remembertips

I don’t speak Spanish, but on a recent trip to Mexico my wife and I tried to learn some basic words and phrases to get around.  When helpful shop owners would approach us I wanted to be able to let them know that we were just browsing.  Google translate provided “solo estamos mirando,” as the translation for “we’re only looking.”  I’ve always disliked (and not been very good at) brute force repetition as a memorizing technique, so I applied a visual association method.  I imagined the actor John Stamos free soloing El Capitan (a la Alex Honnold) when a policeman stops him to read him his Miranda rights.  Solo estamos mirando!  (If you are a basically non-Spanish speaker like me, I recently got a tip from a native Spanish speaker on the pronunciation of mirando, which is to emphasize the “mir” part with a distinctive “ee” sound: MEE-ran-doe.  The way I was pronouncing it before he couldn’t even tell what the word was!)

[Photo credit: Photo credit: iDominick on Visual Hunt]

OK, so now that you’ve mastered the link system (see last post!) you’re ready for the next level of sophistication: the peg system.  Like the link system, this method allows you to memorize a list of items, but with the additional advantage of being able to identify the ranking of the items or retrieve particular items directly without having to go through a series of links.

For example, you want to remember the first 5 presidents of the United States in order.  The first step is establishing the “pegs”–so called because they act like pegs on a wall that you might hang things on.  Each peg has a number and an associated image, which in this case we will associate with rhyming words as follows:

• one – sun
• two – shoe
• three – tree
• four – door
• five – hive

Once you establish the pegs (and of course you can substitute your own images if you wish), you can use the same ones over and over.  It’s been shown that ordinary folk can maintain at least six simultaneous, discrete lists of ten each, using the same images.  Now let’s attach the presidents:

1. sun – Washington: picture someone “Washing” the sun
2. shoe – Adams: the tip of the shoe poking out where a person’s Adam’s apple would be
3. tree – Jefferson: someone you know named Jeff as the trunk of a tree
4. door – Madison: a door that looks like a Mad magazine cover
5. hive – Monroe: Marilyn Monroe with a bee-hive skirt

Now you can easily recount the first five presidents in order, and furthermore, you can immediately tell what number each one was, or given the number you can immediately name the president.  I did five here for brevity, but if you establish 10 pegs for yourself that covers a lot of situations.  If you make up your own pegs, use images that work for you–they should be common and concrete–and then make them vivid in your mind by picturing and rehearsing them in detail a few times before attaching a list.  Once you’ve used them a few times they’ll be set for you to use the rest of your life!

This was just a basic introduction to the peg system.  If you like it and want to pursue it further, there are lots of variations on how to organize & implement it (for example using visual vs. rhyming associations, using letters instead of numbers, etc.).  Just Google “peg system.”

[Photo credit: internets_dairy – License]

You’ve probably heard the term mnemonics, which refers generally to methods for enhancing learning or memory.  It comes from the Greek mnēmōn meaning mindful.  Familiar examples include acronyms such as the BRAT diet for upset stomach, or OFNR (which looks kind of like “oftener”) for the Non-Violent Communication rubric Observation, Feeling, Need, Request.  There are whole books devoted to mnemonics, and people who specialize in these memory tricks are called mnemonists.

I’ll be discussing some of these tricks in various posts, but I’ll start with one of my favorites which is kind of like a mental alarm that you can use anywhere.  One way that memories are given salience is through the detection of something abnormal.  For example, you are more likely to remember something strange-looking  than something ordinary.  This principal can be exploited to form a new memory cue.

Let’s say you want to remember to take the bread out of the freezer when you get home.  You don’t have anything to write on, or any other easy way to make a physical reminder. What you can do is think of something that you will definitely see when you get home, such as the front door.  Now, since it’s the bread you are trying to remember, imagine that when you walk up to your house, in place of the front door you see a huge loaf of bread with a door handle on it!  Imagine reaching out to the door handle and swinging the loaf of bread open to enter the house.

The more vivid and sensory you can make the memory, the more likely it is to work. Picture the loaf-door in your mind, imagine the smell of the bread as you open the loaf-door, think of the loafy sound it would make, etc.  When you get home there’s a pretty good chance that as you get to the door those imagined memories will pop up and remind you to take the bread out of the freezer. To improve the odds even more, make up several of those memories for different things that you will see you when you get home.   After the front door, you could imagine a piece of furniture being the loaf, or picture your dog as a loaf of bread wagging it’s crusty tail!

Try it–I bet you’ll find lots of uses for this one, and the more you practice, the better it gets.  In fact, see if when you get to your front door, you think of bread, just from having read this blog today!

[Photo Credit: Benediktv – License]