Memory methods

Techniques > Memory methods

Human memory is terribly fallible and can be very annoying. You can hear a person's name and forget it in very short order. A single word can be at the tip of your tongue. And whole episodes of your life can be forgotten.

Fortunately there are specific methods that you can use to significantly increase what you remember. Here are some of the good ones:

• Memory basics
  • Associating: The basic method of connecting cue and item.
  • Rehearsal: The importance of practice!
• Memory methods
  • Active Experiencing: How actors remember their lines.
  • The Linking Method: Associate sequential pairs of items.
  • The Journey Method: associate items to places along a known journey.
  • The House Method: associating things to places in a building.
  • The Peg Method: For remembering numbers.
  • The Consonant Peg Method: An alternative method.
  • The Story Method: Setting words in a story context.
  • The Celebrity Method: Linking memories to celebrities.
  • Mnemonics: Playing with initial letters.
• Remembering particular things
  • Remembering their name: The name of the person you are talking to.
  • Remembering faces: Knowing what they look like.
  • Remembering cards: How to become a card sharp!
  • Remembering languages: Become a linguist!
  • Remembering spelling: Particularly of tricky words.

People who are good at these are sometimes called mentalists and can display seemingly-superhuman memory skills (where it seems you can make a good living from standing on the stage and reciting the phone book :).

Just using these as described can give amazing results. However, to get really good and be able to remember all kinds of things easily, nothing beats practice and rehearsal.

Fortunately, there are always many things happening in our lives that we can practice at remembering, from laws of physics to names of people to news headlines.

Rehearsal requires recalling the items remembered multiple times after you have committed them to memory. Do this several times immediately then in increasingly stretched-out times, for example after an hour, four hours, eight hours, a day, two days, a week, and so on.

See also

Memory