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Overview

Memorizing a text is easy. You just need to know the right techniques. One of them is by using imagery and themes from your childhood home, which will help you remember what you’re trying to memorize.

Big Idea #1: Our memory capacity is not fixed. We can train ourselves to remember more things and improve our memory skills.

Have you ever met someone who has a knack for remembering names and thought to yourself, “Why can’t I do that?” Well, anyone can improve their memory. All you need to do is know how your brain works and use it correctly.

One way to do this is by practicing the phonological loop method. In a classic experiment, psychologist K. A. Ericsson and his colleague Bill Chase presented an undergraduate known as SF with digits that he had to repeat back to them.

At first, SF could remember about seven items in his memory. However, after practicing this test for 250 hours, he was able to expand his memory by a factor of 10.

The phonological loop method is not the only way to improve your memory. You can also become an expert in a particular field. Studies of experts in chess showed that although they are better at chess than normal players, they don’t perform significantly better on general cognitive tests like memory.

In the 1940s, it was found that chess players have a special memory for remembering their moves in a game. They focus on parts of the board that are most relevant to them and do not see 32 pieces; they only see a few bigger sections of the board.

Although their memory for general things didn’t change, the chess players did develop a very good memory of how to play the game.

Big Idea #2: If you change the way you store information in your brain, it will help you remember more.

We tend to remember five to nine items at a time. However, if we combine those pieces into bigger chunks, it’s easier for us to remember them. For example, the numbers 1224200001012001 are chunked as 12/24/2000 and 01/01/2001 when they’re converted into dates.

For example, try to memorize the following 22 words: HEADSHOULDERSKNEESTOES. You can improve your memory of that list by thinking about it as a sequence of 4 chunks (HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES and TOES). This makes remembering a lot easier because you’re only dealing with four things instead of 22. Even better is if you remember it as one chunk—the children’s song “Heads Shoulders Knees and Toes.” That way, you’re only dealing with one thing in your mind rather than 22 separate things.

Another method for improving your memory is called elaborative encoding which involves making information vivid or sensory-rich so that we can more easily recall it later on. Over time our brains have developed to be able to deal with abstract concepts but they were originally designed for us to remember information from our senses like what foods are poisonous or how we navigated home after being out hunting all day long.

So, we can take advantage of the way our brains are pre-programmed by employing senses and imagining things vividly. For example, if you want to remember a shopping list of pickles, cottage cheese and salmon, imagine a glass of pickles on your bedside table next to a tub of smelly cottage cheese in which a good-looking man or woman is bathing with a salmon. This will help you remember those items!

Big Idea #3: Our unconscious remembers.

Have you ever wondered what life would be like without memories? What if a virus damaged the medial temporal lobes of your brain, which are vital for storing and recalling memories?

Even though the patient couldn’t remember anything, he unconsciously did. Psychologist Larry Squire showed the patient a list of 24 words to memorize and within minutes, he had forgotten about it.