From multi-coding to chunking and large displays, neurology professor Richard Restak gives his top 10 tips to boosting your recall
CREDIT: This is an edited version of an article that originally appeared on The Guardian
Methods for strengthening memory can be traced back hundreds, if not thousands of years. The key insight was learning to think in pictures, rather than words. We are primarily visual creatures who best remember images, rather than words.
Here are a few key tips to practise for retention and recall of memory.
Use all of your senses (multi-coding)
Picture yourself drinking coffee. The coffee experience is both verbal (naming and describing it), as well as sensory (tasting, smelling, etc). The more senses that can be recruited, the more likely you will be able to form a long-lasting memory, as more areas of the brain are involved.
Create meaningful stories
Our brains are designed to work with meaning. If meaning isn’t obvious, we create it. The easiest way to organise unrelated information is to place things you are trying to remember into a framework, like a story or a rhyme.
Make your own memory theatre
It was the 16th-century architect and philosopher Giulio Camillo who suggested the memory theatre as a way of using images and loci (the position of these images) to remember. So to remember milk, bread, watermelon – here is how I would do it.
House – imagine the house as a pint of milk turned on its side with milk pouring out of the chimney. Library – when I look through the floor-length window facing me, I see loaves of bread instead of books on shelves. Coffee shop – a giant coffee cup on a table outside contains a watermelon.
Use association
Simply thinking about how two or more things can be associated requires you to concentrate and attend – two brain activities which on their own lead to enhanced memory.
As the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson put it: “The art of memory is the art of attention”.
Think like a Navy Seal
Situational awareness exercises are used by US Navy Seals, and other branches of the military.
The next time you are in a restaurant, close your eyes for a few seconds and mentally picture the arrangement of the people sitting around you at the nearby tables. Chances are you probably won’t do very well with this memory exercise the first time you try it.
The goal is to employ your attentional focus in the manner of a searchlight scanning the night sky. The more you practise, the greater the breadth and depth of your memory.
Look inward
One step beyond are situational exercises directed inward. Situational exercises involving self-exploration are used in creative-writing seminars. After encountering unfamiliar people in a social setting, the aspiring novelist is asked to incorporate them into the plot of a novel or short story.
As an exercise for remembering an unfamiliar group of people, you can invent a visually vivid story around them.
Try ‘chunking’ to remember numbers
Look at this long string of digits for one minute:
According to the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (Moca), the gold standard among neuropsychological screening tests, your performance was acceptable if you remembered five or more.
Now, take another look at the digits you attempted to memorise and arrange them like this:
The organising principle at work here is called chunking – converting random numbers into a memorable string, so your brain can come up with a way of imposing impose meaning on a meaningless sequence.
Use larger computer displays
To form mental images of the greatest clarity, we are better off separating those images so they don’t overlap. So, the next time you are reading an important article, work document or committing a map or photo to memory, choose the biggest screen available to you.
Boost your ‘working memory’ to increase intelligence
Working memory, often described as the “queen of memory”, is essentially the ability to keep in your attentional foreground a piece of information while you turn your attention to something else.
See how many prime ministers you can think of, starting with Rishi Sunak and going back as far as you can. Now list their names in alphabetical order. To do this, you have to mentally move the names around and rearrange them. What you are doing is encoding one item while retaining access to items recalled moments earlier. This is working memory in action.
Keep testing yourself and don’t give up
Finally, one highly effective technique for improving your memory is to keep re-testing yourself on the material you want to remember. Even after you have learned something, your long-term memory for it will be strengthened if you repeatedly challenge yourself to recall it.
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