Twenty (or so) Handy Tips to Improve
Your Memory…..

(first published in the Independent, January 2007)

Human memory  is not meant to be perfect.
It’s primary
purpose is to  guide
our current actions by pulling on past experience , and that involves amplifying
some events,  blurring  others and junking most of them
entirely. So a properly effective memory is selective, distorted, often vague
and ultimately forgetful.

Having said that,
to function well in day to day life you need to store a vast and fairly
accurate  database of  past events,  skills,  words, names, facts, dates, plans, and
locations. You need to be able to hold  a phone number in mind for long
enough to dial it,  recall where you
left your keys, remember where you went for your last holiday, match faces to
names, and state your post code without hesitation.

Failing in  such things
does not necessarily suggest that your memory is failing. It may be that you
are simply using your memory ineffectively. The following techniques should
help you to use it better:.

Remembering
events:

Connect!.

Your memory can only be as  good as your  ability to experience the world.  If you  are actively engaged in what is
happening around you  your brain
will automatically encode your experience of them but if you are day-dreaming
your memory of external  events will
be hazy . Imagination can be a powerful memory aid, though. If you want to lay
down a memory of a route , say, you might imagine you
are  being chased along it by a
demented knifeman rather than cruising it in the safety of your car. If you can
generate a real sense of fear every landmark and turn will be registered.

Keep
socially, physically , and intellectually active

Seek out other people and engage as often as possible in social
activities which challenge and stretch your mind. Those which combine physical
activity with social engagement are best of all –  e.g. dancing, rambling, .amateur
dramatics. Get into the habit of creating
memory “games” from everyday experiences, such as grocery
lists, the street names you pass on your drive home, or car number plates.
Solve a crossword or some other challenging puzzle every day

Keep a
mental note.

When it is
important to remember an event, try putting  it into words as it happens, as
though it is a sports event and you are a commentator. This will help focus
your attention
and organise the information into a
form that will make it easier to access later.

Repeat,
repeat, repeat

Mentally run over
past events  you
want to memorise.  A late-night mental reprise is
particularly useful because memories seem to be consolidated during sleep.. Current evidence suggests that neural patterns generated
during wakefulness are replayed during sleep by  thehippocampus
– the organ deep in the brain which initially registers experience. The
patterns are then reflected by, and eventually copied on to the cortex –
the grey surface matter -  where they remain as long-term
memories.

Verify

Check your
recollections against external sources  if you want them to be accurate.
Remembering involves reconstituting the neural activity that was occurring in
your brain when you had the  original experience. You never
reconstitute a previous moment perfectly– if you did you would have no
way of
distinguishing between a memory and the present  moment.  Instead you reconstitute bits of the
original along with a background “hum” of current experience, and
sometimes the two get mixed together by mistake.  If you are standing in a thunderstorm,
say, and happen to recall a long-distant picnic, the picnic memory may get
“contaminated” by your current experience of rain. So next time you
think of the picnic you remember it taking place in a downpour, even if the
weather was actually fine. Over time memories can  get distorted beyond recognition
in this way, so if it is important to remember something accurately you should
repeatedly check it– if possible – against external records or by
cross-referencing them against other people’s recollections .  Doctors, for example, and taught not to
prescribe drug dosages from memory, but always to look them up.

Keep a Notebook or start a blog

A Blog , or a  private journal, will  encourage you to  impose a story line on the things that
happen to you, and this  will act as
a  linking device – like the
string in a necklace – to lead you from one event to another so you can
recall your personal history in more detail. If you are writing for other
people (or hoping to) it will encourage you to “colour
up” the things you describe and thus make them more memorable (if not
necessarily more accurate!).

Keep a visual
diary

If writing things
down is too much of a hassle, get into the habit of snapping moments throughout
the day . A photo often brings memories flooding back
– both of the events surrounding the captured moment, and also,
sometimes, of
whole periods of one’s life. Think of the effect of seeing
yourself in some long-discarded dress, for example, or an experimental hair-do.

REMEMBERING
FACTS

Learn
little and often

Limit what you try to take in at a single session.  Most
people can only handle about four or five items at a time and  if they try to take in more the
earlier ones get forgotten before they even start to  be laid down..  So if you have to learn a new skill or
digest a lot of data., do it in several short
sessions, punctuated by periods of review, rather than by
“cramming”.

Use the back burner

If you can’t  immediately
access something you know you know, turn your mind to other matters for a while
or “sleep on it”.  Your
brain will go on roaming for the quarry unconsciously, and when you next turn
attention to it you will probably find the answer will pop into your head.

Weave it in

Memories are
stored in a weblike way –  new facts are linked to one
another by the elements they have in common. So the more links you form between
a new piece of information and material which is already firmly encoded, the
easier it will be to recall.

Keep methodical notes

Writing things down forces you to organize  information
and experience consciously. Your brain will organize and edit it anyway –
but left to itself it may reduce a crucial physics lecture, say,  it to an enduring image of the
lecturer’s bizarre tie rather than a cogent description of  the second law of thermodynamics.

..and read it back

Notes are doubly useful, of course, if you actually read them back.    So go over your records
frequently, and try to join them together into a “meta-story” by
looking for connections between one set of notes and another.   Memories are stored in a web-like
way, and the denser the interconnections between them,  the easier it is to pull out the
most useful ones when needed.

Remembering numbers, words, and lists

ACRONYMS  are formed by taking the first letter from several associated  words to form a new word, eg LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of
Radiation). You may need to play around with the letters to get a useful
acronym. If  you
wanted to memorise the lobes of the brain: frontal,
parietal, occipital and temporal, for instance, you might take the initial
letters: FPTO and then include the “a” after the P in
“parietal” and  juggle
them to make the fairly apt: “OF-PaT”.

RHYMES & SONGS. Rhythm, repetition, melody, and rhyme  aid memory
because these things are mainly processed in the right hemisphere of the brain,
whereas word-based , “semantic” information is largely processed in
the left hemisphere. Linking them to  word-based information
effectively “speads” the information  throughout the brain.  If you want to recall the words of a
song, say, you will do it much more easily if you can hum the tune.

CHUNKING. This is a technique generally used when remembering
numbers, although the idea can be used for remembering other things as well. It
is based on the idea that short-term memory is limited in the number of things
that can be contained. When you use "chunking" to remember, you
decrease the number of items you are holding in memory by increasing the size
of each item. In remembering the number string 64831996, you could try to remember
each number individually, or you could try thinking about the string as 64 83
19 96 (creating  4
"chunks" rather than 8 “bits”.of
numbers).  Chunking  is particularly helpful if you
can form meaningful units. For example – you might turn the last four
digits above  a
single chunk by thinking of them as
the year:1996. If you associate that chunk with an event such as
“the year my son was born” the chunk is even easier.

METHOD OF LOCI. This technique was used by ancient orators to remember
speeches, and it combines the use of organization, visual memory, and
association. Before using the technique, you must identify a common path that
you walk. This can be the walk from your home to work, a walk around your
garden, or even the route from your living room to your kitchen.  What is essential is that you have a
vivid visual memory of
both the path and a number of  permanent “landmarks”  which lie along its route. These may be,
for example, a pillar box, or a pedestrian crossing; a tree or step; or  - if your
route is inside - a particular door , shelf or lamp . Once you have determined
your path, imagine yourself walking along it, and note th landmarks very carefully in your mind,
“fixing them” in place.

Once you have done this you can start to use the path to remember
things.  . This is done by mentally
associating each piece of information that you need to remember with one of
these landmarks. For example, if you are trying to remember a list of
mnemonics, you might remember the first--acronyms--by picturing a LASER beam
emerging from the mouth of the pillar-box.

REMEMBERING PEOPLE

Get the name!

When you are first introduced to someone,  make sure you
get their name. If you are not sure that you have caught it correctly, ask for it  to be
repeated immediately. And repeat it back to make sure you have heard it
correctly. If it is an unusual name, ask how it is spelt, and repeat the
spelling back. Thereafter repeat the person’s name several times during
your initial conversation : “Do you live
locally, James? James, can I fetch you another drink?” etc.. Bear in mind, though, that ,
some people (especially in England)  find it intensely irritating to be
repeatedly addressed by name. If you sense this is the case (pick up your cue from  surrounding
conversations) you can do almost as well by repeating their name silently .

Notice who the new person is with and link
their name to those that you know. For example, if you know Jane and she  introduces
you to Zoe, make a visual note of the two of them
together. Establish their relationship with other people you know  (“Do you know many people
here?” is a very useful icebreaker in this regard) and spend a little
time “slotting in” the new person to your existing circle of  acquaintances.

Link a person’s name to a physical  feature
or characteristic. If a person has a resemblance to
something – fishy eyes; currant bun features, a moon-shaped face – find some way to link their name to that feature. If there
is no obvious connection stretch your imagination to contrive one. For example,
if the person’s name is  Cookson
and they are very thin , imagine them as the son of a cook who forgot to cook
for his children. The dafter the idea the more memorable it will be.

Celebrity
connections. If you are introduced to someone who
shares a name with someone famous, imagine this new person in the place of the
celebrity…again, the more absurd the image this presents, the better. If
you meet  a
man called “Monroe”
for example, take a second to imagine him dressed in a fifties’ style
frock that is being blown up by air from a grating. Remember – the person
before you need never know what is in your mind, so  you can make your links as daft
as you like.

Ask again. If you run into
someone whose name you have forgotten, ask again. It isn't bad to ask someone
for their name again, but try some of the memory clues to see if you can
remember it for the next time you run into them!

Remembering physical skills

Relax: When you get good
at some physical procedure  such as riding a bike or swimming
-  it ceases to be something you
have to remember consciously. The “action” scheme associated with
it – that is, the sequence of movements required to do it – is
encoded in an unconscious  part of the brain, which will run
through the motions automatically if it is given the right cue.  This leaves your conscious brain  free to
concentrate on other things – deciding where to go  etc – rather than moving your arms
or pushing pedals.  Trying to
over-ride the unconscious memory by actively thinking about how to do something
will actually inhibit this expertise. So if you are unsure about whether you
can remember
something such as a dance, or how to play ping-pong or how to
ski, you may benefit  from thinking
about something else and allowing your body to remember its moves without
interference.

This may even work for a challenge like
finding your way around a town  you haven’t visited for a
long time,  or recalling  a once-familiar phone number.  If you want to call a friend whose number
you long misplaced, for instance, you might just let your fingers play over the
phone buttons while thinking about the person.