
How to Train Your Brain to Remember Everything - daegloe
http://lifehacker.com/5897708/how-to-train-your-brain-and-boost-your-memory-like-a-usa-memory-champion
======
feral
Something has always bothered me about the type of memory technique mentioned
in the article.

There's a sense, in which it is a 'junk' association, to associate 'zero' with
Ozzy Ozbourne eating a bat's head. Do I really want to have many such
associations in my mind?

Is there a cost? Our brains are bounded in volume, energy, complexity; there
have to be limits and costs? I've always been wary about such mnemonic
techniques, on these grounds - but I don't know if this caution makes any
sense. Anyone?

~~~
kinleyd
I've used the techniques described here for as long as I can remember (over 30
years: man, how the years have passed!) and here's how I'd summarize my
experience:

1) The techniques work well to impress your friends and family (you look like
a genius weaving that magic) but better still, they work wonders for
examinations that require lots of memorization (think history, biology,
geography, chemistry, literature and so on.) In a world where we all agree
memorization is not the best way to go, our education system can't seem to
avoid it. These memory techniques help you to "tape" the facts and spit them
out appropriately - no thinking, no stress. They've allowed me to get done
with the memorization quickly, and move on to where logic and analysis is
actually required. A double win.

2) The other great fear in life - public speaking - is also neatly handled.
Among other things public speaking combines the recalling of the content of a
story, and the presentation of that story. We fear we will forget on the one
hand, and that we will screw up delivery on the other. These memorization
techniques make the recalling a breeze, and allow you to focus on the
presentation. Worth it's weight in gold.

3) Finally, on the questioning of the value of the "junk associations"
connected with these techniques. As others have pointed out, the reality is
our human mind creates mostly junk associations anyway. We remember what we
remember only because those mostly junk associations are vivid. These memory
techniques teach you how to make vivid whatever junk association you use via
heightened or over exaggerated imagery.

What I've found is that while the short-term benefit is better short-term
memory, in the long-term the exercise of such vivid imagery has made me much
more creative in the way I see things. Sometimes crazy but mostly creative,
and lots of non sequiturs that bring out a crazy sense of humor that keeps you
chuckling along to better ideas.

~~~
kinleyd
To follow up with a bit more substance. Rather than sweat it out remembering
something like this the hard way (and it would be hard using normal methods):

    
    
        91852719521639092112
    

It's a piece of cake remembering this instead:

    
    
        A beautiful naked blond jumps up and down.
    

The imagery is easy to conjure, and before I get hammered for sexism of any
kind, imagine a beautiful naked blond of either gender. ;)

The key linking the two is this:

    
    
        1 : t, d
        2 : n
        3 : m
        4 : r
        5 : l
        6 : j, sh, soft g
        7 : k, hard g, hard c
        8 : f
        9 : p, b
        0 : s, z, soft c
    

A little bit of time and effort memorizing the key has allowed me to handle
tables of numbers and dates of amazing sizes and lengths. Thanks to a book by
Harry Lorayne I picked up by chance in my 9th grade. :)

~~~
pramodbiligiri
I concur. I too chanced across that Harry Lorayne book in high school and it
made rote memorization much less of a chore during those years :) Even now I
occasionally use it for phone numbers.

For the others, this is the book: [http://www.amazon.com/How-Develop-Super-
Power-Memory/dp/0811...](http://www.amazon.com/How-Develop-Super-Power-
Memory/dp/0811901815)

~~~
lusr
He has many other books describing his techniques but that was easily the best
one. I remember being able to memorize the sequence of half a deck of cards,
forward and back, on my first attempt. It's amazing what you're capable of if
you put the effort in (unfortunately I stopped...).

------
marakas
How many times can you use the walk-through-your-house technique without
reducing the strength of the associations ? I can see how useful it would be
to use it once - milk on your front doorstep, steaks attacking you in the
foyer, it makes sense, but what about the next time you want to remember
something? Perhaps, the next time I want to remember a sequence of numbers
starting with zero and I will have Ozzy Ozborne on my front door step. After
that maybe I want to remember something else and I might have something random
on my front doorstep like a mental image of Jack Bauer with a gun .. After a
few goes at doing this how will I remember what is supposed to go on my front
doorstep at all ?? Does anyone have experience of this ?

------
mashmac2
2007 USA Memory Champ from the high school division here-

Yes, it's very difficult to become a national champion (or be competitive at
that level). However, these skills really do help in real life at a much less
intense level - grocery lists, names and faces, _cough_ card counting... lots
of practical applications.

~~~
hobin
Can you apply it to mathematical formulae et al. as well?

~~~
res
I'd also like to know this, though I imagine it's possible. I've been thinking
about what sort of things I'd like to remember with these methods, and I feel
that the Periodic Table would be a good, fun place to start.

~~~
evoxed
Absolutely. I used a rhythm mnemonic in middle school to remember pi to 106
digits in middle school, and that was the day of the quiz (it was extra credit
in... geometry for some reason). Actually the more you practice these
techniques on completely ordinary and mundane things, the easier it becomes
when attempting formulae, tables, and graphs. Saving your memory for
"important things" will only deprive you of essentially free practice. The
periodic table is actually a good place to start as long as you don't
overwhelm yourself, so for example start with the names of the elements in
order, then the numbers will associate, and you can keep building with
recursion. OR you could begin with smaller blocks if you're more comfortable
absorbing a lot of different information at once, which can sometimes work
much better.

------
dbuxton
There is a cool startup that does a lot of the boring legwork of making up
memorable images to help with language learning: <http://www.memrise.com/>

~~~
scoot
There was a fantastic site for learning Chinese that had you draw the word
shapes and compared them to the correct form, but I didn't bookmark it, and
never managed to track it down again. Anyone?

~~~
creamyhorror
It could be Skritter.

Memrise is really an implementation of the Heisig et al approach to memorizing
Chinese characters - imagine their components to be images/shapes of things
which they mean, and use those mnemonic images to recall the characters'
meanings. Which is, unsurprisingly, the original basis of most Chinese
characters anyway, although they've undergone a lot of evolution in the
intervening millennia.

Unfortunately I'm past the stage that I need to use mnemonics to remember
characters, but it's certainly a useful tool for those starting out or at
intermediate levels.

~~~
scoot
That's the one - thank you!

------
losvedir
> In my memory palace, I walked through my house, starting at my front door,
> and placed these familiar people or numbers on my furniture.

> So for a grocery list, the example goes, imagine a container of milk
> overflowing on your doorstep, and when you get inside, perhaps two giant
> steaks attacking you in your foyer. Continue to your living room to find
> pretzels dancing on your rug.

To people for whom this works: how vivid exactly are you imagining these
things? I think I'm like this guy[1]; basically, I can't close my eyes and
"see" anything, much less "imagine walking through my house."

I think the memory palace technique is supposed to help you remember things
like this: you "walk" (via imagination) into a room and see a crazy scene full
of memory prompts. Right? But... how automatic is seeing that scene? I can
memorize "a wet lion on my bed" or something, but then I'm just memorizing it,
so why shouldn't I just memorize the original thing? And if you can walk into
that room and see the lion, and then go, "oh yeah, a wet lion, that means an
Ace of Spades" can't you just imagine a poster on the wall with an Ace of
Spades on it?

I guess, basically, the memory palace technique seems so far from useful it
makes me question how my brain works vs. other people's.

[1] <http://dfan.org/visual.html>

~~~
bmelton
Sometime last year, I read "Moonwalking with Einstein" which, despite not
having been as educational as I would have liked (there are other books for
that though,) was a great read, and did have some instruction in it.

One of the lessons in the book is was to memorize the memory champion's
grocery list which contained some items I'd never remember on my own (pickled
garlic, for example, I've never had or heard of).

My daughter and I walked through the list, doing as instructed in the text,
and instructing my daughter to do the same. I never performed an image
replacement (e.g., the ace of spades actually equals something else,) but did
try to abstract the items. For example, for pickled garlic, I imagined a car-
sized jar of pickles, but the pickles were garlic shaped. Instead of cottage
cheese, I imagined (as instructed) Charisma Carpenter bathing in a large
cottage cheese tub.

To this day, both I and my daughter can remember the list perfectly, by
walking through the house and looking how we should.

I haven't gone much farther with it to the degree that I would have had to
encode a lion into an ace of spades, but just exaggerating the image itself
into a more memorable form works for me. I also have the same lack of visual
imagination, but following the instructions in the book exactly as offered
worked perfectly.

One of the catches though, is that numerous memory champions will tell you
that becoming really good at mnemonic memory is really a game of who can be
more imaginative.

Some routines (like memorizing a deck of cards) can become rote, as you
already have the cyphers in your head, you just have to encode them. The more
advanced mnemonists have partial encoding techniques such that one mnemonic
image can encode a 3 or 4 card sequence. That doesn't take imagination, just
discipline... but encoding things, on the fly, that you haven't predetermined
the pattern to, is a game of imagination.

That said, you might suck at it, as I sort of expect to suck at it myself.
Regardless, there are other, less imaginative techniques that may work well
for you, and allow you to permanently remember things you would wish to.

~~~
losvedir
Thanks for your response, very interesting! I should clarify, it's not really
the imagination to create weird scenes that I lack so much as the ability to
actually visualize them. So I'm really curious now, when you say:

"I imagined a car-sized jar of pickles, but the pickles were garlic shaped."

did that involve you creating a mental image of this? How clearly can you see
it? Can you close your eyes and visualize just an ordinary pickle, for that
matter? I wonder how integral that is in order for this technique to be
useful, since I have trouble visualizing even a simple colored shape.

That said, it occurs to me now that I can imagine the _feel_ of things very
well, as well as the sound of things. So maybe I could prompt myself with a
slippery trumpet or something, rather than an odd visual picture.

Thanks for the book recommendation.

~~~
bmelton
To be honest, I think I'm kind of in the same boat as you.

I don't really 'see' it, as I would a scene I was actually looking at. I don't
see items in the periphery of it to the extent that I could describe non-
essential items in the scene, but I know what I pictured, and I know it's
there.

For comparison's sake, I know that my guitar is brown, and I know that it has
chrome hardware, and I know it's got that classic Les Paul shape, but I don't
really 'see' it in my mind's eye very well. When I look over at it now, I
realize several details that I didn't envision in my head, but I generally
know what it looks like.

In summary, it sounds like we might be similarly minded, and I can say that
mnemonics have definitely helped me to learn certain things very well. I feel
like it would be a bad all-around memorization technique for me though,
because the act of creating the memory takes quite a bit longer to 'encode'
than it does to just remember. While I realize that encoding is more reliable,
it isn't practical for every day memories, and there are certain types of
things I think I would be very bad at encoding.

Your mileage may vary.

~~~
losvedir
Ah, ok. Very helpful. Your description of thinking about your guitar is
exactly how I would think about it, so I think you're right that we might be
similarly minded. I'll definitely have to check out Moonwalking with Einstein,
then, if it worked for you.

~~~
bmelton
"Moonwalking" is a good book, and I encourage you to get it, however, it won't
train you on much more than how to remember that one thing. The book isn't
about "how to train your memory", rather, it is about how one guy trained his.
A subtle, but important distinction.

For something more instructional, I was recommended Higbee's, "Your Memory,
How it Works and How to Improve It[1]".

I also noticed somebody else in this topic post a link to Memrise.com[2],
which is a startup actually created by one the guy who actually taught the one
bit of instruction in Moonwalking.

[1] - [http://www.amazon.com/Your-Memory-How-Works-
Improve/dp/15692...](http://www.amazon.com/Your-Memory-How-Works-
Improve/dp/1569246297/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333370461&sr=8-1)

[2] - <http://www.memrise.com/>

------
Ryan_Shmotkin
The number one reason for 'poor' memory is actually lack of concentration.

The reason you start forgeting the name of the person just introduced to you
is that you are thinking of a 100% other things, like what to say, do I know
him, what to do.

All the excercises in the article will help you 'pause' and really concentrate
on what you want to remember.

Even the first tip: Once you hear a new name, immediatelly try to think of
someone you know with the same name. Will improve your 'name memory' greatly.
(Not because you know someone else, but because you took a second to
concentrate on the name)

------
grot
The argument I find most compelling for learning the memory palace technique
is that building a memory palace is a creative act (Yes, like Picasso). One
must be creative to construct a memorable palace for something as mundane as a
grocery list, and what's vivid works. (Joshua Foer argues just this,
persuasively too, in his book "Moonwalking with Einstein").

( _begin sort of random tangent_ ) I've tried using the memory palace
technique to memorize poetry, and I found the clashing images somewhat
disconcerting. On the one hand, there was the imagery of the poem, and on the
other, there was the image I had created. Often times, I had to create
completely new images, totally unrelated to the substance of the poem, in
order to remember it. And well, somehow the images I created always involved a
lot of...boob.

~~~
tripzilch
> somehow the images I created always involved a lot of...boob.

yet another advantage of these systems, I suppose.

A "perk", if you will.

------
wamatt
Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=trying-
to-f...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=trying-to-forget)

Just sayin.. :P

------
gouranga
These things are all good but I have found it ruins your ability to perceive
signal versus noise.

Everything seems to be a trade-off - the mind included.

~~~
burke
Could you elaborate on this a bit? I'm curious.

------
sycren
I understand how some of these techniques work like creating a story for
remembering the order of a stack of cards but surely it depends on how you
think as in some people are good at remembering language, others pictures or
feelings..

------
Zarathust
I still have no clue about how to remember 500 random numbers.

~~~
ahelwer
Associate the thing to be remembered with a bizarre visual, then imagine going
through some place familiar (say, your house) and putting these bizarre
visuals in order along a tour.

For stuff like decks of cards and long numbers this is very difficult and
requires practice. But there are easy examples you can do to show you the
power of this method. For example, I tried memorizing the basic layout of the
electromagnetic spectrum about two years ago. This was accomplished in about
five minutes and I can still recall everything with clarity at this very
moment.

~~~
shasta
Seems like I read an article recently that covered this in more detail. Very
recently...

~~~
jkolko
[http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-
Rememberi...](http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Science-Remembering-
Everything/dp/0143120530/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333328812&sr=8-1)

------
crpatino
I have read the original article and found it deeply lacking. Not in the sense
that it misrepresents the facts, but more like it fails to acknowledge the
underlying assumptions and motivations that give those fact a meaning.

//----- In theory

First of all, what is being described seems a lot like the "Art of Memory". It
is a technique whose modern incarnation was developed mostly during the
Renaissance, based on older techniques of the ancient roman schools of
rhetoric.[1] If that is the case, we need to put the Art of Memory into a
context and remember that it pre-dates Gutenberg and his printing press (let
alone any sort digital media).

So, the way I see it, its a little bit like running. We have all this
professional and olympic athletes, who we admire and subsidize so they can
devote full time to their art, who represent the maximum levels of human
physical achievement. Now, to expect those athletes to run longer and faster
than a car would be obviously ridiculous, and to expect that the whole society
ditch their cars and begin running everywhere is beyond impractical. However,
most people would agree that it's a very sad state of human existence to be
unable to move oneself without motorized assistance for a few hundred, or even
a few dozen, meters.

With memory, it is the same thing. These memory athletes may do amazing things
but it'd be foolish to expect them to store and recall as much information as
a computer. Still, having a good memory is a very human thing that everybody
can do, and we are reaching to a point where cloud computing and hand-held
devices are not empowering us to remember and handle even more information,
but to be complacent and not to bother with it.

//----- In practice

Now, when we are talking about the particulars of how this things are
remembered... There are some points... first, some people here has commented
that it is harder to remember all this crazy imagery that then payload data in
the first place. As others have pointed out, the crazy imagery works because
it is loaded with strong emotions that trigger responses in our brains that
simple digits cannot. This is part of the answer, the other part is that
imagery is meant to be reused over and over again.

As it is described in [2], you have to pay the cost upfront. You build what is
essentially a sort of ideographic alphabet with which to encode new
information in the future. I assume you could go the other way around and load
our native alphabet and guarisms with a bunch of strong emotions... but it i
not how the method evolved historically.

Other important flaw that I find in the original article is that it fails to
stress the fact that these new symbols are (or should be) a personal
fabrication. It is not like everybody has to cramp their heads with imagery of
Ozzie Osbourne chewing off bat heads. If there's a number of competitors doing
that, it must be a (very recent) defect in the teaching of the technique. Its
like the students are literally blindly copying their teacher's symbol table;
instead of developing a personal, and more effective, one of their own.

By example, the author of [2] is a sorts of fan of Tolkien, and his mental
imagery is filled up in characters from LOTR. I have very recently started to
use this technique, but its very clear that I shouldn't pick the same work of
fiction to base my own symbol table. Instead, I am using Eliezer Yudkowsky's
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality".

So it is not that we clutter our heads with useless stuff. We ought to
"recycle" the stuff that has already found its way in. To continue with the
example, may mind has attached emotions to "Theodore Nott, Chaotic Lt." (as
depicted by Dinosaurusgede [3], nonetheless) in a way that "Theoden of Rohan"
will never reach. So, I use that when trying to pinpoint the phoneme "Th"
instead.

//--- Links

[1] Art of Memory I. Introduction and historic development.
[http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/1/ars-
memorativa.htm...](http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/1/ars-
memorativa.html)

[2] Art of Memory II. Description of one technique.
[http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/2/ars-
memorativa.htm...](http://hermetic.com/caduceus/articles/1/2/ars-
memorativa.html)

[3] [http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/Potter-s-Chaos-
Legi...](http://dinosaurusgede.deviantart.com/art/Potter-s-Chaos-
Legion-177373507)

------
georgieporgie
I really like Quantum Memory Power by Dominic O'Brien:
[http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-
Champion/...](http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Memory-Power-Improve-
Champion/dp/0743528662/ref=sr_1_1)

I listened to it while working out over the course of several weeks and,
despite not putting much effort into it, was able to improve my ability to
remember short lists (e.g. groceries) and names. With more focused practice,
I'm sure it would lead to excellent results.

The only flaw in it is that some of his social references are a bit dated. In
the imagery exercises, you'll probably want to substitute your own, updated
names and faces. :-)

~~~
tripzilch
The other flaw is that, without even clicking the link I already know it has
nothing to do with "quantum" except for being a cool scientific-sounding
technical buzzword.

