clair073

Memories that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit other things we remember—but have a slightly weird twist. The most effective memory strategy is to relate new information with something you already know, but do it with a weird twist. This is the basic principle of well-known mnemonic strategies, like acrostics or "Memory Palace." The idea of acrostics is to construct a sentence in which the first letter of each word reminds you of what you are trying to remember, as in the names of the 12 cranial nerves: "On Old Olympus Towering Tops A Finn and A German Viewed Some Hops" (olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory, hypoglossal). Acrostics and all other mnemonic aids work best if you create mental-image representations—the weirder the better. It is the  weirdness that makes things especially memorable. There are three basic techniques: 1.       Subject-Verb-Object. ...

As we took our hour and a half drive to Houston, my granddaughter was practicing a school assignment of memorizing the names of the first 10 presidents. By the time we got there, she still had not done it. I told her a simple way to memorize such sequential lists, and showed her that she could have mastered the task in about 10 minutes. The solution is one of the oldest mnemonic devices: create image-based story chains. The idea is to imagine an image for each item to be memorized and then link them in a story sequence. As I mentioned for Tip 1, several thousand years ago, ancient Greek orators were noted for their ability to give hours-long speeches from memory. After all there were no teleprompters then, nor even any practical way to write down a long speech. So how did they pull off such astonishing feats? They invented a visual imaging technique where thoughts were mentally captured as images in the mind’s eye because images are much easier to remember than words. They then placed ...