Memory and Visualization

I learned how to memorize lists yesterday. Before yesterday if you would have given me a list of 10 things and an hour, I probably would have had a hard time memorizing them. No more. I was able to remember a list of 31 things in less than 5 minutes. I was able to do it in such a way that I still haven’t forgotten the list.

HOW ? ! ?

By linking the items together in an image that I can bring to mind, I can remember everything instantly. Here’s a short list:

cat Fred chair car lagoon house cat square statue sunset laughter pot germs halo danielle hallway trashcan fork bird song garage

So the trick is to create a mental image. Make the image as crazy as possible. The crazier the scene, the easier to remember. This is the scene I came up with:

A cat is latched on to Fred Savage’s leg. Fred is balanced on a chair which is balanced on a car that is driving magically over a lagoon towards a large house with big windows. In each of the windows is a giant cat head, peering out. The cat’s bodies are square. The cat’s are spitting statues of the ‘thinking man’ out of their mouths, very rapidly. The statues break through the sky and cause sunset colors to flood in. Meanwhile, Rinpoche, larger than life, is laughing at the whole situation. In his left hand he has a pot full of germs, that he blesses. The germs turn into nectar and a big halo forms around the pot. Danielle is bowing down in front of Rinpoche. This whole scene is in a photograph at the end of a large hallway. Under the picture is a trashcan filled with forks that keep overflowing, so birds are swooping in through a window, and carrying away the forks. They sing the song of fork removal, carrying them into the garage where they stockpile them.

So that’s the scene I came up with. Maybe that took me 5 minutes. The trick is to make the visualization really, really vivid. See all the colors, smell things, feel things. The more senses you employ to make the scene, the more it will stick.

I for one am very linear thinking - and very auditory. To remember the list above I would have had to remember them by sound. I would not typically bring an image to mind. That way of trying to remember things is very difficult.

Tanya and I played a game with this last night. We took turns writing down ten things and then tested each other to see if we could memorize them. It was really fun. I’m imagining a board game or something in my mind now. One version could have a person naming off an object on her list every 5 seconds. The partner could then try to recite back the items and get scored based on that. Could be fun.

So that’s about it. The site that I learned this from has tips on remember all kinds of things: dreams, numbers, foreign languages, faces, names, etc. I really recommend giving it a read.

Link to improving your memory through visualization [buildyourmemory.com]