and joins it with another to then bring all the sensory perceptions together for a full long-term memory relies on the brain’s biology. Nerve cells connect with one another through passageways called synapses, bridges over which electrical impulses can travel via neurotransmitters. Using these synapses and neurotransmitters, your nervous system passes the scent of cologne to one area of your brain, the feel of a shirt to another, and the sight of your loved one to a third area.

These neurotransmitters then attach themselves to dendrites, the parts of the nerve cells that retain memories at the other end of the synapse. The connection creates links that become part of the brain’s ability to recall information at random. Your brain may contain more than one hundred trillion links like these, a vast neural network that allows you to function in a world filled with potential memories. Proteins in your brain make the communication among brain cells possible, and they also determine the lifespan of brain cells and repair your DNA. How exactly the hippocampus retrieves all of these bits of information from different areas of the brain and reassembles them into one memory remains one of the great mysteries of modern science. Suffice it to say that the human brain serves as the most complex random-access memory computer in existence.

What we do know is that these links can change as required, creating networks that serve to process particular kinds of information, and then shifting to process something different. This is what scientists call plasticity, the brain’s ability to shift these transmissions whenever new connections are needed—making it possible for the brain to work around a damaged area or to become stronger through continued use in a certain way.

Through the techniques described in this book, we will take advantage of the healthy brain’s plasticity to strengthen the bonds between dendrites and synapses, allowing you to boost the functioning and flexibility of your memory.

The Psychological Perspective

Psychologists explore memory as a function of information processing, examining its sequence of maintaining and accessing impressions and experiences. They define memory as the mind’s ability to encode, store, and retrieve information.

Encoding takes place when you are presented with information and take it into your memory. For example, when you read a story in the newspaper and you want to remember the details, your mind absorbs that information in one of three ways: visually, acoustically, or semantically.

- Visually: Your mind may create a “mental picture” of the information. If the story involves a car accident, for example, your mind instantly creates an image of the accident—even when there is no photo in the story—and you store that image automatically to remember the story, so you can repeat it to your spouse later. You don’t need to think, “Wait, let me get that picture in my mind,” because the encoding process happens on its own.

- Acoustically: When you meet someone new, do you repeat their name aloud after they’ve told it to you? You are creating an acoustic memory, a way for your mind to hold on to the name so you can recall it later. Now that you know what you’re doing, you will catch yourself repeating telephone numbers, addresses, other numbers and codes, new words, and the names of various objects to help you commit them to memory.

- Semantically: Giving information its own meaning or context is considered a way to encode using semantics. For example, when you think of your child’s graduation from high school, that moment has considerable emotional meaning and context. Recalling that feeling brings the memory back vividly, with all of its personal significance.

Once your brain encodes, or converts, the information, it uses short-term and long-term memory to determine which information can be used and discarded, and which should be retained for a longer time—or for a lifetime.

Using your short-term memory, your brain can select information, process the information it selects, and complete complex calculations or find more subjective solutions. For example, your brain can read the calories, fat, and fiber content on a box of cereal and remember their facts long enough for you to record them into your food journal. By the time you pour the cereal, the detailed information vanishes from your memory. Generally, short-term memories last only a few seconds.

Long-term memory takes the information gathered by short-term memory and stores it for use at another time. Many long-term memories last a lifetime, especially those formed early in life. It appears that human beings can retain an unlimited number of memories, creating as many clusters of information—life experiences, people, songs, events, and countless others—as their lives require.

Studies in the psychology of memory indicate that acoustic encoding is the most effective method for committing information to short-term memory, while semantic encoding carries the information into long-term memory.

Finally, the mind has the capacity to retrieve information stored in memory, no matter how long ago the memory was stored or what kind of memory it may be. How the brain retrieves these memories depends on whether they are stored in short-term or long-term memory.

Studies have shown that short-term memory is retrieved sequentially. Think about how this works: When you have to remember the fifth thing on a list of ten things, how do you recall what the fifth thing was? Chances are that you count through the first five things, perhaps even using your fingers to count them off. You need the whole list to remember these things in sequence.

Long-term memory, on the other hand, allows you to remember things according to the other things with which you associate them. For example, how often do you find yourself standing in the middle of your living room, trying to remember why you are there? If you retrace your steps to where you were before you entered the living room, the memory of what you wanted suddenly pops back into your consciousness. Your brain associates the thought of the book you left on the coffee table with the room you were cleaning when you thought of it.

Meeting of the Minds

Scientists on both the medical and psychological sides point to the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s as a transformational time in memory research. During this period, the two points of view converged to create a new field called cognitive neuroscience, spurring the work of new researchers, including George Miller, one of the best-known experts on short-term memory. Miller’s paper on short-term memory, “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” was the result of an extensive review of decades of psychologists’ research. Miller’s conclusion—that people generally can remember a cluster of seven digits or words in sequence, plus or minus two—led to the modern-day seven-digit telephone number.

Since the 1970s, a number of researchers have explored methods for improving memory, and several methods have proved to be successful both in controlled research settings and in everyday practice.

One of the leading teams in this area comes from the world of special education. Margo A. Mastropieri and Thomas E. Scruggs, professors at Purdue University, researched ways to facilitate learning and memory in students with learning disabilities. Their work with mnemonic devices, including association and visualization—discussed in detail in Chapters Five and Six of this book—provided students with the ability to retrieve factual information to answer questions on tests by connecting the new information they studied to a keyword already embedded in their long-term memory. For example, a student remembered the capital of Florida by associating Florida with “flower,” and Tallahassee—the state capital—with “television,” and then picturing the flower on top of the television. Students who memorized information using this method performed better on comprehension tests.

Studies throughout the 1990s and 2000s led to increased knowledge about memory function and improvement. For instance, research produced results in protecting against the development of Alzheimer’s disease in older adults. Among the strategies are using commercial brain-training games (in this case, Brain Age and Tetris), increasing regular exercise in older adults, and using mentally stimulating activities like crossword puzzles and discussions about politics and current events. Modern research has also found that the use of a computerized memory program can help victims of traumatic brain injury improve their short-term memory function. One recent study showed that physically fit children perform better on memory tests, while another concluded that learned information remains in the brain even though a person can’t recall it readily.

What do all of these recent studies tell us? Many of the memory improvement methods in use today actually have the potential to produce results, if used judiciously. The best and most proven of these have been selected for inclusion in this book to provide you with an objective overview of the methods available to you. Once you understand how these methods work, you can implement them on your own.

CHAPTER TWO

What Can Get in the Way of Memory

Do you remember every telephone number you’ve ever dialed? Chances are you don’t—and that’s a good thing. It’s a normal function of your short-term memory to discard extraneous information once you’ve used what you need.

Likewise, you don’t remember every sunny or rainy day, every time you’ve driven to and from work, or every moment of a long car trip. Your memory knows that it does not require all that information, and it responds accordingly by letting it vanish from your mind. This automatic erasure is what psychologists call memory inhibition, and it’s part of the brain’s amazing plasticity—its ability to change as needed to adapt to your current needs. Memory inhibition facilitates the rapid retrieval of the information you do need to keep in memory: not the miles of open road, but how much change you need when you reach the toll bridge at the exit; not every raindrop on a wet, dreary day, but the need to keep a towel by the door to dry off your dog after you walk him in the rain.

On the edge of this normal memory inhibition, however, are outside forces that can make it more difficult to retrieve memories that do serve a purpose. In the worst cases, abuses of your healthy body can damage your long-term memory and cause permanent memory loss. It’s important to know what these forces are, and how to avoid them.

Diet and Alcohol

It’s been said that you are what you eat, and when you eat food that’s high in saturated fat, sugar, and refined grains, your brain becomes as junky as the low-nutrient substances you put into it. Trans fat—any ingredient with the word “hydrogenated” attached to it—and saturated fat do the same thing to your brain as they do to your heart: They increase the bad cholesterol in your blood, which travels up to your brain as well as into your heart. Clogged arteries in your brain lead to small blood vessel damage—blocking the flow of blood through your brain. Over time, this results in an Alzheimer’s-like disease called vascular dementia, with the added potential for hallucinations and delusions in addition to memory loss.

Even in the short term—long before it causes brain damage—foods high in saturated fat slow the impulses across synapses in your brain, making it harder to dredge up a memory as you need it. The next time you eat a fast-food burger and fries, take note of the way you function as you digest. You may notice that it takes a moment longer to comprehend the text you are reading in a newspaper, or that your sharp decision-making ability slows down slightly.

Simple sugar—including everything from cane sugar to pure maple syrup from a local farm—can be just as injurious to your memory by keeping the proteins in your body and your brain from functioning normally. Without these proteins, communication between neurotransmitters and synapses is jeopardized. How much is too much sugar? Experts recommend that you take in no more than four grams of sugar in an hour. There are thirty-nine grams of sugar in a single can of cola and an average of thirty grams in a regular-size candy bar, so it’s easy to see how quickly sugar accumulates in your system. Your afternoon pick-me-up could actually sabotage your ability to be alert.

High-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is six times sweeter than cane sugar, and it’s a less expensive additive than sugar. It is used in many soft drinks, candies, baked goods, canned fruits, yogurt products, and foods you would not expect, like condensed tomato soup and ketchup. The scientific community has recently produced conclusive evidence that HFCS is worse for the body than cane sugar. A study of laboratory rats completed at the University of California, at Los Angeles (UCLA), published in the Journal of Physiology in May 2012, showed that a diet that includes a large amount of HFCS slows brain function, and with it, the ability to learn and form memories.

Researchers theorize that too much fructose prohibits the body from regulating blood sugar. With steady blood sugar levels come proper amounts of energy for physical activity and also for learning and retaining information. Watch your intake of HFCS by reading the labels of packaged foods, especially soft drinks, juices, and energy drinks. To determine how much HFCS might be in the food, pay attention to the order in which the ingredients appear on the label. Ingredients are listed in the order of their amounts, so if you see HFCS near the top of the list, a large percentage of the food item contains this sinister sweetener.

Refined grains, also called processed grains, are grain products that are separated from their hard outer layers. These grains often undergo bleaching and other industrial processes, each of which removes nutrients that were there naturally before processing began. When you buy “enriched” flour, for example, nutrients like thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, and iron have been added synthetically to replace some of the vitamins and minerals that were removed during the refining process. Even with this enriching, however, refined grains do not contain nearly as much nutritional value as the whole grains from which they were made. These refined grains become the processed wheat flour used in most cakes, cookies, breads, crackers, cereals, pasta, snack foods, pancakes, and waffles, and as a thickener in soups, gravy, and sauces. Products made with processed cornmeal—like corn tortillas and taco shells—also contain refined grains, and foods including white rice, couscous, and grits are refined grains as well. All of these refined grains provide calories, but little in the way of nutrition—and they quickly turn to sugar as you digest them. This translates to an overall higher sugar intake, boosting your daily sugar levels.

This does not mean that you should never eat a cookie or a slice of bread again; however, choosing whole-grain carbohydrates will provide your body and brain with the natural nutrients needed without spiking blood sugar. Whole-grain foods are complex carbohydrates, which contain natural vitamins, minerals, iron, and fiber as well as calories. The most recent guidelines from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) recommend that adult women eat between three and six ounces of whole grains daily, and that men eat between three and eight ounces (depending on your age). Look for foods that are labeled “100 percent whole wheat” on the package, choose brown rice over white, and select sweet potatoes over white potatoes to ensure you consume carbohydrates that are low on the glycemic index.

It’s a well-known fact that alcohol intake affects the brain by depressing its cognitive and motor functions. The occasional glass of wine or beer are unlikely to have lasting effects, but the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) states that heavy drinking over time will affect the brain, even after the person achieves sobriety. Recent research has shown that blackouts and memory lapses are common even among social drinkers, whether or not the drinker is clinically dependent on alcohol. The studies have also discovered that women are at greater risk for blackouts and memory impairment (short-term and longterm) than men, though results have been inconclusive on whether both genders are at similar risk for permanent brain damage.

Excessive drinking is unwise on any level, but moderate use of alcohol may actually be good for you. A myriad of published studies by researchers in the United States, England, Italy, and Australia have concluded that moderate drinking can improve brain functioning. The Italian study, published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, examined more than fifteen thousand men and women over age sixty-five. The study found a lower number of people with mental impairment among the drinkers, even when other factors—age, education, and health problems unrelated to drinking—were taken into consideration. The well-known Whitehall Study in England, led by a professor of epidemiology and public health, tracked the health of civil servants beginning in 1967. This remarkable study determined that people who abstained from drinking alcohol were twice as likely as social drinkers to score lowest on tests administered at intervals throughout the study.

So that glass of wine you have with dinner may actually help you keep your memory sharper—as long as you don’t follow that glass with very many more on a regular basis. There’s more about red wine as a memory enhancement tool in the Appendix.

Smoking

Smoking inhibits the flow of oxygen to the brain, making it more difficult for it to function properly and retain memories. Studies have shown that heavy smokers—defined as those who smoke more than a pack of cigarettes a day—struggle to recall names and faces much more than do nonsmokers.

In a study meant to explore the association between cardiovascular risk and cognitive decline in older adults, researchers found that “smoking represents the most consistent vascular risk predictor of cognitive decline.” Published in Age and Ageing in November 2012, the study drew its participants from the older adults in the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, measuring their cognitive abilities at the beginning of the study and at four and eight years later. The study notes that “smoking was consistently associated with lower performance on all three cognitive outcomes” at each of the three intervals studied.

Along with the tar and nicotine that threaten overall health, cigarettes also contain toluene, a toxic substance that can cause confusion as well as memory loss. Normally used as a degreaser and in the manufacture of paints, glues, and explosives, toluene is one of a number of industrial chemicals that are inhaled. It provides a low-level feeling of intoxication and euphoria as an additive to cigarettes. Studies have shown that if used carelessly, toluene can cause severe neurological damage.

Too Little Exercise

If you’d rather watch your favorite sports than play them, or if getting fifteen to thirty minutes of aerobic exercise daily does not entice you, your sedentary lifestyle could take a toll on your memory.

A number of studies on the effects of physical exercise on memory retention and retrieval show that the group of subjects who get some kind of exercise—even nonstrenuous stretching and chair exercises—can have a positive impact on memory. In one study, elderly nursing home residents, ranging in age from seventy-six to ninety-three, took a memory test after performing fifteen minutes of low-impact exercise, while another group of residents took the test after watching a similar exercise regimen on television. The group who exercised scored better on the memory test than the group who watched others exercise.

Neurologists have documented the fact that while the hippocampus—the memory intake center of the brain, as you may remember from Chapter One—shrinks in late adulthood, it actually increases in size in adults who maintain high levels of physical fitness. A 2010 study showed that older adults who take up aerobic exercise could increase the size of their hippocampus, with the direct result of improving their memory. John Ratey, MD, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, reports that regular cardiovascular exercise releases a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which makes connections in the brain work more effectively. The only way the brain can create this internal chemical is through regular exercise, Ratey notes, so daily cardio becomes necessary if you want the cognitive benefits.

While not getting any exercise does not appear to be a cause of memory loss, it does deprive you of the opportunity to keep your memory in top form by pumping up the oxygen, nutrients, and BDNF your brain needs to stay sharp.

Sleep Deprivation

Here’s a scenario you may have experienced: It’s nine a.m., and you’ve just pulled an all-nighter to study for an exam. You sit down with the test paper, but when you look at the first question, you can’t think of the answer. You know for certain that you crammed that topic the night before, but you can’t access the information you “memorized.”

What went wrong? Lack of sleep left you with a fuzzy head that could not retain the facts and figures you worked so hard to remember. You missed out on one of the most important factors in maintaining your memory: a good night’s sleep.

While you sleep, your brain works, assembling and codifying the information it accumulated during your waking hours. When you try to push through the night (or day, if you’re working the night shift) without an adequate amount of sleep, you risk losing the information altogether.

Sleep is a key element in the memory-making process, the glue between memory acquisition (learning a new thing or having an experience) and recall (accessing the memory when you need to use it.) The process in the middle is called consolidation, the period during sleep when your mind stabilizes the memory, placing its various parts in the areas of the brain that store that information. How this happens is still a mystery, but scientists have been able to observe images of the hippocampus and the neocortex—a part of the brain that stores long-term memories—and see their activity during sleep. They believe that neural connections become stronger when a person is sleeping, and that different kinds of memories are consolidated depending on the kind of sleep you get.

Early research into sleep and its connection to memory focused on factual information, or declarative memory. One study’s results suggested that people who engaged in intensive fact-based learning—in this case, a course in which they learned a foreign language—got more sleep involving rapid eye movements, or REM sleep. Scientists concluded that REM sleep plays a critical role in processing and retaining new information. In later studies, researchers refined this hypothesis, now believing that REM sleep takes care of complex declarative memories with semantic triggers but not the simpler information like facts and figures.

Over time and through many studies, researchers have reached new conclusions about sleep and memory. They now believe that the deep sleep that leaves you feeling refreshed in the morning—what they call slow-wave sleep—consolidates new declarative information as well as memories of things your brain encoded visually.

REM sleep also plays a role in this visual learning. In fact, scientists hypothesize that REM sleep takes the lead in consolidating procedural memories: remembering how something is done, such as using a computer or driving a car.

How does the hippocampus decide which memories to consolidate when you’re asleep? A recent study suggests that the brain reviews the information you value most during sleep, storing it so that you will remember it when you are awake. Participants in this study saw objects on a computer screen, each displayed with a different dollar amount, and each with a corresponding sound (like a car horn along with a photo of a car). The participants were told that if they could remember these objects after a short break, they would receive the dollar amount of each object they could recall. It probably won’t surprise you that the participants did not have clear recall of the objects with lower dollar amounts, but they remembered the objects with the highest dollar amounts, earning the largest rewards.

After the first memory test, the participants each took a ninety-minute nap, during which the researchers played the sounds associated with the objects. The result: The subjects remembered the objects with lower value as well as the high-value objects after the nap. The researchers concluded that this improved recall was the result of hearing the sound for each object in their sleep—even though none of them reported actually hearing the sounds while they slept.

So how much sleep is enough? Generally, sleep specialists recommend that adults get between seven and nine hours of sleep per night, though there is no perfect number for the amount of sleep you may need personally. Doctors and scientists agree on one thing overall, however: Getting too little sleep—five hours a night or less for most people—results in a wide range of cognitive and physical impairments. Neurons in the brain can’t consolidate the information you’ve taken in, so you don’t store memories and you lose the ability to use this information. Add to this the compromised motor control, lack of focus, and difficulty with decision making and problem solving that come with sleep deprivation, and you may think twice about catching The Tonight Show and choose to turn in earlier than usual.

Stress

When your brain is bombarded with stimuli that trigger anxiety, you experience stress—a series of biological and chemical processes throughout your body that initiates a fight-or-flight response.

In a nutshell, here’s what happens: Your sympathetic nervous system, commanded by the hypothalamus—a small area at your brain’s base—releases stress hormones that ready you to deal with whatever threat has emerged. First, your adrenal glands (on top of your kidneys) release adrenaline, which causes increases in breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure. These glands also release cortisol, which increases glucose (for energy) and aids in the metabolism of fatty acids; these are critical in repairing tissue should you become injured. Your blood, now enriched with all of these extra chemicals, races to your brain and muscles. In seconds, you are prepared to fight—for which you need the extra strength and energy—or flee, using the speed and endurance you get from the extra oxygen and glucose.

This miraculous system gives us the “rush” of heightened sensation that many people find addictive, but it also has some negative effects. During stress, your hormones also discontinue a number of your body’s normal functions that you don’t need when you expect to fight or flee. For the period of stress, your cells stop reproducing, and your body’s immune system stops working. Your skin receives less blood, causing rashes and even hives that are directly related to stress. You also may experience sexual dysfunction as the reproductive system goes on hold. If stress continues unabated for a long period of time, you become more susceptible to germs while your immune system stands dormant.

All that cortisol pumped out by your adrenal glands can have a negative effect as well, especially if you’re under stress for a prolonged period of time. Too much cortisol affects neurotransmitters and prevents messages from traveling across synapses, thereby inhibiting memory formation. If you’ve ever been in an accident and found that you cannot recall the exact details of what happened, you’ve experienced the effects of cortisol in preventing memory. Sometimes this effect only lasts for a little while, but if the stress continues, the amount of cortisol in your brain damages the hippocampus, keeping it from communicating with the hypothalamus to make it stop producing adrenaline and cortisol. The continued flood of cortisol can lead to permanent memory loss.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) poses a challenging conundrum for neurologists, as patients’ memories seem to be affected by the traumas of war, rape, violence, the Holocaust, and other events in a wide variety of ways. The effects of this level of trauma on memory have been documented by many studies, though the causes of memory loss appear to diverge from the basics of adrenaline and cortisol. In addition to loss of working memory, many PTSD patients experience the sudden intrusion of sharp, vivid images from memories—traumatic flashbacks—into their everyday lives, a phenomenon that has not yet been explained fully by neuroscience. There is no question that PTSD has a lasting effect on memory, but the exact causes of this are still under scrutiny by scientists and psychologists.

Before you conclude that stress completely kills memory, let’s look at the upside to this hormonal response to danger. Your body needs a measure of stress to release norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter than plays a critical role in forming new memories. Norepinephrine also improves mood, so in times when you must tolerate a long period of stress—planning for a major event, for example—you may find that you feel happy and excited through much of the process, and that your mind seems sharper. Your problem-solving abilities may be elevated to new heights, introducing a good deal of rapid, creative thinking, which causes new connections to form in your brain.

The bottom line about stress and memory: Some stress is good, but prolonged stress can have a major effect on memory storage and retrieval, an effect that becomes cumulative as you age.

Inadequate Social Activity

Maintaining an active social life through your later years can have a positive impact on your mind’s ability to retain memories, according to the Harvard School of Public Health’s famous Health and Retirement Study.

This monumental study followed a population of people age fifty and up from 1998 to 2004, using a nationally representative sample of participants. During the study period, the subjects took memory tests every two years and reported their social activity, including their relationships with friends, neighbors, and family members. They also reported any volunteer activity in which they were involved.

The commonsense results showed that people who engaged in social activity on a regular basis had less memory loss than those who were more isolated. What made this finding interesting, however, was the extent of memory retention in people with active social lives: They lost only a fraction of their memories in comparison with the people who spent a lot of time alone.

“The working hypothesis is that social engagement is what makes you mentally engaged,” the study’s lead investigator, Lisa F. Berkman, told the New York Times when the study’s findings were released. “You can’t sit and withdraw if you’re constantly talking and working on things and figuring out problems in your daily life.”

Caregivers who did things for the elderly person were not seen as sources of engagement for the study subjects, Berkman noted. “Having someone to count on is not what we’re measuring,” she said. “It’s not about support; it’s about being completely engaged and participating in our society.”

For those who lose that connection to other people as they age, memory loss can be an inevitable result. An analysis published in 2010 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives used data from the United States, England, and eleven other European countries to conclude that the earlier people retire, the more quickly their memories decline. People who don’t see and engage with others regularly have no reason to remember how to do so—and this loneliness creates dementia, which circles back to inhibit social interaction.

In 2012, the Amsterdam Study of the Elderly published the results of its three-year longitudinal study on loneliness and increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The study makes a clear distinction between loneliness—the mental state of isolation and unhappiness because of a lack of social contact—and being alone, the physical state of not being with other people.

The study followed 2,173 elderly people living in the community, controlling for extenuating factors, including existing cases of depression, medical conditions, cognitive functioning, and sociodemographic information like living conditions and social class. Many people enjoy being alone and living on their own, and these people did not show any marked decline in memory or cognitive ability. Those who feel lonely, however, showed an increased rate of dementia: a staggering 64 percent more dementia than those who simply enjoy being alone.

“A better understanding of the background of feeling lonely may help us to identify vulnerable persons and develop interventions to improve outcome on older persons at risk of dementia,” the study concludes.

What does this mean for you? If you’re not elderly and you would like to avoid the potential for decline in later life, make social activities that require your full engagement an important part of your life. Volunteer activities with nonprofit organizations like your church or a service agency, membership in clubs that reflect your areas of interest, and maintaining a strong circle of friendships can all help you maintain good memory and stave off the threat of encroaching dementia later in life.

Medications

Quite a number of prescribed medications have memory problems as a known side effect. While these drugs may not affect every patient’s memory, there have been documented cases of memory impairment in some people who take the medication, even when used as directed. If you have a sudden onset of memory issues and you’re taking a new medication, talk to your doctor about this side effect.

Antianxiety drugs in the benzodiazepine family (like Xanax and Valium) can slow the activity that transfers short-term memories to long-term, making people feel forgetful. Statins, the drugs that lower cholesterol, can affect the brain because cholesterol is part of the brain’s communication system, forming the connections among nerve cells.

Anti-seizure drugs dampen the flow of signals throughout the central nervous system, causing memory loss in many patients. Tricyclic antidepressants like doxepin, amitriptyline, and others block the transmission of serotonin in the brain, one of the brain’s most important chemicals for carrying messages across synapses.

Narcotic painkillers like fentanyl, hydrocodone, and morphine stop the flow of pain signals, using the same neural pathways used by the brain’s communication system. Drugs for Parkinson’s disease interfere with memory transmission, as do the beta blockers used for hypertension control. Sleeping aids, incontinence drugs, and antihistamines all can have a negative effect on memory.

Depression

If you’ve ever experienced clinical depression, you know how debilitating a condition it can be—robbing you of the ability to enjoy any kind of activity, isolating you from friends and relatives, and stealing your energy and vitality while filling in the gaps with despair. Recent studies show that depression may also play a role in shrinking the hippocampus, diminishing its capacity for the formation of new memories.

Research completed at the Brain and Mind Research Institute in New South Wales, Australia in 2005 discovered that older people with depression have a measurable decrease in the volume of the hippocampus, whether their depression came on early or later in life. These people also exhibited deficits in visual and verbal memory when tested using the mini–mental state examination (MMSE), one of the most popular and widely accepted verbal tests for the onset of dementia. The people with depression had lower MMSE scores, poorer memory performance, and smaller hippocampus volumes in comparison to the control group of people without depression.

What does this mean for you? There are so many reasons to try to avoid depression that you hardly need another one, but if you have ever been a victim of this illness, do your best to keep from falling off that dark cliff again. Modern medications can help you turn back the first signs of depression, so if you feel as though you may be approaching a tipping point, talk with your doctor about your options. There is no need to grit your teeth and bear the discomfort—there are plenty of ways in this day and age to recover from depression and to keep this illness from taking over your life and shrinking vital parts of your brain.

Memory problems can be a rare side effect of some medications for depression. If your memory issues worsen while you are taking a depression medication, notify your doctor immediately.

Age

Many of the studies about memory loss use older people as participants, because age-related memory loss has become such a prevalent part of human life. In nearly all cases, older people experience some unavoidable memory loss that begins in their fifties or even late forties. The first time you lose your keys, misplace your glasses by putting them on top of your head, or leave a cup of coffee on your car’s roof as you drive off, you may believe that age-related memory loss has begun.

You may be right, but there’s no need to panic. Memory loss does not necessarily signal the onset of Alzheimer’s disease or a related dementia. Age-related memory loss happens to just about everyone, and recent evidence suggests that it’s a condition in its own right, entirely separate from Alzheimer’s—one that affects a different part of the brain.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center have isolated a protein called RbAp48 that appears to inhibit age-related memory loss. Autopsies on older people who had memory loss in life showed that their brains lacked this protein in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, which is important in the formation of episodic memories. To test whether RbAp48 played a role in memory loss, the researchers used healthy mice, testing their memories through object-recognition exercises and their ability to navigate a water maze. The researchers then inhibited the RbAp48 gene in the brains of these mice, and found that they showed memory loss when the gene was not working.

Here’s the really exciting finding: When the researchers turned the RbAp48 gene back on, the mice’s memories went back to normal, and they performed better on the object recognition and water maze tests. This tells us two things:

1. If age-related memory loss is caused by the inhibition of this gene, it proves that this kind of memory loss is not related to Alzheimer’s, which has an entirely different root cause in a separate part of the brain. Alzheimer’s disease causes a loss of neurons in the brain, while age-related memory loss does not.

2. Age-related memory loss may be reversible.

It may be a decade or more before researchers in translational science—the process of taking scientific discoveries and turning them into drug therapies to bring to market—can complete the task of developing a pharmaceutical, testing it in clinical trials, and bringing it to people who need it. In the interim, you can slow down some of the effects of age-related memory loss by maintaining a healthy lifestyle with diet, exercise, and adequate sleep, keeping your alcohol intake at a moderate level, managing your stress levels, and engaging in social activities that stimulate your mind and keep you engaged with others.

If, on the other hand, your memory loss includes a number of the following symptoms, you may be experiencing a more serious form of dementia:

- Sudden difficulty with simple tasks you’ve performed easily for years

- An inability to find your way home or through a neighborhood you’ve lived in for a long time

- An inability to follow directions (for example, a recipe or a log-in process)

- A pattern of forgetting words, misusing words, or speaking in a way that doesn’t make sense

- Repetition of the same stories or questions

- An inability to describe situations in which your memory loss caused a problem

- Difficulty with making choices

- Socially inappropriate behavior, like talking to people in signs or photos, or removing clothing at inappropriate times

- Changes in behavior in the late afternoon or evening, when the sun goes down

- Seeing people who are not there

- Talking to people on the television as if they are in the room with you

Any of these symptoms can signal Alzheimer’s disease or one of a number of other dementias.

Technology

Our world includes 140-character tweets, snippets of information on Facebook, videos that are twelve seconds long, and a constant bombardment of hyperlinks and pop-up windows. Is your Web surfing affecting the length of your attention span and your ability to remember information? Today there has been a great deal of opinion and conjecture on the subject, but little research.

It’s interesting to note that while commentators from all forms of news media have expressed their views about the Internet’s role in shortening the next generation’s attention spans, no published clinical studies have substantiated this. A much-quoted statistic, attributed to the Associated Press, suggests that the average attention span of a person is shorter than the nine-second attention span of a goldfish. This citing turned out to be an offhand comment by writer Paul Haven in an August 5, 2012, story about what it might take to attract viewers to the 2012 Summer Olympics, however, and has nothing to do with science.

A series of studies completed by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow showed that people are more likely to remember things when they believe they won’t be able to find them using a computer. When given a difficult question to answer, they started thinking about using the Web to find the answer online, distracting them from completing other simple tasks they were given, like identifying the colors of words. When the participants were given simple questions they could answer without a computer—for example, “How much is two plus three?”—they were not so distracted, and later they more quickly identified the colors in which words were printed. Sparrow and her team concluded that technology becomes our external memory. “We’ve come to use our laptops, tablets, and smartphones as a ‘form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside of ourselves,’” the researchers told the Los Angeles Times. “‘We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where information can be found.’”

Research at the Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of California, San Francisco has shown that “a simple task that intervenes while you are holding a piece of information will degrade your ability to remember it,” according to Adam Gazzaley, professor of neurology and the principal investigator for the study, who wrote about it for CNN. “Although data are still lacking on the direct impact of mobile technology on cognition, there is extensive evidence showing that our brains are exquisitely sensitive to external interference by both irrelevant distractions and multitasking. This ‘noise in the system’ erodes our performance on a wide spectrum of cognitive activities, including the ability to recall details in our lives.”

So the jury is still out, so to speak, about the effects of Internet surfing and mobile technology on your ability to pay attention, and on its strengthening or interference with your memory.

Multitasking

If you’ve been suspicious of devices that allow you to perform many tasks at the same time, or if you wonder if people who text, email, and reference Google during classes and meetings are actually retaining anything, you are on to a fact that’s been borne out by research. Multitasking, especially with our ever-fascinating electronic devices, is interfering with our long-term memory storage and retrieval.

A study completed at UCLA in 2006 concludes that multitasking adversely affects how people learn, according to Russell Poldrack, the coauthor of the study and an associate professor of psychology at the university. “Even if you learn while multitasking, that learning is less flexible and more specialized, so you cannot retrieve the information as easily,” Poldrack said in a news release from the UCLA Department of Psychology.

The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe brain activity in people in their twenties as they divided a set of cards into two categories, and then did the same exercise again while they listened to a series of beeps through headphones and kept track mentally of the number of beeps. In the first exercise—just sorting the cards—the participants learned the task and remembered what they had learned, dividing the cards into two categories. In the second exercise, while they had multitasked by listening to the beeps, they could not describe what they had done with the cards. In scientific terms, their knowledge was less flexible; they could not apply it the way they could when they focused on one task. Since this study, additional research by teams around the world continues to prove the same hypothesis: Multitasking causes less memory retention.

It may come as no surprise that people can be kept from remembering information by visual or auditory distractions in the environment surrounding them. The effects of distractions can be more pronounced in older adults than in young adults, according to a study by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Before this study was conducted, psychologists tended to believe that older people had difficulty remembering new information in short-term memory because they struggled to focus on what they were hearing or seeing. This study, however, used fMRI technology to observe the brain as the participant received information. Participants looked at pictures and were told to focus either only on the faces in the photos or only on the landscapes, and that the rest of what was in the photos was irrelevant. Young subjects who were told to focus only on faces had no trouble ignoring the landscapes, for example. Older adults with some memory loss, however, could not filter that information so skillfully. Instead, for participants who were told to focus only on faces, the part of the brain that takes in scenes lit up on the MRI, storing information about the scene even when the participant didn’t want to do that. The distracting information became as dominant as the relevant information.

This tells us that people need more than an ability to concentrate on new information in order to retain it and move it into long-term memory. People—especially those who have some memory loss already—also need to be able to filter out distracting information. This can be particularly difficult for those with age-related or trauma-related memory loss.

That being said, a new study tells us that distractions can actually increase some people’s ability to remember information.

A study conducted at University College London stumbled on an unexpected finding. Researchers examined the effect of off-topic distractions from a specific task, and how memory performed when presented with such a diversion. Their work focused on people who had epilepsy with lesions in the hippocampus, but they used young and old people who did not have such lesions as a control group to see the differences in the way distractions affected memory.

The study used a memory tool called delayed match-to-sample task. Each participant received a set of pictures of nature scenes. After he or she had viewed them, the pictures were set aside and the examiner showed the participant one picture after a short delay—one second at the beginning of the test, and as long as a minute at the other end. The participant was asked if he had seen the picture before. The process got harder as the delay got longer and there were more pictures to match.

As you might expect, people with memory impairment struggled to remember the pictures, and some of them had a cascade failure of memory as the task got more complex. After a number of tries, the examiner showed the participant a picture of something else entirely, something he definitely had not seen before. This was the distraction, a photo of a face or an object that had nothing to do with the original nature scenes.

The control group—the young adults with no memory impairment—showed no improvement in their ability to remember the other nature scenes after they had seen the distracting image. The people with memory impairment, however, suddenly could recall many more of the photos they had seen originally.

What caused the improvement? Brain waves, the scientists determined. You may have thought that brain waves were an outdated science fiction concept, but it turns out they do exist, and there are a number of different kinds. In this case, theta rhythms act as a brain wave, coming into play when someone is trying to remember something for later (a process called rehearsing a memory). In the people with memory impairments, theta rhythms increased during the delay between seeing the original set of pictures and the one they would need to match. The introduction of a distracting photo interrupted the brain waves, keeping them from rehearsing the memory any further. This led to better memory performance.

This tells us something very important about distractions: They can help us improve our memory’s performance. There may be something to be said for interruptions during the day, or breaks in concentration during testing or studying. The distraction may actually help you retain more memories than you could without the momentary diversion.

CHAPTER THREE

Test Your Memory

How good is your memory, and how long can you remember information? Before you begin the process of strengthening your memory, it’s a good idea to understand the point at which you’re starting.

In this chapter, you’ll find a short test to determine your memory span—the amount of time you can keep in your short-term memory lists of words, numbers, or letters. This is a good starting place for determining the kinds of memory tools you will want to use to strengthen your memory, increasing its capacity to hold information for both the short and long term.

If you want to delve more deeply into other kinds of memory testing, a number of comprehensive tests are available to determine your memory’s capacity for storing information, the length of time information remains in your working memory, and your ability to recall new information quickly—or at all. Here are some of the most recognized and trusted tests used by psychologists and neurologists.

- Wechsler Memory Scale (WMS): Probably the most widely used scale of adult memory, this package of exams includes seven subtests that score your auditory memory, visual memory, visual working memory, immediate memory, and delayed memory. One of the functions of this test is to help neuropsychologists differentiate between people with dementia or brain disorders and those with normal memory functioning.

- Memory Assessment Scales (MAS): This test assesses short-term, verbal, and visual memory functions, and is one of the most widely used instruments by professionals. It contains twelve subtests for verbal span, list learning, prose memory, visual span, visual recognition, visual reproduction, and recalling names and faces. If you have serious concerns about your memory, or if you are certain that you or a loved one are experiencing memory loss, it could be worth your time to consult a psychologist who can administer this test.

- Self-Administered Geocognitive Examination (SAGE): Specifically used to test for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, this test can help you determine if you have mild cognitive impairment, a precursor to early dementia.

- Saint Louis University Mental Status (SLUMS) exam: Developed in conjunction with the Department of Veterans Affairs, this test looks at cognitive function and memory, using words, numbers, and clock faces to determine your current state.

A Memory Span Test

The following test will give you an idea of the number of words you can remember from a list. The entire test will take no more than ten minutes to complete.

This test should be used for your own information and entertainment, not as a clinical assessment of your cognitive abilities. Everyone has good days and bad days, or days with extra doses of distractions and worries. A low score does not necessarily mean that you have developed a neurological disease or that you are not as intelligent as other people. In fact, this test does not measure intelligence—it is meant to help you understand the workings of your own short-term memory, so that you can take steps to improve it if you choose to do so.

If you believe that you are experiencing real memory impairment, seek a neuropsychological assessment from a qualified specialist.

What to expect: The following is a list of words. You will be asked to look at the words for a set period of time, and then write down the words as well as you can remember them. These words are still on the page, of course, so you’re working on the honor system. Once you’ve closed the book, there’s no peeking! This is not a test to determine how smart you are, so it doesn’t matter how many you get “right.” This is a test to see how well you can remember what you’ve read—the capacity and duration of your short-term memory. It’s important that you take the test correctly to give yourself a useful assessment of your memory’s abilities.

Here’s what you will need to take the test:

- A sheet of paper

- A pen or pencil

- A timer or stopwatch that can go as long as two minutes

A Short-Term Memory Test

In the following table, you will see a list of words. Look at these words for two minutes, and memorize as many as you can. Do not write down anything until the two minutes are up. When your timer rings at the end of two minutes, close this book and reset your timer for two more minutes. Write down as many words as you can remember in those two minutes.

When the timer goes off again, open the book and count how many of the words you remembered. Also note if you wrote down any words that were not on the list.

Ready? Go.

When two minutes are up, set aside the book and write down all the words you remember.

Now you’ve opened the book again and you’re looking at the preceding list of words. How many did you remember? Write down the number of words, and prepare for the second exercise.

Here is another list of words. The process is the same: Give yourself two minutes to memorize this list. When the two minutes are up, close the book and write down as many of the words as you can remember. At the end of two minutes, put down your pen and refer to the book to see how many words you got right.

Is your timer set? Go.

When the timer goes off, set aside the book and write down all the words you remember.

If you’re reading this, you have spent two minutes trying to remember the words on the previous page. How did you do? Did you remember more of the words in this list than in the first list?

Now let’s switch things up and try a test using numbers. This test will help you gauge your short-term memory’s limit for a certain quantity of items.

Again, you will need to look at a number, set aside the book, and write down the number as best as you can remember it. It’s a good idea to cover up all the other numbers on the page following the one you’re looking at to be sure you don’t see them and start to remember them before you’re ready. Use an opaque piece of paper to do this.

Look at each number series for ten seconds, then turn over the book to hide that number, and write it down. When you are ready, go on to the next number. Look at it for ten seconds, and then write down the new number. Keep going until you can’t remember every digit in the new number series.

Is your timer set for ten seconds? Go.

492

3543

84302

557691

6345703

45930275

230735829

1928750238

43960472084

697835021952

2039482309482

23094823948230

How many digits were in the largest number you could remember? If you’re like most people, your recall topped out at seven or eight digits, nine at the most.

Let’s look at your results. Add up the number of words you remembered on the first test, the number of words you remembered on the second test, and the number of digits in the longest number you remembered on the third test.

How did you do?

- 28 or higher: You have a strong short-term memory. The tools in this book will be easy for you to master.

- 18 to 27: You are in the normal range for short-term memory. The techniques in this book may help you increase your memory’s capacity and power.

- 17 or below: What’s going on? You may be distracted today by issues other than your memory, or maybe you’re not feeling as well as you’d like. Take these tests again on another day, and try out some of the techniques in the upcoming chapters. If you have seen a pattern of memory issues, however, talk with your doctor to see if you need a professional assessment.

Chances are you found the first list of words and the numbers harder to remember than you expected. Short-term memory is more limited than you may realize, as researchers have repeatedly discovered for more than fifty years.

You met George Miller in Chapter One, but let’s take a closer look at his research. Miller was the first psychologist to measure the limitations of short-term memory, pegging this limit at what he called “the magical number seven, plus or minus two.”

Miller reviewed the work of many other experimental psychologists in a 1956 issue of the Psychological Review, and his conclusions have become the standard by which short-term memory has been measured. He determined that when people are presented with one-dimensional information—that is, with a series of random words, objects, or numbers that have no particular relationship with one another—the human short-term memory can hold no more than seven of these, plus or minus two.

When even one additional dimension is added to the words or objects, for example, the object takes on new meaning. That’s why you probably did not remember more than seven of the words in the first list, but you remembered many more of the words in the second list. The first list showed you a bunch of randomized words with no interrelationship. The second list gave you five groups of related words: pets, flowers, colors, weather, and woodland creatures.

The numbers start out being fairly easy to remember, but the addition of even one digit can suddenly make a number too unwieldy to retain in short-term memory. Perhaps you found yourself reciting the numbers aloud to remember them, or breaking them up into chunks, the way we break up telephone numbers. This creates associations between digits that did not exist when you were first presented with the long string of numerals. You may now have a better understanding of the patterns of phone numbers, and the ingenious way that they were designed from the outset to be easy to remember.

Now, here’s a final question: Do you remember any of the words and numbers you were tested on a few minutes ago?

If your answer is no, or if you can only remember one or two words, you are entirely in the normal zone. Your brain had no reason to retain any of the information you just memorized, so your short-term memory quickly discarded it. The random numbers and words you processed have no special meaning to you. If you decided you wanted to remember them, you would need to move them from your short-term memory into your long-term memory, and store them until you needed to access and retrieve this information.

In Part Two of this book, you will learn about a number of techniques used by leading memory experts to increase the capacity of short-term memory, move new information into long-term memory, and improve your ability to access stored memories at random and retrieve them throughout life.

PART TWO

Methods for Improving Memory

Chapter Four Overview of General Methods

Chapter Five Association

Chapter Six Visualization

Chapter Seven Chunking

Chapter Eight Method of Loci

Chapter Nine Rhyming

Chapter Ten Acronyms and Acrostics

CHAPTER FOUR

Overview of General Methods

In 1975, researchers Fergus I. M. Craik and Endel Tulving at the University of Toronto in Ontario, Canada, designed a series of ten experiments to explore the levels of processing within the human memory. They presented their participants with a series of sixty words, and asked them one of three questions about each word.

One of the questions asked strictly for visual processing of the word: “Is the word in capital letters or small letters?” Another asked them to consider the sound of the word: “Does the word rhyme with?” The third question required the participant to think a little more deeply about the word: “Does the word fit into this sentence?”

After they were quizzed in this manner about the original sixty words, the researchers handed each participant a list of 180 words to consider. The first sixty words were mixed into this much longer list. Their task: Pick out the words that had been in the original list of sixty.

What do you think happened? If you guessed that the participants remembered many more of the words about which they’d been asked the more meaningful question—if the word fit into a specific sentence—then you are correct. The deeper question, involving the meaning of the word, required a process that scientists call elaboration rehearsal, making the participant think about what the word meant and how it would be used, rather than simply about what it looked like or how it sounded.

This breakthrough research was the first to explain the workings of memory in a less structural, more process-oriented fashion. Where prevailing theories about memory at the time focused on the separation of short-term and long-term memory and the requirements for a memory to move from one to the other, this new study showed that the way the mind actually processes the memory has a great deal to do with its retention.

Craik and Tulving saw the memory’s ability to process information in three ways: structurally, phonemically, and semantically.

1. Structural processing encodes an item’s physical properties without examining its meaning or context. In this case, participants were asked to respond to questions only about the word’s typeface or the size of its letters.

2. Phonemic processing involves the encoding of the item’s sound. Participants had the opportunity to respond to a question about whether the word rhymed with another one, a reference to the way the word sounds. They also observed that people said the word aloud, a short-term technique to help them hold the word in short-term memory long enough to respond to a question. (Both structural processing and phonemic processing involve what the researchers called shallow processing—a surface exploration of a word or object that does not give the word meaning or context.)

3. Semantic processing encodes the meaning of a word, connecting it with other words or images that have a similar meaning to the participant. This is a form of deep processing, making a more meaningful analysis of the information and linking the word or object with another memory, concept, or word of which the participant has previous knowledge.

This study opened up new avenues for scientific exploration of the formation of memories. At the same time, it pointed the way to new methods for improving the brain’s ability to retain information. No longer a mechanical concept, memory retention moved into the world of context and semantics, creating mental hooks that linked one kind of information to another for stronger memories and longer retention.

Engaging the Whole Mind

Students and adults are expected to learn a great deal of information over the course of a lifetime. A new job can require long hours of training or retraining, a quest for a law degree can mean intensive memorization, and the process of earning a medical degree means acquiring copious amounts of facts about the human body and its detailed systems.

If you’ve ever sat through a dull meeting and realized you retained none of the information once it was over, you know that it’s important to engage your mind—not just a little bit, but in total—to take in information and keep hold of it after the event has passed.

As you begin your exploration of ways to improve memory, here are some of the ground rules that will be useful no matter which method you embrace.

1. Pay attention: Concentrating only on the task at hand will improve memory, whether you are memorizing state capitals or trying to recall where you parked your car. Something as potentially dull as memorization virtually begs the mind to go elsewhere during the process. Sticking with the task and staying in the moment definitely helps memory—after all, you can’t remember what you never saw, heard, or experienced. If you’ve ever sat through a meeting at work and suddenly realized that the meeting is ending and you can’t remember what tasks you were assigned to do, you know what happens when you stop paying attention.

2. Practice active learning: If a student reads all the material assigned, he or she might absorb some of it and retain it. If the student takes part in discussions about the material, takes notes, and engages with other students in the process of learning, the student will be much more likely to retain the bulk of the information. Active learning gives you the opportunity to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate the information you’ve been given, creating a stronger relationship with the material that leaves a memorable impression.
If you’re taking a lecture course or sitting through a meeting that does not offer much opportunity to ramp up your participation or interaction with the subject matter, you can create opportunities for active learning on your own.

- Be sure that you are prepared for the class (or meeting) by completing any assigned reading beforehand. This allows you to spend the class learning about the concepts you’ve read, instead of feeling frustrated that you don’t understand any of the references the professor has mentioned—leaving you unable to ask questions without feeling embarrassed.

- Make a sound recording of the class and transcribe the recording later. This forces you to pay attention to the words, giving you the opportunity to think about what has been said.

- After the class, make a note of the concept that seemed the clearest to you, and one that seemed the least clear. Spend some time looking up information about the least clear point to deepen your understanding of the topic.

3. Rehearse: You may never be called upon to actually stand and recite the information you learn in class, but that doesn’t mean you should not say it aloud anyway in the privacy of your own home or office. Using all of the appropriate senses to learn the information can make a significant difference in retaining that information in memory.
When you took the memory test in Chapter Three, did you say the words or the numbers aloud as you worked to commit them to memory? This kind of repetition, including the use of another sense besides sight, makes a stronger impression on your memory and helps you keep the information at the top of your mind. Further rehearsal—more repetition over a longer time period—helps you retain it beyond the few minutes in which you needed it.

Think, for example, about all of the song lyrics you may know, even if you have never memorized a poem without music in your life. The process of singing along with the recording, hearing the song over and over, and connecting the music and lyrics together turns that lyric into a long-term memory. Some people remember song lyrics they learned in nursery school well into old age, even if they do not hear that song again in adulthood. (You’ll find more on songs and rhyming as a memory technique in Chapter Nine.)

4. Rework what you learn: Rehearsal of information can also involve a sort of translation, taking a concept and rephrasing it aloud in your own words. This can be particularly effective in a study of a complex topic, or in learning a new skill or a technology on the job. The jargon used in textbooks and instruction manuals can be virtually meaningless to you on its own, but once you’ve given it meaning by rephrasing it in your own words, it becomes understandable and memorable. You have used a deeper processing method called reworking, turning the information into something your mind can embrace.

5. Use visualization: Using a vivid mental image to link with a fact or a piece of information can help you remember it. Vivid images are easy to recall when you need to bring back a specific memory, so they are particularly important tools in turning a short-term memory into a long-term one. You will find much more on the visualization technique in Chapter Six.

Scaffolding

The memory improvement techniques discussed in the chapters that follow all hinge on a basic premise: linking new memories with things you already know. Experts call this scaffolding, a process of building on prior knowledge to form bonds between old memories and new ones.

Have you ever wondered when babies begin to remember? Scientists have determined that children do not form explicit memories—a full account of a specific event, for example—until they reach about three years old. There’s no question that babies begin to remember things much earlier, however. In fact, researchers have found that newborn infants react to their mother’s voice within minutes of birth, because the infant heard that voice continually while in the womb.

The ability to remember is established even before birth, though the meaning and context of such memories takes years to develop. Babies’ minds learn to create patterns of sensory impressions that become specific people, items, or experiences, based on repeated attempts that teach them basic principles. If you’ve ever watched a baby drop a toy from the high chair’s tray to the floor over and over again, you are seeing a memory being constructed at that very moment. The baby lets go, the toy falls . . . and Mommy picks it up and gives it back. These events become linked in the baby’s brain, and learning takes place. The baby will not remember the specifics of the day, time, location, or even the toy itself—what researchers call the long-term explicit memory—but he will remember that Mommy picks up toys that drop.

Once babies and young children build a foundation of these basic memories from a very early point in their lives, they pile on new memories at a rapid pace. Knowing one thing—that Mommy will pick up the fallen toy—leads to learning about a related thing: Mommy also will pick up food that falls. Using this information as if it were scaffolding, the baby soon learns that Mommy will lift him out of the high chair when he wants to get down. All of these bits of knowledge center on activity in the high chair, the familiar point of reference that forms the basis for learning.

Building the scaffolding from an established memory to a new one can take conscious effort, especially when you are working to take in a lot of new information at once. Techniques like association (Chapter Five), visualization (Chapter Six), and the method of loci (Chapter Eight) are based on creating linkages between what you already know and what you want to learn.

Organize to Remember

Your desk may be cluttered, your garage may need a cleaning, and your attic or basement may cry out for a good purge, but your mind requires a certain amount of order to be able to form lasting memories. Your ability to organize information in meaningful ways can go a long way in helping you retain and recall memories when you need them.

What if you had to memorize a string of forty-five letters, all strung together at random? Such a list might look like this:

alskfupcwelkjowirutjnclcjdowhvbgkdnwkdycogneo

How hard would this be to memorize? For most people, it would be virtually impossible to accomplish.

But what about if you had to memorize this forty-five-letter sentence:

Marley and Josiah could not wait to play in the new snow.

Suddenly it’s not hard at all to memorize forty-five letters. A collection of letters makes sense when it’s broken up into words, each of which has a meaning you can recall instantly.

A number of memory improvement techniques use the basic concept of order to help you remember information.

- Chunking (Chapter Seven) links bits of information to one another to form associations that help you to remember the contents of each group.

- Rhyming (Chapter Nine) uses sound to match new ideas with existing memories, creating an immediate auditory link between words.

- Acronyms (Chapter Ten) take the first letter of each word and bring them together to create another familiar word, which triggers recall when you see or hear it.

All of these methods employ mnemonics, devices that are used to improve memory. A mnemonic is a way of reconstructing the content of the new information, with the intention of tying it to knowledge you already have.

The human mind remembers some kinds of information more easily than others:

- Spatial information: It’s easier to develop a mental picture of an item in a specific space than to retain an image of it in isolation. For example, you can remember landmarks around your car in a parking lot more easily than the license plate numbers of the cars nearby.

- Personal information: Facts that relate to you personally are far more fascinating and memorable than those about another person. This is not because human beings are self-centered and conceited; it relates to one’s sense of identity—and the fact that most people rehearse information (see more on this earlier in this chapter) about themselves repeatedly as part of their natural process of thought.

- Surprising information: An unexpected twist will stick with you long after the plot of the rest of the movie has passed. Think, for example, about the famous twists in films like Citizen Kane, The Sixth Sense, and The Crying Game (no spoilers here!). Likewise, surprises in life remain fresh in your mind for decades after they take place.

- Physical information: Why do you recognize faces, but you can’t always remember names? Physical characteristics come more easily to mind than words—a fact that helps you recognize friends and acquaintances as they approach, while also allowing you to react quickly when you see danger in your path. If you can spot poison ivy along a trail, an icy patch on a road, or a dog approaching you with bared teeth, you can thank the quick recall that comes with memory of physical characteristics.

- Sexual information: This probably requires no explanation, but if you can attach a sexual innuendo to a concept or list of things to remember, you may never forget it.

- Humorous information: Happily, human beings love to laugh, and you can remember a funny story, a pun, or a witty remark and repeat it to friends over and over. When you connect a funny rhyme or a silly acronym to something you need to remember, your chances of recalling it later will increase dramatically.

Mnemonics can take many different forms, but if the one you use links to any of these specific kinds of information, you will create an association that may still be with you in the last days of your life.

CHAPTER FIVE

Association

When Rhonda’s parents moved to a new condo in an over-fifty-five community, Rhonda could not seem to remember the number of their new home. Try as she might, she just couldn’t recall if the number was 7646 or 7468—and from the outside the condos were identical, so she kept ringing the wrong doorbells.

One day, Rhonda’s mother said to her, “For heaven’s sake, it’s 7466. Just think the year you were born and ‘Route 66.’”

It was the simplest thing in the world to associate her mother’s address with her birth date and one of her favorite songs. From that day on, Rhonda never forgot her parents’ house number.

Can improving memory really be this easy? All kinds of memory experts say it can. One of the most effective techniques they use is called association, a process of linking a thing you need to remember to a way of remembering it.

You remember that your favorite Starbucks drink is available during the December holidays, or that your green purse with the orange stitching looks great with your orange blazer. You’ve associated the taste of a drink, the season of the year, and the place where you can buy that drink—in part because the peppermint mocha is a high-priority item, but also because it’s one of the things you enjoy about the Christmas season. You didn’t have to think hard to link these things together. Likewise with your bag with the orange stitching and your wardrobe item of a similar color—you like the way these things look together or have received compliments on them, so they are linked in your mind. The color gives you a quick, easy, immediate association.

Not only do you make these associations already without much effort, but some of them also happen without conscious thought. For example, you glance at a digital clock and see the time is 2:11. Suddenly you realize that your cousin’s birthday is on February 13 (2/13), and it’s just two days away. The numbers on the clock automatically trigger the association with the date.

The Origins of Association

The discovery of association as a memory tool actually happened by mistake in the field of psychological research known as classical conditioning.

A physiologist named Ivan Pavlov, working with dogs in his laboratory, knew that his dogs salivated when they saw their food being presented to them. Pavlov noticed that the dogs actually began to salivate long before the food was offered—when they saw a person in a lab coat enter the room. Pavlov deduced that the dogs had associated food with lab coats, since everyone feeding them wore one. The dogs had developed a conditioned response, expecting food when they saw a lab coat and reacting with anticipation.

Pavlov was a man of science, so he understood that this was an important discovery and that it deserved a study of its own. He designed an experiment in which he rang a bell right before feeding time. The bell was a completely unrelated stimulus, so he knew that if the dogs eventually began to salivate when he rang the bell, they had learned to expect food when they heard the sound.

At first, they did not salivate when the bell rang, but they did when food was placed in front of them. Finally, Pavlov rang the bell but did not provide food, and the dogs salivated anyway. Their association between the ringing bell and food had become conditioned, and they responded automatically.

Over time, the dogs began to salivate when the bell rang, even if Pavlov did not feed them. So strong was their conditioning that they reacted to the stimulus whether or not food came after.

Just as Pavlov’s dogs learned to associate the bell with food, you learn to associate a familiar word or phrase with a name, fact, or statement. Soon the item you want to memorize will come to mind involuntarily when you think of the familiar thing—one will become a mental hook for the other.

Your Handy Study Aid

Creating linkages can be easy even when the items carry less personal meaning. While you make immediate associations with things that are important to you, you can make intentional associations with a little bit of conscious effort, linking an item and a thing that will remind you of that item instantly.

Let’s say you’re studying for an exam, and you need to remember which amendment to the Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. That’s the Eighth Amendment—which, for a history major, might bring English king Henry the Eighth (VIII) to mind. Henry had his wife beheaded on a trumped-up charge. That’s cruel and unusual punishment, right? So when you think of overthe-top punishment, you think of Henry VIII, which reminds you that it’s the Eighth Amendment. You made a quick association that will remind you of the fact you need on exam day.

Deep Processing for Associations

To make an association stick, it’s important to choose something that has some familiarity for you, so that you can attach that meaning to the fact or item that you need to remember.

Think, for example, about how the information you need to remember may be personally meaningful. Does it trigger a connection to something that has happened in your own life, or something that you would like to have happen? This association method is called deep processing, borrowing an episode or event already stored in your long-term memory and attaching its meaning to the new memory.

Let’s take the Eighth Amendment example again. You made a quick connection to Henry VIII to remember that the Eighth Amendment outlaws cruel and unusual punishment. If you want to remember this information after the exam, you may connect it to a memory of a legal case in the news that you found disturbing, involving solitary confinement or prison overcrowding. Or perhaps you make a connection with your memory device—Henry VIII—by recalling the last episode of the second season of The Tudors, in which Anne Boleyn is beheaded. A new memory will have a higher recall value for you immediately when you make this mental attachment to something else that’s meaningful. The reason for this is biological as well as psychological: Your existing memory already has many connections to other memories, making the new memory stronger on contact. The more your brain engages with this new information (remember the concept of scaffolding in Chapter Four), the more it performs a cognitive analysis of the new thought. This makes it a more valuable piece of information, increasing its “recall value,” in the words of neuropsychologists.

Names and Faces

Nothing is more uncomfortable and distracting than that chance meeting on the street, when a person you recognize comes up to you and you can’t remember his name, or worse, where you met him.

There he is, chatting away and using your name repeatedly, but try as you might, you just can’t dredge up his name so that you can introduce him to your spouse, who is giving you the raised eyebrow and waiting to be included in the conversation.

What can you do to avoid this kind of embarrassment? You could never leave your house again, but the more practical solution is to find a way to link the name and the face. Here’s a fairly simple way to create an association that will remind you of the name as soon as you see the face.

When you meet someone new and hear his name for the first time, convert the name to a word or phrase that sounds like it. It doesn’t need to be a rhyme—just a word that will be easy to recall the next time you see this person. For example, if the person’s name is Doug, think of a hole in the ground (which has been “dug”). If the name is Terry, a terrier might pop into your head. It’s good to choose the first thing you think of, because that association is a natural one and will come easily to mind the next time you meet this person.

Perhaps the association will come from a favorite movie, book, or television show, or from the name of a famous person. The source is not as important as is making a quick decision to pair the person’s name with a word that means something to you.

Once you have a word association established, look at the person’s face (for simplicity’s sake, let’s use Doug as the name). Does Doug have a characteristic that you can add to the association? Maybe he has a big smile, one that you can picture as part of the hole in the ground. If he has a large nose, you can imagine the nose coming out of that hole you “dug” in your mind.

Does this all sound a little silly? That’s good! As you may remember from Chapter Four, humor is a key element in forming a strong memory. It’s easier to remember things that are funny, so if the association makes you smile, you have a good mental hook for remembering Doug. (And keep in mind that no one ever has to know what your association with Doug’s name and face may be. Silly or serious, it’s your memory device and it works for you.) Don’t be surprised if the next time you meet a guy named Doug, you think of this book, and even this very paragraph. Now, that’s association!

Remembering Numbers Through Association

Names and faces can be challenging to remember, but few things are tougher than numbers. A number is an abstract concept; something the brain does not grasp and hold as quickly as it does stories or events. It’s tough to make a number funny, taboo, sexy, or new and unusual—the things the mind holds best in long-term memory. To make a number memorable, therefore, you need to associate it with things that are funny, taboo, or sexy.

Start with a list of digits, from 0 to 9. Does each digit remind you of something? Think in terms of the shape of the numeral—perhaps the 0 looks like a globe to you, or an egg, or a window, or your mother-in-law’s body type. The 1 may look like a pole, or a lighthouse, or a penis. Continue down the list all the way to 9. The brain has far less difficulty remembering words than it does numbers, so the number association technique turns the number into something nonnumeric and simpler for you to remember.

If the numeral doesn’t have a natural shape or object association, reach beyond appearance to find your emotional connection to each digit. Perhaps your young son is five years old, or your daughter started ballet lessons at six. That might make 5 “Jimmy,” or whatever your son’s name may be, and 6 might be “ballet.”

Whatever word you choose for each numeral, it should be simple, clear, and something that will come immediately to mind. It needs to serve as a trigger, an instant reference that always links your memory to the number. Triggers must be simple, clear, and concrete—not abstract concepts. If zero reminds you of nihilism, for example, and the number one makes you think of loneliness, your brain is not likely to pull up instant associations with these concepts as memory triggers.

Write your list of number associations in the following table.

Here’s the part that takes a little time: Memorize the word that goes with each numeral. You want to be able to bring these words to mind in an instant, and have the word and the numeral linked permanently in your mind. Committing these to memory isn’t difficult, but it requires rehearsal. You can practice any time you see a number—house numbers as you walk your dog, license plates on passing cars, and so on. Convert that number to words, and see if you can remember the resulting phrase.

Now that you have committed your list to memory through rehearsal, you can translate the next number you have to remember into words.

Let’s go back to Rhonda at the beginning of this chapter. Rhonda had to remember 7466, the number of her parents’ condo. Instead of struggling with the number, she could use the association tool, and turn 7466 into nose-dog-devil-devil. Even just remembering devil-devil would solve the problem for her, so 7-4-devil-devil would do the trick.

While this technique may become too unwieldy to help you remember long strings of numbers, it works well for things like debit and credit card numbers, PINs for using automated teller machines, license plate numbers, telephone numbers, and numerical passwords.

A To-Do List of Associations

Associations can be particularly effective in helping you remember lists of things you need to do, buy, or pack—three of the most common reasons that people make lists.

Let’s say you’re making a pot of sauce this Sunday for dinner with the family, and you need to remember to pick up several items at the supermarket. You need tomatoes, garlic, onions, green peppers, sausage, tomato paste, and fresh oregano. You don’t have a pen and paper to write the list down, and you can’t thumb-type all of this into the Notes app on your smartphone because you’re driving. This leaves you with the hope that your memory is good enough to hold on to this list. There’s an easy way to keep that list in mind: Make up a story involving all of these items. This technique is called memory linking—bringing all of these elements together in a tale you concoct on the spot.

Here we go: Nona spent the whole summer in Italy getting ready for the big party with the family. She grew the tomatoes and green peppers in her garden, with lots of tomato vines winding up the sticks she put into the earth to hold them up. Down in that earth, she grew the onions as well—big, yellow onions just right for flavoring sauce. Days before the party, she goes into town to the market, where she stops in the butcher shop and argues with the butcher over which sausage she wants. He’s finally so insulted that he hurls a length of sausages at her over the counter! She’s convinced there’s not enough garlic in them no matter what he says, so she stops at a stall in the marketplace and buys a big, fat bulb of garlic. The woman with the spices talks her into some fresh oregano that she snips off the plant right in front of Nona, so she knows it’s absolutely the freshest. Now all she needs is a little can of tomato paste, which the spice woman slips into her basket when no one is looking—because Nona normally never buys canned goods. Nona pays and goes home, getting out her biggest pot to start the sauce.

Look at all the associations in this story: Nona is the Italian term for grandmother, and the romantic images of Italy in the not-so-old days, the garden in the Mediterranean sunlight, the volatile butcher, the spice woman, and the secret can of tomato paste all create a story you can remember at least until you make your purchases at the supermarket. All of these images evoke an emotional reaction, whether it’s a fond memory of your grandmother’s stories of the old country or a yearning to go abroad. While it took some time to type out this story, it only took seconds to imagine it—and you’ll find that you can weave together a picturesque, silly, or funny story that uses images that have meaning for you.

Make your associations interact—one crashing into another, coming together in the same place, one penetrating the other, twisting around one another, walking or dancing together, or one placed on top of another. The more these objects form a relationship, the tighter the association becomes.

Your associations are personal, so the ones someone else comes up with may not be strong enough to work for you. Always choose associations that come to mind quickly and that don’t require you to rehearse them for days at a time to turn them into long-term tools. They should rise to consciousness quickly, and serve as handy reminders with very little effort.

CHAPTER SIX

Visualization

The association techniques discussed in the previous chapter are largely verbal, involving the use of similar-sounding words or phrases, or words that evoke a specific emotional or intellectual reaction. In this chapter, you will learn about ways to use mental images to link new memories with old ones to bring more meaning to the new memories.

You have already tried out this memory improvement technique by creating the story about the shopping list. In that example, you learned to tie the list to a series of vivid images that had specific associations for you. It probably will not come as a surprise that association and visualization are closely related—in fact, it’s tough to use one without the other. The words you use to associate one memory with another one bring images to mind immediately, making the memory that much more vibrant.

Choosing a vivid visual image as well as a word or phrase engages a second sense, allowing you to use more than one of your senses to remember the new information. Not only do you hear the memory verbally, but you can see the connected image as well. The more senses you can employ, the more parts of your brain will be engaged with that memory. This strengthens the new information and gives it more significance—more value—to your brain, creating additional pathways across synapses to help you recall the memory more easily.

Use Your Imagination

The concept is fairly simple: Think of a visual image that will remind you of the thing you want to remember. Link the image with the memory, making both the image and the new information come to mind at the same time.

To make visualization work as a memory trigger, however, you need to make that image as interesting and memorable as possible. Remember the list of characteristics at the end of Chapter Four—the kinds of information that are easiest for your brain to remember. If you can make your visualization funny, sexy, personal, distinct in its location, surprising, or physically unusual, you have a much better chance of remembering it than if you use something nondescript, abstract, and boring.

Let’s say you want to remember the names of the early spring flowers in your garden: tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth. Just looking at the flowers may not bring the names back from memory, because you have not linked the flower names, the way the blooms look, and a vivid image in your mind.

Look at the tulip—it looks like a cup. Imagine bringing a cup of your favorite tea to your two lips. Now you’ve made a play on words—”two lips”—from the name, and a vivid image of this beautiful cup filled with tea. Perhaps you can link this with another image: you and a female friend having tea in the living room of her house. This image adds emotional value to the memory, creating the additional linkage to another part of your brain and strengthening your recall.

The same happens with the daffodil: The name sounds like Daffy Duck, and you can imagine the trumpet-shaped part in the middle of the flower to be a big, yellow Daffy Duck bill. Every time you see that duck bill coming at you, you’ll know it’s a “Daffy-dil.”

The hyacinth has a completely different shape—it’s a cluster of tiny flowers along a stalk. Its scent is so rich and sweet that it’s almost sinful to inhale it—so you quickly link the high-a-sinth to the idea of intoxication (being high), which may bring all kinds of memories to your mind. Or you might think of the medication hyoscine to equate it to being drugged. For the purpose of this example, imagine a bottle of a sweet liquor, like honey bourbon. You might even take this a step further, looking at the shape of the hyacinth stalk and equating its phallic shape with a penis. Now you have more than one kind of “sin” linked to this flower, and it’s unlikely that you will ever forget its name. You’ve also incorporated your sense of smell, and perhaps even the sense of taste in regards to the liquor.

Once you have these three images, build a mental relationship between them. Take the first visual you thought of: a cup of tea. How can you create a connection between this and Daffy Duck? Imagine Daffy Duck sipping your cup of tea from the tulip cup. Now add the third element: a bottle of honey bourbon. You can see Daffy pulling off one of his signature pratfalls, upsetting the bottle, and letting it pour into his cup. It doesn’t matter how silly, obscene, violent, or bizarre the image is, as long as you make it memorable enough to stay in your mind.

You can link your visualizations in all kinds of ways: merging them, having one ride on top of the other, covering one with another, wrapping them around each other, smashing one with the other, or having a character or person use the other items in the image. As you get better at creating mental images quickly, you may be surprised at the number of elements you can crowd into a visualization to make it memorable—allowing you to remember long lists of information for as long as you need to.

The Peg List/Number Rhyme Technique

In the example about the flower names, we used a freestyle approach to demonstrate the power of visualization. Using this technique, you can come up with images from many different areas of your life, relating them to the sound of the flower’s name and the appearance of the flower.

Visualization can blend with other kinds of mnemonic devices that offer an initial structure from which you can supercharge your imagery. Let’s begin with a time-honored memory booster known as the number rhyme technique. This provides a very effective way to remember short lists of items.

Begin with the numbers 1 through 10. Match each number with a word that rhymes with it. Here is the list of the rhymes used by AdLit.org, which provides resources for learning and memory to parents and educators of kids in grades four through twelve:

This list is called the peg list, the standard list of words that are pegged permanently to the numbers. You can replace any of these words with rhymes that are more meaningful to you, but make sure that the words you choose rhyme with the numbers. This creates both a visual and an auditory connection between the words and numbers, strengthening these links in your brain. It also makes the words and their corresponding numbers easy to memorize.

It’s also important that each word represent an object, something that provides you with a visual image. For example, if you decided to use “done” instead of “bun” to rhyme with the number one, what kind of visual image might “done” evoke? It could be different in every season, or from one day to the next. To make this memory method work properly, the word you choose needs to bring up a standardized image instantly. You will always know what a bun is, and if you imagine a hamburger bun on one day and a glaze-covered sticky bun on another, it’s still a bun.

The number rhyming method is particularly useful for memorizing a list that has to be recalled in a specific order. For example, let’s memorize the five steps of the scientific method, in the order in which they must take place.

1. Research

2. Problem

3. Hypothesis

4. Experimentation

5. Conclusion

How can the peg list help you remember these steps? Use the peg words to create a visual image for each number, and then link that image with the item corresponding to that number.

1. Research: A scientist in a white lab coat munches on a cinnamon bun as she reads through a big stack of dusty books.

2. Problem: The scientist walks down the street and suddenly develops a problem and falls, because she’s lost the heel of her shoe.

3. Hypothesis: The scientist sits under an apple tree until an apple falls and hits her on the head, just like Isaac Newton. This is how Newton formed his hypothesis about the rate at which objects fall.

4. Experimentation: The door to the scientist’s lab swings open and you can see the scientist pouring smoldering liquids from one test tube into another as she performs her experiment.

5. Conclusion: Bees rush from a hive and buzz around the head of the scientist as she busily completes her calculations and has an “aha” moment, coming to her conclusion.

Read these through two or three times and visualize each of these scenes in as much detail as you can; then put down this book and see if you can remember the five steps of the scientific method. The visuals are silly but just logical enough to make for memorable tools that will help you recall the steps. You can make your own images as crazy as you like, as long as it will help you remember them.

Once you’ve made your peg list, commit it to memory so that you can reference it instantly any time you need to recall a list of items in a specific order.

The memory experts who win major competitions create peg lists that stretch way beyond ten numbers, often going well into the thousands. If you frequently have more than ten items to remember, you can lengthen your peg lists with all kinds of keywords: shapes, famous people, kitchen items, foods, things you use in a hobby, the names of the planets, tree and flower species, animals, and other nouns that provide short, simple, easily remembered images. You will need to memorize your peg words so you can recall them instantly, and the experts recommend using basic learning tools like flashcards to quiz yourself until these words and images become second nature to you.

Chaining and Story

Now that you understand how to link peg list images with the items you need to remember, you’re ready to take the next step. A technique called chaining helps you recall all of the items in a list, or a list of items in a specific order, using each item as the trigger for the next one.

Let’s take the names of the seven dwarves in the Disney animated film version of Snow White—one of the bits of trivia that tends to pop up at parties, resulting in hilarity as people try to remember all seven. Chaining allows you to link these names in a way that gives each of them lasting meaning:

- Doc tries to treat Sneezy for his chronic sinusitis.

- Sneezy leaves Doc and goes into the bedroom to lie down. He sneezes hard, waking up Sleepy.

- Sleepy gets up, stumbles around in a sleepy haze, and knocks into Grumpy, spilling Grumpy’s soup.

- Grumpy gets mad and hollers at the first person he sees—who happens to be Bashful, who is too shy to complain or put up a fight.

- Bashful edges behind Dopey, using him as a shield.

- Dopey doesn’t get it, and runs off to go into town with Happy.

- Happy is pleased to have the company, and lives happily ever after.

With all of the dwarves doing something characteristic of their names, it’s easier to remember them than it was before you set up this chain of events involving all of them. You can embellish this kind of chain with all the details you want, adding humor and vivid imagery, and making the chain even more memorable.

This chain quickly takes on the timbre of a story, but the seven dwarves already have a whole fairy tale of their own, so putting them in a new story may become confusing. If this is the case, you can use their names to create an entirely different story that will make the names memorable. Here’s a simple one:

I felt Sleepy when I got up in the morning because I went to bed too late, which left me feeling Dopey all day. By evening, when I started to get Sneezy, I knew I had a cold. I was not Happy. I thought I’d better call the Doc, but I’m really Bashful about such things, so I just got Grumpy and hung out at home.

Now, let’s embellish this story with details that make it more memorable:

When Julie called Rachel around noon, she had a lot to tell her. “Was that some party last night, or what?” she asked. “I was so Sleepy this morning because I didn’t get to bed until, like, four in the morning. No wonder I feel so Dopey today—or was that because of those brownies? Anyway, I shouldn’t have drunk out of other people’s cups, because now I’m Sneezy, and I know I’ve got a cold. I can’t go to the Doc, because I’m really Bashful about needles. Want to come over? I don’t know if I’ll be Happy or Grumpy, but we can watch a video.”

Of course, your story will be different, with imagery that’s more meaningful to you.

Chaining and stories rarely are used separately, as one naturally flows into the other. They make it easy for you to remember a list of items because they provide a context, while making each of the points you must remember an integral part of a larger tale. If your story does not lead to immediate recall, take a closer look at it—maybe you need to ratchet up the details to make it more memorable. Adding something a little naughty, funny, sexy, violent, or even illegal (hence the brownies, unless you’re in Colorado or Washington) can make the story more vivid and turn average details into great mental hooks.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Chunking

Why are telephone numbers divided into three groups: the area code, exchange (the first three numbers in a local telephone number), and subscriber number?

Aside from the practical concerns of sending the call to the correct phone, telephone numbers adhere to two different premises proposed by George Miller, the father of “the magic number seven,” as discussed in Chapters One and Four. Miller determined that people can remember seven bits of information, plus or minus two, so local telephone numbers are seven digits long. The research didn’t end there, however: Miller also discovered that people can remember seven chunks of information—groupings of words, numbers, facts, or other data—that bring together individual elements to form a new whole.

While remembering ten digits of a phone number would be daunting for many people, remembering the elements of three groups of numbers turns out to be a great deal easier. You know your own area code by heart, so even if you are required to dial it in your calling area, you don’t have to think about what it is. Likewise with the exchange. It may be the same throughout an entire small town, suburb, or calling area, so you can recall it fairly easily even if your area has a number of different exchanges. So it’s only the subscriber number—the last four digits of the phone number—that may give you trouble. Given that it’s just four digits, however, it should be a snap to memorize by saying it aloud a few times.

Simplifying the use of an entire worldwide utility by dividing its identifiers into chunks may be one of the most impressive industrial uses of psychological research ever executed. If the entire world can remember phone numbers by dividing them into three chunks, then you certainly can master the memory encoding method called chunking, in which you will do the same.

From Random to Meaningful

Chunking takes bits of information that seem random, like lists of words or numbers, and groups them together to create a more meaningful arrangement. The telecommunications industry not only mastered this, but it took the concept a step further by creating vanity phone numbers, the ones that spell out words. For example, you may not immediately associate the telephone number 800-356-9377 with a gift delivery service, but when you discover that the number spells out 800-FLOWERS, you’ll make it your top-of-mind, go-to service every Mother’s Day.

This pattern recognition is not just a great memory tool; it’s also an integral part of the human consciousness—and, therefore, ready and waiting for use. According to neuroscientist Daniel Bor, author of The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning, this skill in finding patterns plays a critical role in our experience of life. “The process of combining more primitive pieces of information to create something more meaningful is a crucial aspect both of learning and of consciousness and is one of the defining features of human experience,” he wrote. “Once we have reached adulthood, we have decades of intensive learning behind us, where the discovery of thousands of useful combinations of features, as well as combinations of combinations and so on, has collectively generated an amazingly rich, hierarchical model of the world. Inside us is also written a multitude of mini strategies about how to direct our attention in order to maximize further learning.”

Chunking serves as a kind of zip file, a compression mechanism that contains quantities of information in a compact form. Once compressed into a chunk, the information operates in our minds much like that zip file, allowing us to unpack it to use the information inside, and then put it away again as a chunk until the next time we need it.

Bor sees three parts of the chunking process:

1. Searching for chunks

2. Noticing and memorizing chunks

3. Using chunks already built

“The main purpose of consciousness is to search for and discover these structured chunks of information within working memory, so that they can then be used efficiently and automatically, with minimal further input from consciousness,” he wrote.

If this is the case, then using chunking as a tool for increasing memory is simply a matter of giving your brain what it wants: a recognizable pattern among disparate objects that creates some kind of logical order. Once you see—or create—the order within the chaos, you have a good chance of remembering it for the long term.

How Many Chunks?

While the long-term memory has unlimited capacity for information storage, the working (short-term) memory may be even more limited than George Miller’s research originally indicated.

Studies conducted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and published in 2011 looked closely at visual working memory in rhesus monkeys, a species with a virtually identical capacity for memories as human beings. The research started by determining that the working memory’s capacity for new information actually topped out at four items, not seven—two items for each hemisphere of the brain. The experiments required the monkeys to determine which square among four on a computer screen had changed color when they saw the squares a second time. The monkeys did fine with this task . . . until the researchers increased the number of squares on one side of the screen. The monkeys could still determine which square had changed color if it was on the side of the screen with two squares, but not if it was on the side with three squares.

You may scoff at the brain capacity of monkeys, but before you do, think about the GPS device in your own car. The device provides a significant amount of information in a small space, and for most people, it takes a moment before they can absorb all of it. The human brain simply can’t take in seven or more fields of information—current speed, miles before arrival, time of arrival, direction traveled, the map of where the car is at that moment, the current time, and traffic updates—in a single glance.

“We found that the bottleneck is not in the remembering, it is in the perceiving,” said Earl Miller, professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. In essence, the study discovered that if more than two objects are placed in the same visual field, the working memory could not perceive them.

To maximize your ability to make long-term memories, use fewer objects but make them more detailed. Chunking is one of the best methods for doing this. Using this technique, you will decrease the number of items you need to hold in memory by increasing the size and capacity of each item.

Chunking Methods

How can you make chunking work for you? Let’s look at something that’s tricky for a lot of people in the later years of life: remembering the ages of all their grandchildren.

If you are particularly blessed, you may have quite a few grandchildren, so let’s start with a group of twelve. You’ve probably been trying to remember all their ages by rote, and of course, they get older every year. By grouping them into chunks, you can make this challenge a great deal easier.

Start by listing all of these grandchildren like this:

You already have some chunks in place—knowing which children belong to which family. If that’s not helping you, however, chunking them by age group can help break down this family.

Now you have three groups: adults, adolescents, and children. In each group, you have four ages to remember:

Adults: 27, 25, 24, 20

Adolescents: 14, 12, 11, 10

Children: 5, 4, 2, 1

Suddenly this task becomes more manageable, simply because you took twelve pieces of information and reorganized them into four chunks. You don’t need to memorize mnemonic devices or prepare by committing a list of peg words to memory. You simply need to know that you have three groups of grandchildren, organized according to age.

This same principle can help you remember the shopping list discussed in Chapter Five. Do you remember the list? (Tomatoes, garlic, onions, green peppers, sausage, tomato paste, and fresh oregano.)

To divide this list into chunks, you have several methods to try.

1. By category: Put all the vegetables together: tomatoes, onions, green peppers. Then group the seasonings: garlic, oregano. The packaged food: tomato paste. That leaves the only deli item: sausage.

2. By area in the store: Produce: tomatoes, onions, green peppers, garlic, oregano. Deli: sausage. Shelved goods: tomato paste.

3. By usage: Things to go into the sauce: tomatoes, onions, garlic, oregano, green peppers. Things that are cooked separately: sausages, tomato paste.

4. By first letter: TOGGOST. Perhaps you can reorganize this into SO GOT T, turning it into three fairly easy chunks to remember.

You may even see another pattern that you would prefer. Whatever chunks you choose, they need to mean something to you—the floor plan of your favorite supermarket, the flavor palette of the food, the family recipe they will create, or the encoding that will make them most memorable for your use.

Chunking to Remember Numbers

Most people do not have to recall long strings of digits on a regular basis, but if you are required to do so in your work—or if you want to impress your friends at parties—chunking the numbers can, with practice, make you a memory master.

Perhaps you have a reason to remember a string of numbers:

384950685301

Start by breaking this string of twelve digits into two-digit chunks:

38 49 50 68 53 01

Already you can see the task becoming easier. Do any of these numbers have meaning for you? Do they represent the age of someone you know, or can you remember something you were doing at that age? If you can link each of these numbers with a meaningful memory, you can bring in your skills of association (see Chapter Five) to match the chunk with its meaning.

Are any of these pairs of numbers the birthday of a friend or relative? March 8 (3/8), April 9 (4/9), and so on, can be linked with people about whom you care enough to remember their birthdays.

You may see meaning in the numbers that others could not begin to guess. The most important thing is that you make a vivid connection that will stay with you for as long as you need to remember this string of digits.

This technique can work for long strings of words as well—particularly when the string of words is not a sentence. If you need to remember vocabulary words for an overseas trip, you can group them by general meaning, parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), number of syllables, starting letter, or anything else that makes sense to you. This can turn a string of twenty words into five groups of four words each, making remembering them more manageable.

Chunking History

One of the daunting tasks of studying history and other global topics is remembering all of the names and how they fit into the course of events. As an example, let’s look at the generals on each side of the American Civil War.

Here’s a list of the officers in attendance at the Battle of Gettysburg, in alphabetical order:

Armistead

Buford

Chamberlain

Early

Ewell

Hancock

Heth

Hill

Hood

Meade

Lee

Longstreet

Pickett

Reynolds

Sickles

Stuart

Vincent

Warren

Even if you’re a Civil War buff and a history scholar, it can be difficult to keep all of these names straight. Start by breaking them up into the side on which each one fought:

This narrows down the memory work, but you’ve still got two chunks that are probably too large to remember on their own.

The list of officers in the South breaks down fairly simply into three groups:

1. Armistead, Early, Ewell (AEE)

2. Heth, Hill, Hood (HHH)

3. Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Stuart (LLPS)

These groupings should make them much easier to remember: one with three names that start with vowels, one with three names that start with H, and four more that start with mixed consonants.

The North’s officers break down into three groups as well:

1. Buford, Chamberlain, Hancock (BCH)

2. Meade, Reynolds, Sickles (MRS)

3. Vincent, Warren (VW)

Now you can see the patterns in their starting letters. BCH may be the initials of someone you know, or you might match it with “beach,” a simple thing to remember. MRS certainly gives you an easy mnemonic, and VW—short for Volkswagen—will stick in your mind.

You still need to do some memorization to recall what each letter stands for, or what the officers’ names actually are, but now you are starting with manageable chunks of information that will become meaningful on their own as you commit them to memory.

Chunking can be an easy and handy tool for remembering all kinds of lists, numbers, and names. When you pair it with association or visualization, you can create linkages that can stay in your long-term memory for the short length of time in which you require them, or for many years to come.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Method of Loci

Back in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, before the availability of paper allowed people to write things down at their discretion, a number of the early philosophers and politicians took their ability to memorize very seriously. They had no easy way to capture their thoughts as they considered the meaning of life or composed brilliant orations for delivery to the senate. This forced them to rely on memory.

The most innovative and effective method originated with a poet known for composing epitaphs as well as for remarkable adventures and narrow escapes. Simonides of Ceos found himself one of the only survivors of a roof collapse at an event, when he was called out of the building moments before it was destroyed. (This is every bit as suspicious as it sounds, but that’s a story for another book.) As workers excavated the ruins of the hall, Simonides proved invaluable in identifying the broken bodies of those who were killed, by remembering exactly where everyone was sitting at the tables.

This feat so impressed those who witnessed it—including Simonides himself—that it found its way into a short Latin rhetoric book called Rhetorica ad Herennium, written anonymously. This is the only discussion about the system he had invented: a mnemonic system called the method of loci. “Loci” is the plural of “locus,” which is Latin for location. The method links items to a familiar location, helping the user to visualize these items in the context of a place he knows well. By mapping out a location, pinpointing specific areas for linking, and matching these areas with thoughts they wanted to memorize, orators and philosophers memorized speeches and complex thoughts about logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. Later they would capture these ideas on papyrus, but the method of loci served them well in the meantime.

It says a great deal about this method that it has withstood the test of time and is still in use twenty-one centuries later. It became the leading memory method in the ancient world and into the Middle Ages, continuing its popularity all the way to the Renaissance (around the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when the Major System method discussed in Chapter Eleven was developed). The use of other mnemonic devices became prevalent then, but so effective is the method of loci—today called the “memory palace,” “mind palace,” “memory theater,” or the “Roman room”—that it has become the most widely used method by competitive memory experts throughout the world.

The method of loci has even found its way into popular culture. Today you can see Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes in the BBC television series Sherlock using the mind palace to recall clues he observed earlier in the episode. On American television, the character Patrick Jane (played by Simon Baker) uses the method to help people remember crime details in several episodes of the CBS series The Mentalist.

Why does this age-old method still have such credence and popularity? A 2002 study published in Nature Neuroscience gives us a glimpse of the reason. Researchers examined some of the top competitors in the World Memory Championships, using neuropsychological measures as well as brain imaging. They discovered that “superior memory was not driven by exceptional intellectual ability or structural brain difference. Rather . . . superior memorizers used a spatial learning strategy, engaging brain regions such as the hippocampus that are critical for memory and for spatial memory in particular.”

The study notes that a whopping 90 percent of these memory champions use some variation of the method of loci. Spatial memory, it turns out, is the key to winning memory challenges at the world championship level.

The method of loci is particularly effective for remembering lists of items for short periods of time; once you fill your memory palace with new information, the old images fade away or are forgotten almost immediately. “If you want to use your memory palace for permanent storage, you have to take periodic time-consuming mental strolls through it to keep your images from fading,” wrote New York Times journalist Joshua Foer, who turned himself into a memory competitor in an exercise in participatory journalism in 2011. “In fact, mnemonists,” as these mental athletes call themselves, “deliberately empty their palaces after competitions, so they can reuse them again and again.” Presumably, these memory experts spend time taking that “mental stroll” through their mind palaces to envision themselves removing each of their carefully placed images, leaving the rooms empty for the next competition.

How It Works

The method of loci is elegant in its simplicity.

Choose a place you know very well—your home, your campus, a favorite nature spot, a neighborhood in your community. The important thing about the place is that you can visualize everything about it without effort.

Visualize a number of places in this location, in logical order. If you’re using your house, start visualizing as you come in the front door and walk through the house on a standard route. Go through the house mentally from room to room, just as you would if you were coming home at the end of the day. What’s important here is that you keep moving forward, establishing a route that you will use over and over as you employ this tool to strengthen your memory.

As you establish this route, look around each room in your mind and determine what places you will use in the room to place things you want to remember. You may have several places in each room: on the couch, on the coffee table, on top of the bookcase, on the dining room table, on the stove, in the sink, and so on. When you have a list of items you want to remember, visualize your house and the route you’ve established. Place (mentally) one of the items at each of the locations you’ve chosen.

As you place the item, pay attention and develop a strong visual image of that item in that location. Let’s think about that shopping list we started talking about back in Chapter Five. If tomatoes are the first item on the list, place a big pyramid of tomatoes on the foyer table as you “come in” through the front door. Imagine sliced onions covering your couch cushions, and bulbs of garlic rolling back and forth on your coffee table. Make sure each image is vivid, colorful, and somehow unusual. Keep going until you run out of items.

If you have things to remember that are large or overly detailed, come up with a symbol that will remind you of the item. For example, if you need to remember to pick up Georgian oak at the lumberyard, picture a wooden board with a peach and a peanut sitting on top of it. If you want to remember all the ingredients in a Long Island iced tea, picturing an assortment of liquor bottles won’t be memorable enough—but remembering a room full of potatoes dancing with worms in sombreros will make it easy to recall that you need vodka and tequila.

One of the ways that top memory competitors remember so much information is to make the mental images as outrageous as possible. That pyramid of tomatoes on your foyer table will stay with you longer if you imagine yourself smashing them into a juicy, seedy pulp with the umbrella in the stand by the front door. Imagining such an act does not make you a psychopath—it simply cements an image in your mind that becomes unforgettable.

Later, when you want to remember the items, visualize your house again, and go through along your established route. You may be surprised at how easily the items come to mind as you move mentally through your house and look at the places you’ve placed them.

In a number of ways, the method of loci draws upon several of the memory devices discussed in previous chapters of this book. As you place your items to remember through your familiar environment, you create associations between the item and the place you’ve put it. Visualization is key, of course, and so is chunking—you may want to place several things together in one of the locations along your route, if you have a large number of items to remember or if you want to associate several things as a group. You’re also creating a chain of linkages, using your selected location to bring all of the items together. Perhaps this usage of so many memory tools is what makes the method of loci such a strong device.

A Memory Palace Example

Sticking with the ingredients for a Long Island iced tea, let’s walk through a memory palace and see how this works. This drink uses vodka, tequila, rum, gin, triple sec, sweet and sour mix, and cola.

Using your own home as the memory palace, imagine yourself coming through the front door into the foyer. What’s all this commotion? You’re imagining at least a dozen potatoes (the main ingredient in vodka), waving their arms and dancing madly. Perhaps they’re painted like those nesting Russian dolls, with brightly colored shirts and vests and wide, floor-length skirts or pants. It’s your memory, so whatever will make these potatoes remind you of vodka will work.

Wait—the potatoes have partners! Dancing around them, arms crossed over their chests, are bright pink worms wearing wide-brimmed Mexican hats. What’s this about? They’re drunken worms from the bottom of the tequila bottle. Maybe they look like the extraterrestrial worms that serve coffee in the movie Men in Black. You can hear them whooping it up as they dance.

Continue to the living room. What have we here? A pair of Caribbean visitors, dressed in brightly printed floral shirts and long shorts, is lounging on your sofa, toasting one another with the coconut half-shells they’re using as drink cups. Each of the coconuts has a little paper parasol sticking out of the top. If they’re from the islands, they must be drinking rum. They’ve got their bare feet up on the coffee table, and you can see sand falling from their toes onto the polished surface.

Who’s that in the recliner? It’s Al Capone himself, with his tie loosened and his feet high on the recliner’s footrest, his shoes gleaming black and his suit a perfect fit. He’s got a machine gun lying across his midsection, and he hoists a glass filled with clear liquid at you as you pass. Naturally, he’s got to be drinking gin—the forbidden beverage of the 1920s, and the source of his fortune.

Coming around the corner into the dining room, three clowns in full circus garb, from big red noses to huge shoes, juggle oranges and toss them from one to the other. There are three of them, and the oranges are a quick reminder of triple sec (the three clowns emphasize the “triple,” so you don’t confuse it with Cointreau, which is also orange flavored). If you happen to find clowns frightening, the sight of three of them in your dining room will burn itself into your memory. And if you love clowns, you’ll have a happy time with this one.

On to the plant in the corner of your living room—which has suddenly become a lemon and candy tree, covered in sweets of many colors and gorgeous yellow fruit. Pass this sweet and sour display and continue into the kitchen, where someone has crushed a cola can on top of the faucet, creating a sink that provides hot and cold running cola.

This all takes a little time to establish in your mind, though you might find that it takes far less times than you think. Once you’ve placed all of these images in your memory palace, take the time to explore it repeatedly to rehearse the route and make these people and objects seem entirely natural in their designated locations.

Journeying Beyond the Palace

Since the method of loci’s effectiveness became widely understood, other spatially based memory techniques have emerged.

The Journey Method places objects to be remembered along a route that you know well: your commute to work, your running course, the route you take to visit family members or friends, or a vacation that you can remember in detail. Your route does not have to be part of the physical world—if you have a favorite video game or simulated reality site, you can follow the familiar route you take through it. It can even be a route through a favorite story or book—the well described District 12 in The Hunger Games, for example. What path you take is entirely up to you, as long as it’s memorable and easy to follow.

As you would with the method of loci, prepare the route in advance of your needing it. Choose obvious landmarks and follow the route in your mind to establish them as the places where you will put the symbols, objects, or words you need to recall.

Some memory experts prefer to use the Journey Method because it is essentially boundless, allowing them to remember long lists of items like the elements on the periodic table or all of the presidents. It can even be used to memorize long-form text, like poetry, historic documents, or speeches.

To use the Journey Method to memorize a speech like the “Gettysburg Address,” place images or symbols to represent keywords from the text along your route. These words become triggers that remind you of the cadence of the speech, allowing your mind to fill in the connecting words—all those articles and prepositions—as you remember the next keyword in the text.

Take the opening of this famous speech: “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Choose keywords that will prompt your memory. The keywords are not necessarily the biggest words or even the most important words—they are the words that will remind you of the next phrase, so you can connect the dots between one segment of the speech and the next. In this case, virtually everyone knows that the first words of this speech are “Four score and seven years ago,” so you may not need to use these at all. Instead, move on to the next bit and choose the keywords: fathers, forth, nation, liberty, dedicated, proposition, men. (These may not be the exact words you would choose—in all cases, use the keys that will work for you.)

Now, just as you imagined the ingredients for the Long Island iced tea throughout your memory palace, place these words along your journey route. For the purpose of this example, let’s use a route to work.

Picture your father and your best friend’s or spouse’s father (so you have a plural) escorting you out your door as you leave your house. As you reach your car, you find it draped in red, white, and blue bunting, with a big number 4 painted on the hood. Together, the 4 and the bunting remind you of forth (as in July 4th). Who’s in the front seat with you? It’s Uncle Sam, holding up a big map of the United States—the nation.

Begin your drive to work. On the street corner as you leave your neighborhood, the Statue of Liberty bows and waves to you as you pass.

So far, so good. Now, however, you get to the word “dedicated.” How do you represent that in a symbol or image that will bring it to mind? Think of someone whom you would describe as the most dedicated person you know. This can be someone in history, or a person in your family, or someone you admire. Don’t think about it too hard—take the first person who comes to mind, because that person will bring to mind the word “dedicated“ later. Put that person in the next landmark along your journey route.

Proposition is an easier word to represent. Perhaps you see a sleazy-looking barfly, putting the moves on someone. Abraham Lincoln may not have enjoyed this image, but it’s not his memory you need to worry about.

Finally, at your next landmark—let’s say it’s the pharmacy on the corner as you pull into the parking lot at your job—you place an image of a big group of men in various styles of clothing, of various ages and economic backgrounds, and all waiting for a bus. Here are “all men,” as Lincoln said.

You can continue this process through the entire speech, lengthening your route if you choose so that you can include many more keywords. Rehearse this sequence of keywords as often as you can—every day as you drive to work, for example—to retain the images you’ve created and keep the entire text of the speech at the forefront of your mind.

CHAPTER NINE

Rhyming

Thirty days hath September,

April, June, and November.

Of twenty-eight is but one,

And all the rest are thirty-one.

Except leap year; that’s the time

When February’s days are twenty-nine.

What child in school doesn’t know this rhyme? Chances are good that you remember it (or some variation of it) from before you started kindergarten, and you probably still use it several times a year to determine the number of days in each month.

Such is the power of rhyming, a mnemonic device that dates back even further than the method of loci, to 800 b.c. Many epic stories, including Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey, were written as poems to make it possible for people to remember and share more than fifteen thousand lines of poetry verbally before the advent of paper.

Rhymes, songs, and poetry are popular teaching and learning tools in families, schools, after-school television shows, and the workplace. Simple rhymes have been used to warn children of dangers like poison ivy—”leaves of three, let it be”—and the danger of potential abduction—”stranger danger.” Children learn when to cross the street from a rhyme: “Red means stop, green means go, yellow means everybody stand in a row.” Later, students learn to remember rules of spelling and pronunciation: “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.” Chemistry students learn to double-check the labels on bottles in science labs from this rhyme: “Little Willie was a chemist / Little Willie is no more / For what he thought was H2O was H2SO4.” Even adults who struggle with spelling remember, “I before E, except after C, or when it sounds like an A, as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh.’” (Someone who discovered the exception to this rule has since added, “And ‘weird’ is just weird.”)

The power of rhyme doesn’t stop with school, either. Many a farmer may have had the sense to bring in their livestock because of the rhyme, “Red sky at morning, shepherds take warning; red sky at night, shepherds delight.” Electricians remember that “green is ground the world around” to be certain that they know which wire is the grounded one when rewiring an outlet or a fixture. People who might not know how to loosen a screw can recite, “righty tighty, lefty loosey.” And college students use this one as their all-important motto: “Beer before liquor, never sicker; liquor before beer, never fear.”

Rhymes and Music for Permanent Memories

From the moment you learned the alphabet song, you began using rhyme and music as a tool to remember new concepts. Not every song you learned as a child taught a valuable lesson, but they did teach you the value of remembering by setting an idea to music. You jumped rope while chanting rhymes and played clapping games about Miss Susie or Miss Lucy, depending on your region. If you can still sing any of these songs today, you know the remarkable power of music and lyrics.

Think about all the songs that you can sing from memory. Can you count them? There are likely too many to list, because the combination of the rhyming lyric and the established patterns in music create one of the greatest mnemonic devices known to our society. Learning a list of items becomes much easier when you set the list to music. This is the principle used by Sesame Street, Schoolhouse Rock, and a number of other televisions programs for children that help preschoolers and grade school children learn complex concepts. For example, a generation of young people learned how a bill becomes a law by watching Schoolhouse Rock‘s remarkable animated video on the subject, with clever lines like, “Well, it’s a long, long journey to the capital city / It’s a long, long wait while I’m sitting in committee / But I know I’ll be a law someday / At least I hope and pray that I will / But today I am still just a bill.”

Whether it’s Tom Lehrer’s astonishing lyric for “The Elements,” listing the entire table of chemical elements (as of 1959), or the “Fifty Nifty United States” song that lists all fifty American states in alphabetical order, songs have provided catchy, pleasurable, and useful ways to shortcut the memory process. It’s fun and easy to rehearse a song until you commit it to memory, and it can feel effortless to do so.

Why are songs such good memory tools? Songs and rhymes engage more than one part of the brain, creating more and stronger linkages that provide more ways for the brain to retrieve the memory of the information. By using visual and auditory cues, the rhyme or song gets stored in at least two different parts of the brain—and when you add meaning and context to the information through imagery within the rhyme or song, you engage semantic memory. All three of these parts of memory work together to bring that song to your conscious mind quickly and repeatedly.

Henry L. Roediger III, professor of psychology at the Memory Lab at Washington University in Saint Louis, explained this to the Wall Street Journal in a 2013 article. He said that while getting information into memory is relatively easy, recalling it at will can be harder. Music, he said, “provides a rhythm, a rhyme, and often, alliteration. All that structure is the key to unlocking information stored in the brain—with music acting as a cue.”

It’s not the tune but the structure of the song that makes it such a strong mnemonic device. “The added melody encourages repetition and thus memorization, which is perhaps why patients with advanced Alzheimer’s have been known to sing along to a familiar song,” the article concludes.

Making Rhyme Work for You

You don’t have to be a poet laureate to create rhymes or songs that help you remember lists of items, formulas, or facts. Here is a simple process that will help you create your own rhymes.

1. First, determine what information needs to be remembered. Is it a shopping list? A series of equations or formulas for a chemistry, physics, or math class? The ingredients in a favorite recipe? Rhymes will help you remember lists, facts, or anything else that’s fairly linear or needs to be recalled in order.

2. Think of short, catchy songs that you can use to create your own rhymes. These can be the tunes to nursery rhymes—”Pop Goes the Weasel,” or “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—or favorite songs from Broadway shows, movies, television, radio, or any other song that comes easily to mind. You want the tune to come instinctively, so you don’t need to work at remembering it and you can give your attention to the lyric.

3. See how your information scans with the beat. Look for simple rhymes that are easy to remember.

4. As with all of the memory tools presented in this book, combining auditory cues with vivid visual imagery will help you remember both the rhyme and its meaning. If your initial information doesn’t provide a good match with a tune, add some imagery that relates to the items you want to remember. One of the most popular examples of this must be “The Philosophers’ Song” created by the members of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which depicted all of the great philosophers as drunks: “Immanuel Kant was a real pissant / Who was very rarely stable / Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar / Who could think you under the table . . .” and so on. Not only do listeners get a lesson in ways to describe drunkenness, but they also learn names of a wide-reaching history of philosophers.

5. Once you’ve put together your rhyming song, rehearse it to commit it to memory. You will find that it does not take long before you can recall it all without the use of a lyric sheet.

If you’re not a natural songwriter—or even if you are—there are tools to help you assemble a rhyme that will stay in your memory. Using these over time may keep you from struggling to create a rhyme.

- The website Rhymer.com provides a long list of words that rhyme with whatever word you put into its search field.

- The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary is available in most bookstores, both in your city and online. Rhymes don’t really go out of style, so your purchase can be considered an investment in your memory’s power.

- RhymeBrain.com provides a searchable online rhyming dictionary with 2.6 million words in its database.

- If you’re looking for words that almost rhyme with your chosen word, try B-Rhymes.com. This can open up a lot more possibilities if you’re willing to half rhyme one word with another.

- Rhymes and Chimes (Rhymes.net) breaks its results down into one-syllable, two-syllable, and three-syllable words so you can find the rhyme that fits into your tune or your rhythm.

CHAPTER TEN

Acronyms and Acrostics

Even if you’ve never sat down at a piano or picked up a clarinet, you probably know the five notes on the treble clef scale of a piece of sheet music: E G B D F. Why do you know this? Because you know that Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (or maybe Every Good Boy Does Fine), the mnemonic device created from the five letters. You also may know the notes in the spaces: F A C E, easy to remember because they spell a word.

These are two examples of the use of words to help you remember letters: acronyms and acrostics.

Acronyms

First, a word to grammarians and English majors: In the context of mnemonic devices, an acronym is any abbreviation formed from the first letter of each word in a phrase. Normally acronyms refer to actual words (like FACE) created by these abbreviations, but mnemonists stretch the meaning a little bit.

When you take the first letter of each word in a phrase and bring it together to create a simple abbreviation, you’ve created a mnemonic acronym. That first letter acts as a trigger to help you remember the word it represents.

For example, you may have learned the acronym ROY G BIV in grade school. ROY is not the father of spectrometry, but the name does deal with the spectrum: Each of the letters represents one of the colors of the rainbow, in order from top to bottom. So ROY G BIV becomes red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

The range of acronyms used as memory devices is wide and deep.

- English majors use one to remember the seven coordinating conjunctions: FANBOYS (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so).

- Students have one for the five Great Lakes: HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior).

- Biologists use an acronym to remember the essential amino acids: PVT TIM HALL (phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, isoleucine, methionine, histidine, arginine, leucine, lysine).

Creating an acronym to help you remember a list of items is a fairly easy task. If you can’t change the order of the items to form a word, even an abbreviation can give you a device that provides a cue for each word in your list. To create an acronym, here’s what you need to do:

1. List the words or phrases you need to remember.

2. Circle the first letter of each word.

3. Write all of the first letters on one line.

4. If you do not need to remember the list sequentially, rearrange the letters until they spell a word. If the list must remain in sequence (like ROY G BIV), you now have your abbreviation.

5. Rehearse using the acronym to develop quick recall of the meaning of each initial letter, until you can retrieve all of the words without looking at the list.

Acrostics

An acrostic also takes the first letter of each word in the list you want to memorize, but to form the acrostic, you choose a different, familiar word to replace the one you need to remember, and use the chosen words to make a sentence that actually means something. This is how an unnamed musician created the sentence Every Good Boy Deserves Favor (or Every Good Boy Does Fine) from the lines on the music staff.

There may be hundreds of acrostics that help people remember standardized lists of facts. Some of the best known of these come from the world of science, where rote memorization of anatomy, periodic tables, taxonomy, and any number of other classifications is necessary before a student can work in a laboratory.

Here are some well-known examples:

- The order of taxonomy: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species

- The acrostic: Kids Prefer Cheese Over Fried Green Spinach

- The order of the planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto (at the time)

- The acrostic: My Very Excited Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies

- The order of math operations: parentheses, exponents, multiply, divide, add, subtract

- The acrostic: Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally

Create Your Own Acrostic

There’s no doubt that one of the reasons acrostics are so popular as memory devices is that they are easy to create. Here’s what you need to do:

1. List the terms, items, or words you need to remember on a sheet of paper or an erasable board.

2. Circle the first letter of each word.

3. Write the first letter of each of these words in a vertical line, with one letter on each line.

4. For each letter, choose a keyword that starts with the same letter. Write the keyword on the line with the letter.

5. As you choose your keywords, create a sentence from these words. It should be somehow memorable: funny, personal, weird, sexy, or just bizarre.

6. Rehearse the sentence until you can remember what each of the keywords stands for without looking at the board or paper.

7. If you’re memorizing something along with a team of classmates or coworkers, share the acrostic with them to help standardize it. This will increase repetition of the acrostic, thus improving its memorability.

For example, let’s create an acrostic for the periods of the Paleozoic Era, from the oldest to the most recent. Here are the words you need to remember:

Cambrian

Ordovician

Silurian

Devonian

Carboniferous

Permian

The letters you will use in creating this acrostic are: C O S D C P.

Now, create a sentence in which the words begin with these letters in order. The more funny and outrageous it is, the more memorable it will be. How about:

Cranky Octopus Scares Danish Correspondents’ Parents

Like most acrostics, it’s more of a headline than a sentence. You’re likely to remember it, however, especially if you can imagine an annoyed octopus crashing a party and frightening away a crowd of elderly people at a journalists’ dinner in Denmark.

If you were trying to memorize the six Paleozoic periods right now, your next step would be to use the first letter of each word in the sentence to quiz yourself until you can rattle off the six periods in no time. If you were studying for an exam that had this information on it, you probably would experience the mindflush that takes place after the test, when your memory quite literally flushes out all the information it doesn’t need now that the exam is over—but this one tidbit may well stay with you for much longer, because you took the time to create an acrostic that you can remember.

The Downside of Acronyms and Acrostics

The enduring quality of acronyms like ROY G BIV and acrostics like Every Good Boy Deserves Favor may make you think that acronyms and acrostics must be among the strongest memory boosters in the entire field.

Experts disagree about this, however, citing that the lack of meaningful content in acronyms designates them helpful only when using rote memorization. According to some researchers, acronyms and acrostics are fine if a person simply wants to memorize terms, but they do not contribute to comprehension of the content they represent. You may now be able to rattle off the six periods of Paleozoic history, for example, but you may not know anything about any of them—or even what Paleozoic history is.

If you remain clear on the definition of memory versus knowledge, then acronyms and acrostics may be perfectly useful tools to help you increase the number of facts and lists that you can remember in college course work, in your place of business, or at home. Rattling off the names of the bones of the hand and arm, however, does not make you a surgeon. If you want to gain knowledge about the topics in question, there’s only one route to take: Pay attention. Listen, take notes, and become an active learner.

Improving Study Habits for Maximum Recall

Every memory in your brain has a half-life, a point at which it begins to fall off dramatically if it is not reinforced with periodic review. Unlike elements in the natural world that lose their power over time, your memories can be recharged without a great deal of effort—simply by taking them out for some exercise.

One of the ways to increase your recall of information is through the process of stepped periodic review. This can involve any kind of study, whether you’re in college or learning new skills on the job, which can include using all the mnemonic devices, associations, visualization, and everything else discussed in this book—if you review the information periodically and at the right time for your memory, you will increase your long-term retention of the information.

When you’ve been studying for an hour or so, your brain takes the time to integrate what it has learned into long-term memory. Your recall at that point goes up, and you think you’ve committed this information to permanent memory. If you decide you’re home free and you close your books, however, you may be missing an opportunity to give these new memories another bit of reinforcement.

At the end of a study session, take a few minutes to review what you’ve learned in the previous hour. This will lengthen the life of that information. Then the following day, review it again. You may be surprised at how much of what you’ve learned does not come easily to mind. Once you’ve re-triggered those memories, their life actually increases. Now it might be a week before the new information begins to erode.

Come back to your notes in a week and review them again, and you will extend those memories for several weeks. If you keep doing this—coming back after a month, or two months, or six months, and reviewing the material again—you will create long-term memories that will not leave you for years to come.

Why does this work? Think about the process of rehearsing the use of any of the memory techniques discussed so far in this book. Each time you rehearse, you reach a point at which you believe you know the material well. You’ve used vivid imagery, humor, and a little outrageousness to remember all of the details of a list or a concept. Once you no longer have use for that information, however, you stop returning to it—and it disappears, receding in your memory until you can no longer recall how to access it. Your mind has performed the selective forgetting that allows you to focus on whatever task is at hand.

What if, however, you’re using that information on the job? Suddenly it becomes second nature—because you’re rehearsing that information every day. You no longer need the periodic reminders. You have internalized that information to the point that it’s something you know.

PART THREE

Advanced Exercises

Chapter Eleven Memory Methods of the Experts

Chapter Twelve Conclusion—What Now

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Memory Methods of the Experts

Now that you have an understanding of the many ways that you can increase your ability to remember, it’s time for a peek into the secrets of the masters.

On December 2, 2013, Swedish competitor Jonas von Essen took the crown as the World Memory Champion at the three-day competition in Croydon, South London, England. Earning points in ten different disciplines to arrive at a cumulative score of 8,534 points, von Essen achieved the highest point score ever by a competitor in the world championship games.

The competitors racked up their scores in memorizing and recalling strings of spoken numbers, playing cards, historic/future dates, binary numbers, random words, abstract images, names and faces, random numbers, speed numbers, and speed cards. “It is not about what they know or how much general knowledge they can recall,” notes the news release announcing the dates for the 2014 World Memory Championships in Hainan, China, “but their ability to be presented with fresh information, memorize it over a set period of time, and then recall it accurately against the clock.”

So these competitors are some kind of geniuses, right? Not according to the press office for the championship. “By practicing the memory techniques necessary to succeed in competition, it is like taking your brain to the gym. In the same way that muscles get stronger the more you use them, the more you challenge your brain to memorize, the better it gets and the more capable you become at exams, study, or in any profession.”

There you have it—the number-one secret of the master memory competitors is the same as that old vaudeville joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

The techniques you’ve read about in this book are the same ones the masters use, but they take their preparation and practice to a higher and more intense level. While you might commit a short, five-item shopping list to memory once a week in a quick run to the supermarket, for example, a memory competitor would commit five items to memory one day, then ten items the next day, and fifteen the following day. Just as you would increase the length or intensity of your physical workout to build muscle, a memory expert increases the load on his brain to improve its plasticity and ability to retain information.

Eight-time World Memory Champion Dominic O’Brien looks at his capacity for memorizing the sequence of shuffled decks of cards—which exceeded fifty decks in 2009—as the product of three main aspects of memory:

1. Imagination: “Making the imagery he attaches to information as lively as possible makes it memorable,” O’Brien said in an article he wrote for the Daily Mail in London. “The more surreal the image is, the more retrievable it will be,” he said.

2. Association: Using associations between two disparate items allows your brain to make connections, a key element in recollection. “Successful memory work involves using natural associations as well as forging new, unnatural associations to link a forgettable item of information with an unforgettable image,” O’Brien said.

3. Location: Making extensive use of the method of loci, O’Brien places each piece of information in a particular place in his memory palace, or on a route (using the Journey Method) he has long established, to remember the order of the cards in a deck. “This is undoubtedly the key to my success at the World Memory Championships,” he said.

Here’s the thing about O’Brien: He was born dyslexic and has been quoted as saying that he has attention deficit disorder (ADD). Even with these forces working against him, he became the most accomplished mnemonist in the world, and has made a career out of teaching others how to do what he does.

The difference is discipline, the same thing that separates those who took piano lessons as children from the people who perform concerti with symphony orchestras. If you want to truly master your ability to remember—not just numbers and suits on decks of playing cards, but information that may benefit you in terms of higher grades and a strong career—you will need to take the techniques described in the previous chapters to the next level.

Can you do it? That’s up to you.

Open Your Imagination

You’ve learned about the memory palace in Chapter Eight, and about placing the items (or symbols of the items) that you want to remember in places you’ve chosen throughout your palace. The key to making the memory palace your strongest tool is in your ability to quickly and automatically create lavish, surreal images to make them as memorable as possible.

Practice makes perfect, so it’s time to start using and reusing something most people do not tap into on a daily basis: your imagination. Perhaps you feel a bit inhibited about creating wild mental images, even though there’s no need to tell anyone what you’ve concocted in your own mind. Your mental pictures are yours to keep. They hold the key to your ability to improve your memory, so go ahead and ramp them up.

Today, take a ten-item shopping list and place it in your memory palace. Make the image of each item as outrageous as you dare. Go on a mental walk through your palace and see those items in their places—and then take them one step further. Add one more descriptive element to each of the images, something related but crazy. If you thought your original items were outrageous, these will seem insane! Now walk through your palace again. Your items are easier to remember because of repetition, but now they virtually leap out at you with their mad behavior. You’ve worked your imagination muscles a little harder than usual, and they are a bit fitter for the extra effort.

Tomorrow, pick something else to place in your memory palace—something with eleven items. It could be a little longer shopping list, a recipe you want to remember, or the names of the players on a team you’re coaching. Whatever it is, keep pushing the envelope on the outrageousness of your imagery. It will be a little easier tomorrow, because those muscles (so to speak) will still be pumped up. If you do this every day, and add another item with every new list, soon you will double the number of items you can remember.

Palaces in the Air

Some information you need to commit to memory for only a short time—until the end of a shopping trip, for example. Other facts and figures need to stay with you for longer, and you need to be able to keep adding new memories while you hold on to the old ones. To keep one set of information in your memory palace and add new lists, recipes, sets of instructions, people’s names and faces, or anything else you want to remember, you need more memory palaces, and maybe some routes for longer journeys.

The sooner you begin thinking about building your additional palaces and journey routes, the sooner you can start stockpiling the memories you want to retain. Start thinking about places you’ve been and places you might like to go, and all kinds of environments that can become receptacles for the surreal images that hold your memories.

Add your parents’ home, your best friend’s house or apartment, a building on your college campus, the gym where you work out, your local mall, and your office or place of business. Think these locations through carefully before you need them, and plan where you can place items or objects, and how many you can put in each palace. As you increase your memory capacity and you require longer routes, choose some you know well: the park where you walk your dog, a favorite walk in the woods, or a car route that you drive regularly. Your route to the supermarket is a great one to choose, allowing you to practice the list on your way to the store. Even the commuter train can offer you places to put your items along the route, using each stop as a location for an item, or planting them in landmarks that you can see through the window.

You can even invent some places of your own, if you are willing to memorize the palace or journey itself before you add your items. If you run out of palaces, you may decide to add estates described vividly in books, homes or offices you’ve seen in movies, or routes through your favorite video games. Just about anything can become a memory palace, or journey, if you have a clear mental picture of it—and if you can remember all of the places you’ve selected to put your objects.

A Major System for Winning the Numbers Game

With all of the associations you’ve been able to connect to tangible items on a shopping list or ingredients in a recipe, it may be hard to imagine that you can do the same with lists of random numbers. It can be done, however—the world masters do this with great success. All of the work you’ve been doing in your memory palaces to this point leads to the ability to do the same with this kind of information.

First, you’ll need the key that the experts use to convert the digits 0 to 9 to letters, and use those letters to make phonetic words. This is called the Major System (or the phonetic mnemonic system), invented in the 1600s by a French mathematician and astronomer named Pierre Hérigone. A seventeenth-century German linguist who wrote under the pseudonym Stanislaus Mink von Wennsshein developed the system further, publishing his work in a book in 1648. Two hundred years later, nineteenth-century linguists modified it as well, so the current system represents the work of a number of experts who made it easy to remember and quite practical to use. Once you’ve committed the basics to memory, you will be able to convert any number to words, which you can then convert to images—the most important tools in memory work.

Here’s how it works:

Note that each of the digits is matched with a group of consonants that sound alike. Vowels are “free” letters, so you can use any vowels you like to create words by converting a digit to one of the letters it represents. The system also allows you to use h, w, y, and x in any way you like—none of these are assigned to a number.

Using this system, you can translate a number of any length into a word or words. For example, if you want to remember the number 14, you can use the t sound and the r sound to make “tear,” “tree,” or “Tara.” To remember 365, use the m, sh or ch, and l sounds in order to make “Michael” or “mash all.”

Now that you have a word, create an image in your mind that will represent that word (and hence the number) for you every time you see it. For example, choose “tree” for the number 14, and imagine a beautiful, green, leafy tree. For 365, use “mash all” and imagine a hand pounding everything in sight with a potato masher. As with all of the other image exercises discussed in this book, the wackier and more surreal the image is, the more likely you are to remember it.

What if the number you want to remember is 14,365? Now you need to associate these two images in a way that creates an even more bizarre and memorable mental picture. The angry tree holds the potato masher with one of its branches, mashing all of its own fruit on the ground with powerful strokes. If this doesn’t give you actual nightmares, it’s an image that will stay in your consciousness and help you remember 14,365.

The competitors in the World Memory Championship use this system to build their own permanent word pictures for every two-digit number, and many have a vocabulary of as many as one thousand preselected images. Using this method to remember long strings of numbers requires a great deal of practice, until the images come to mind automatically as you see the numbers. These champions then have the ability to remember long strings of numbers because they can pull up these images in an instant and make them interact with one another in sequence.

Let’s try out an exercise with a sequence of eight numbers: 12, 25, 32, 46, 63, 72, 87, 99.

12 (t, n) becomes “tin”

25 (n, l) becomes “nail”

32 (m, n) becomes “man”

46 (r; j, sh, ch, or soft g) becomes “rash”

63 (j, sh, ch, or soft g; m) becomes “jam”

72 (k, c, or hard g; n) becomes “cane”

87 (f, v, or ph; k, c, or hard g) becomes “fog”

99 (p or b) becomes “pop”

These are all words that lend themselves to some vivid imagery. To remember these numbers in sequence, you need to set up a chain of events in which the preceding word/image has an effect on the word/image that follows.

To start, conjure up an image of an elaborate tin ceiling. Get a good image of the ceiling first, so when the nail affects it, you know that the nail came second. You don’t see the hammer, but a nail is being driven into the ceiling. Now your mind’s eye zooms out, and you see the man hammering the nail into the ceiling. Zoom back in close to the man’s bare arm, and you see a rash there. In a moment, a knife laden with jam comes into the picture, and the jam gets spread on the rash! Zoom out once again to see the knife is attached to the end of a silver cane. Suddenly a fog rolls in, obscuring the entire scene. Last, you hear the crack of a can of pop being opened, and orange pop sprays everywhere, obliterating the fog.

It all may seem like nonsense, but this is exactly how the mnemonists do it—except their images are wilder, more colorful, and ready in their memories for split-second assembly.

If you can master the Major System, you will find that it comes in handy in all kinds of situations—remembering house numbers, zip codes, telephone numbers, birthdays, appointment times, and a host of other numerical puzzlers.

Ask any of the top memory champions, and they will confirm that this kind of wordplay and imagery are at the heart of their abilities. When asked if any of them are savants, one competitor told reporter Joshua Foer of the New York Times, “Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn’t exist. In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have average memories.”

The message is clear: If they can do it, you can do it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Conclusion—What Now

Now you know the not-so-secret secrets of the top memory experts of the twenty-first century, most of which have been passed down for hundreds or even thousands of years. These tools can help you improve your memory for all kinds of information, but they require three important kinds of effort:

1. Do the preparation; develop in advance all of the mental repositories for your images, and all the images that represent numbers.

2. Practice until you’ve committed your images to memory.

3. Return to your images and rehearse them regularly to keep the memory fresh.

It may sound like a meaningless tautology to say that in order to become more adept at using your memory, you need to memorize a lot of stuff. The truth is a little more useful than that, however. Once you have created the series of images you will use to represent numbers or to store things in your memory palaces, you will have this library of vivid pictures on which you can depend for quick recall in all sorts of areas of your life.

Paying attention to what you are doing turns out to be the most fundamental aspect of improving memory, as discussed in the early chapters of this book. Practice being “in the moment” as you do things around your house or accomplish tasks at your place of work. It’s easy to let your mind wander as you finish tasks that require little thought, but the next thing you know, your keys are nowhere to be found, or you have no idea where you parked your car. The more you pay attention, the better your memory will turn out to be on its own.

Being in the moment will help you apply your new memory skills as well. When you get a voicemail and you need to return a call, you will find that you can recall a telephone number much more quickly if you turn it into an intense, bizarre image. Take just a moment to use the number-rhyme technique described in Chapter Six, and create a chain of seven images, each having some nefarious influence on the one that follows. In a few seconds, you’ll have a mini-story that you can then link with the person who owns the phone number—and you will remember that number as long as you need it.

Remember Everyone You Meet

Imagine this scenario: You are in a new relationship, and your love interest has decided it’s time to meet the family. Naturally, you’re going to do this at Thanksgiving or Christmas, when you will meet dozens of people all at the same time. How on earth can you remember all those names and faces? You don’t want to embarrass yourself, so it’s time to sharpen up your memory skills before you arrive at this mini-judgment day.

Remember the techniques discussed back in Chapter Four, and match those names with quick associations that provide vivid mental pictures. Add some aspect of each person’s face to the image you’ve dreamed up for them, and you will have a strong association that will help you recall that Jeannie is the younger sister with the piercing blue eyes, and Joanie is the older one with the underbite. Not only will you make your evening easier for yourself, but you will impress your future relatives with your sharp mind and graciousness in making the effort to remember their names.

If this works well in your personal life, imagine the impact it could have at work. If you work as a trainer or make a lot of presentations to small groups, you can impress them all by remembering the names of everyone in the room. If you call on clients, you no longer need to write down everyone’s name or collect business cards and set them up around your notebook according to where people are seated. Instead, you will be able to memorize names and match them with faces in just a few seconds each, saving yourself time and making your clients feel as though their business is important to you.

Improve Your Work Performance

With the drive toward the paperless office finally moving forward after decades of promises, you may find pen and paper becoming scarce in people’s offices when you need to jot something down quickly. You will bring your laptop or tablet to meetings, of course, but for those moments when your supervisor calls you with a quick assignment or you get action items from someone you meet in the hall, you need to remember what you’ve been told to do at least until you can get to your tablet or your desk to write it down.

When your boss tells you, “Shoot me that report when you have a second,” and you’re on your way to do something else entirely, you have a very good chance of forgetting to send her the report she requested because you have another task on your mind at that moment. Here’s where your ability to create exciting images on the fly will come in especially handy. Imagine yourself standing in your office, puncturing the report with an arrow, placing the arrow in a bow and sending the arrow flying through the office, narrowly missing several other coworkers in its progress. The arrow and report land perfectly on your supervisor’s desk, where the arrow magically vanishes and the holes in the report disappear. When you return to your office, this image will be triggered as you walk in the door, and you’ll send the report (probably through conventional email) as she asked.

When you have specific lists that you need to reference on a regular basis—from the steps required for a quality management process to the enzymes found in the digestive system—it can save you time and trouble to commit these to memory. You can use a rhyme, an acronym, or an acrostic to remind you of the items on the list, making it fairly easy to recite them in order at the instant that you need the information. If the list is particularly extensive—like the list of all the proteins in the human body—you may want to use your image-creating ability to give each one an identity of its own in your mind. Place all of these in your memory palace, or create linkages between them in the order in which you need to remember them. Your coworkers may have lists tacked up on bulletin boards or hanging over their lab stations, but your work area is clear and you can move ahead with vigor, because now you have everything you need in your head.

Amaze Your Friends and Coworkers

You may not have any intention of becoming a World Memory competitor, but knowing and applying the techniques used by champions can come in handy at a party or in your workplace.

Memory champions are famous for memorizing the order of the cards in a standard shuffled deck. By now you can guess how they do this: These experts create a specific mental image for each card, and they place them in all of the cubbyholes they’ve planned in a memory palace. With some practice, you can do the same—giving each of the face cards the identity of a famous person, and determining a dynamic, bizarre image for each of the number cards. Memorize your list of fifty-two images and practice by going through the deck a card at the time, placing each card in your memory palace, and then taking a second deck and reordering the cards to match the first deck. Your friends and coworkers will think you have suddenly become a savant.

What’s Next?

If you think you have the discipline and the drive to match minds with the competitors in the World Memory Championships, and you’re willing to put in the countless hours of preparation and practice, you can enter at the competition’s website: WorldMemoryChampionships.com.

The World Memory Sports Council, the independent governing body of memory as a sport, runs the competition and regulates all the local and national competitions worldwide. Led by its founder, Tony Buzan, the council maintains the world rankings of its mental athletes, trains and licenses official arbiters, sets the rules for competition, licenses official competitions around the world, and maintains the integrity and ethics of the sport. You can find a complete listing of the scheduled competitions for the coming year on the website, as well as a tool to compare the performance of up to four competitors at a time. This will give you an excellent idea of the kinds of scores you would need to beat to win a regional, national, or international championship.

Once you feel confident about your memory capabilities, there’s no harm in entering a competition just to see how you measure up under the lights. You can be sure that you’ll have an experience that you will never forget.

Appendix

Nutrients to Boost Memory

Just as our understanding of how memory works has improved and changed over the course of years of study, so too has our understanding of which foods—and specifically, which components of food—assist memory. For example, folate used to be considered a memory booster, but a study published in November 2013 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease stated that folate can actually be detrimental to cognitive function in the elderly if their vitamin B12 levels are low.

Recent studies also refute earlier findings that omega-3 fatty acids can prevent cognitive decline in older adults. Omega-3 fatty acids certainly play a role in the body’s overall health, but the most recent findings suggest that improved cognition is not one of their benefits.

However, there are two vitamins proven to improve memory: vitamin E and vitamin K.

Vitamin E

In 1999, a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology used the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to determine which vitamins were critical in maintaining good mental health during the aging process. The study found that decreased levels of the antioxidant vitamin E were consistently associated with cognitive decline and poor memory. These findings were borne out more recently in a study published in July 2013 in the journal Physiology and Behavior, in which researchers discovered that vitamin E actually prevents cognitive impairment that can be caused by a high-fat, high-carbohydrate diet—probably by normalizing “oxidative stress,” the stress between pro-oxidants and antioxidants, in the hippocampus. Vitamin E may actually help to protect neurons from the damage that comes with Alzheimer’s disease.

At the end of 2013, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) released findings in a study led by Maurice Dyksen, a geriatric psychiatrist at the Minneapolis VA Health Care System. The study of more than six hundred veterans from fourteen VA medical centers across the country showed that vitamin E actually helped slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease in veterans with mild to moderate symptoms. The study, reported on January 1, 2014, in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that vitamin E slowed the disease by about six months when compared with a placebo.

Dyksen was quick to point out that the study subjects received a dose of vitamin E that is many times greater than the single vitamin pill you might take every day, and that people should not start megadosing themselves, because potential side effects have not yet been determined. Also, the use of vitamin E may not actually prevent you from getting Alzheimer’s—the study’s results tested people who already have it. Nonetheless, by increasing vitamin E in your diet, you can take a step toward maintaining healthful levels of this vitamin for your memory’s benefit.

Vitamin K

Vitamin K also appears to play an important role in maintaining cognitive function. According to a study published in the December 2013 issue of Neurobiology of Aging, vitamin K was associated with better verbal memory performance among 320 men and women who were seventy years old and older but had no cognitive impairment. The people who had higher concentrations of vitamin K in their bodies performed better in recalling verbal memories over several short intervals, even after a twenty-minute delay. This adds evidence to the possible role of vitamin K in cognition.

Ingredients to Support Your Brain

Here is a list of foods that can help keep your brain healthy, many by boosting your vitamin E or vitamin K intake.

- Gouda cheese is the single highest food source of vitamin K.

- Oil-based salad dressings made with healthful vegetable oils can help provide vitamin E. Wheat germ oil is the highest in vitamin E—one tablespoon will give you your entire daily requirement of this antioxidant. Hazelnut oil, sunflower oil, and safflower oil rank high as well. Olive oil also contains vitamin E; a tablespoon provides 13 percent of the recommended daily requirement.

- Peanut butter, dry peanuts, hazelnuts, and almonds are significant sources of vitamin E. An ounce of almonds provides 34 percent of your daily requirement, and an ounce of hazelnuts provides 22 percent. Two tablespoons of peanut butter—enough for a sandwich—provide 15 percent of your daily vitamin E.

- Sunflower and pumpkin seeds provide a minimum daily requirement of zinc, which your body uses for memory and thinking. Sunflower seeds are also a good source of vitamin E—an ounce provides 37 percent of your daily requirement.

- Whole grains, though not a significant source of vitamin E, contain more of this antioxidant than breads, pastas, and other baked goods made from refined wheat flour.

- Dark green leafy vegetables, such as kale, collard greens, spinach, broccoli, and asparagus, provide vitamin E and vitamin K for enhanced cognitive function. A half cup of spinach gives you 10 percent of your daily requirement, while a half cup of broccoli provides 6 percent.

- Avocados are a great source of vitamin E; a single avocado provides 28 percent of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin E. This means guacamole (which also typically contains tomatoes) is a particularly mind-healthful snack, especially if you eat it with whole-grain pita bread.

- Red wine, a pivotal part of the Mediterranean diet that has been proven to promote cardiovascular health and longevity, seems to provide protection against cognitive decline. Two glasses of red wine a day, particularly during midlife, has shown to be effective specifically for cognitive health.

- Berries, including blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and acai berries, are turning up as a buffer against cognitive decline. Research presented at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston found that these berries may help slow age-related cognitive decline by preserving the brain’s natural “housekeeper” mechanism, which wanes with age.

- Tomatoes deliver a healthful dose of the antioxidant lycopene, which can help prevent the free-radical damage to cells that neurologists see in Alzheimer’s patients. They also provide small amounts of vitamin E—a single raw tomato carries 4 percent of your recommended daily intake.

- Mango and kiwi are good sources of vitamin E, with a single kiwi supplying 6 percent of the minimum daily requirement and a half cup of sliced mango providing 4 percent.

Glossary

Adrenal glands: Located above the kidneys, these glands release hormones that allow people to respond to stress.

Antioxidant: A molecule that inhibits the oxidation of other molecules, which prohibits the formation of cancer cells and other chain reactions that can kill cells.

Association: A process of aiding memory by linking things you need to remember to things you already know.

Cerebral cortex: The outer layer of the brain that plays a key role in memory, attention, perception, thought, language, and consciousness.

Cognitive neuroscience: A field of study created to join the medical and psychological sides of the brain research field.

Consolidation: The period during sleep when the mind stabilizes memories and places them in the areas of the brain that will store the information.

Cortisol: A hormone released by the adrenal glands during stress that increases glucose and aids in the metabolism of fatty acids, which can also keep the hippocampus from shutting down stress commands from the hypothalamus.

Declarative memory: Memory for factual information.

Deep processing: An exploration of a word or concept that gives it meaning and context.

Dendrites: The part of the nerve cell that receives neurotransmitters across the synapse and is involved in memory storage.

Dentate gyrus: A part of the hippocampus that plays a role in the formation of episodic memories.

Encoding: The process that takes place when you are presented with information and take it into memory.

Hippocampus: Located in the center of the brain under the cerebral cortex, this area takes in information and determines which perceptions are worth saving as memories and which are not.

Hydrogenated: A process of treating vegetable oil with hydrogen to convert it into a solid that is used in creating artificial fats known as trans fats.

Hypothalamus: A small area at the base of the brain that serves as the command center for the sympathetic nervous system.

Memory inhibition: The brain’s ability to erase information it does not require once the task for which the information was useful is completed.

Memory palace: See method of loci.

Method of loci: A memory method developed in ancient Rome in which the user mentally places information or objects in established spots throughout an imagined structure, such as a home or place of work.

Mnemonic: A device used in strengthening memory based on reminders that are more easily processed by the brain.

Mnemonist: A person who specializes in retaining memories, usually in competitions.

Neocortex: A part of the brain that stores long-term memories.

Neurotransmitters: Chemicals that help electrical impulses travel through the brain across synapses to transport memories for storage.

Peg: A permanent or standardized memory trigger.

Phonemic processing: Examining information based on how it sounds.

Plasticity: The brain’s ability to shift transmissions whenever new ones are needed.

Procedural memory: Memory for processes and how things are done.

Recall: The brain’s ability to access a memory.

Rehearsal: Practicing the use of an image or mnemonic device to turn it into a long-term memory.

Reworking: Turning information (like numbers) into something that the mind can embrace more fully.

Scaffolding: Building new information on knowledge already in the memory.

Semantic processing: Examining information based on its meaning or context.

Shallow processing: A surface exploration of a word or concept that does not give the word meaning or context.

Short-term memory: The part of memory that stores and manages information temporarily, which is used in gathering information, performing a task, understanding a new concept, or in reasoning to solve a problem.

Structural processing: Examining information based entirely on how that information is structured rather than on its meaning.

Synapse: A bridge over which electrical impulses can travel using neurotransmitters to connect nerve cells with one another to form memories.

Trans fat: A kind of unsaturated fat that is usually created artificially and that is known to increase the risk of coronary artery disease and stroke.

Visualization: Linking a thing you need to remember with a visual image that aids in memory.

Working memory: Another name for short-term memory.

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Introduction

Part One: Understanding Memory

Chapter One What Is Memory, and How Does It Work

Chapter Two What Can Get in the Way of Memory

Chapter Three Test Your Memory

Part Two: Methods for Improving Memory

Chapter Four Overview of General Methods

Chapter Five Association

Chapter Six Visualization

Chapter Seven Chunking

Chapter Eight Method of Loci

Chapter Nine Rhyming

Chapter Ten Acronyms and Acrostics

Part Three: Advanced Exercises

Chapter Eleven Memory Methods of the Experts

Chapter Twelve Conclusion—What Now

Appendix: Nutrients to Boost Memory

Glossary

References