How To Remember Anything
Unless you have a particularly gifted memory, most people would say their memory is lacking at best. But a lot of what modern day people are trying to remember is surprisingly abstract. A person's name is just a sound that we associate with them. You can't see or feel a date: it's a globally agreed upon framework to structure time that tries its best to fit in with the earth's orbit around the sun. Our brains struggle with abstract.
We don't struggle quite so much with visual and spatial memory. You can see a face you haven't seen in years and know that you've met that person before — remembering their name is another question. After a couple of commutes to a new place of work you stop consciously thinking about how to get there. You can probably remember the layout of a houses you grew up in, or a friends house you used to visit. Can you still remember certain routes from one classroom to another in a school you attended?
All of this means that we can hijack our brain's ability to remember by choosing how we form the memories. Using our senses to imagine how something might look, smell, sound, feel and taste massively increases the chance that we remember something. Let's go over some techniques.
Memory Palace¶
A memory palace starts with any location you can call to memory. It has to be familiar enough that you can imagine walking around it. Some examples could be your house, a place of work, your route to the shops etc. As long as your memory of the location is strong enough you could even use fictional locations from your favourite video game!
Then you "fill" your memory palace with the stuff you want to remember, all the while using creative imagery to make the information more memorable. Let's use a small shopping list to step through an example. The things you need to buy are: bread, butter, milk and eggs.
Imagine walking up to your front door. You pull the door open only to find yourself facing a wall of bread loaves. The loaves are stacked up as if they were bricks. There is a strong smell of freshly baked bread. You notice that instead of cement, these "brick" loaves are stuck together using large amounts of butter. Some of the loaves have butter dripping down them where too much has been used. Wanting to get into your house, you push through the wall of bread like a scene from an action movie and arrive in your living room.
Sitting on your couch is a huge black and white cow! (This represents the milk.) It's even sitting like a human would. What sounds might it be making? Can you smell the fresh cow pats? Your presence frightens the cow and it begins throwing eggs at you in defiance. You can feel the eggs smashing and cracking against your body and even feel the egg white dripping down your face.
I hope you get the idea. Identify anchor points in your memory palace to attach creative images to. In this example I only used two anchor points: the front door and the couch. As you need to remember more things you just increase the journey around your memory palace, adding items to specific anchor points. Some people get really creative with anchor points. I have read about people using their wallets and using each corner of each bank card used as an anchor for different information!
Memorable Sentences¶
In school, to learn the clockwise order of the compass points (North, South, East & West) we were taught the sentence "Never Eat Shredded Wheat", where the first letter of each word maps to the first letter of a compass point.
In the same fashion, learning the strings of a guitar (EADGBE), I was taught the morbid sentence "Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good-Bye Eddie". Conversely, my wife grew up with the sentence "Every Angry Dad Gets Big Ears".
Songs¶
Using the memorable medium of song, we can string together the information we need to learn to make it stick in our minds. Granted, a lot of the content out there is aimed more at younger audiences (such as MC Grammar ), but that doesn't stop channels like AcapellaScience from tackling harder subjects. Want to learn coding concepts such as variables and data types through rap ?
If you are particularly musical, this technique could see you becoming the person who creates the songs.
Metaphors and Analogies¶
Have you ever heard it said that Italy looks like a boot? Or what about electrical voltage being compared to water pressure? Metaphors and Analogies help connect new and unfamiliar information with ideas and experiences you already understand.
When learning the basics of code, I started to see a variable as a box that contained "stuff". If I need to change the "stuff" in the box, I can open it up and swap out the contents. Boxes are portable so it made sense to pass variables into functions etc, like passing a box from one person to another. A constant then becomes a locked box: once something has been put inside, it is locked and cannot change.
Writing and Repetition¶
The book that these notes are from (mentioned at the bottom if the page), consistently emphasises the importance of handwritten notes. The act of writing and re-writing/organising your notes has a notable impact on your ability to remember the content.
With the advent of LLMs such as ChatGPT, we can get the best of both worlds: record your notes by hand, improve them, cull them etc. And once you have notes you are content with, upload a picture of the page to ChatGPT and instruct it to transcribe your hand-written notes. You can copy and paste the result into your favourite digital note app.
Combinations¶
Each of the above techniques will be worth exploring and trying out. But the real benefit will come as you learn to combine them. For example: handwriting your notes, using those notes to come up with memorable metaphors, sentences, songs etc and then finding creative ways to store those "artifacts" in a memory palace! To begin with, a memorable sentence may start off as a collection of chunks, but once the sentence is remembered then the whole thing becomes a single chunk and easily brought into your working memory via a memory palace.
This post is part of a series: How We Learn
This content was inspired by A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science — By Barbara Oakley, Ph.D.
