Tips and Tricks to Train Memory

Tips and Tricks to Train Memory from the cognitive skills training experts at LearningRx

If you think you’re stuck with a weak memory – think again. Memory is just one of the many cognitive skills that can be trained, strengthened and enhanced with the right type of mental exercises. Practicing these memory techniques will make them easier and more effective and will lead to a better, stronger memory over all.

Make memories memorable. Many memory-building techniques rely on mnemonics, or learning techniques that use things that are easy to remember to represent things that are harder to remember. The human brain more easily recalls information that is personal, emotional or sensual, so assign strong multi-sensory associations to help remember things that are otherwise mundane. Here’s an example of how this technique could work for a grocery list. Start with four items: bacon, toilet paper, eggs and lettuce. To link them in a memorable way, picture a sizzling strip of dancing blue bacon joyfully dripping hot grease onto the next item on your list – toilet paper. The animated toilet paper roll is in agony. He’s burned all the way through and is desperately trying to patch himself up with egg whites. Stuck in the gooey mess of broken shells is an angry head of lettuce who’s trying to escape before her leaves wilt. If you can’t quite hold on to that image – build upon it with silly details until you can. Make the lettuce a Southern Belle with a nasal twang who’s irate because her new French Manicure is covered in egg yolks.

Use a Memory Palace: The memory palace is a powerful mnemonic technique that’s been in use since ancient Rome and is routinely used by memory champions. It’s so effective because it combines our remarkable ability to remember familiar places with other qualities that make memories memorable. The “palace” simply refers to any place that you know well and can easily visualize a standard route through. To use your route to work as a memory palace, first visualize the route in detail and mentally mark places where you will put memories. First you go past your mailbox, then past the dilapidated Victorian on the right, through the field with the horses, then past the windmill, bomb-shelter house and the vicious dogs. Then imagine taking the route again, and on each memory mark, visualize what you want to remember in vivid, ludicrous, funny, smelly detail. Let’s use our grocery list as an example. First imagine the sizzling, aromatic blue bacon bouncing on your mailbox to greet you good morning. At your second memory mark – the dilapidated Victorian – giant lettuce meteors are bouncing off the roof. Next, the field of horses has been newly TP-ed and the horses sip tea over an intellectual discussion (in British accents) regarding the most efficient way to clear their toilet paper clogged nostrils. At the fourth memory mark, the windmill is upside down whisking a massive cauldron of foamy egg whites. With your own customizations, you can use this technique to remember long lists of almost anything. It’s great for outlining a speech or project and jogging your memory mid-stream.

Sing it. Creating a song is a fun way to remember many things. Remember “School House Rock?” If you’re the right age, you probably spent a lot of Saturday mornings watching those educational clips between your favorite cartoons. If so, you can still probably sing the preamble to the constitution. (Here’s a hint to get you started: “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…”) Assign the same type of song-style mnemonic to anything you want to remember. Let’s go back to our grocery store list and try it with the Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star tune: Bacon, toilet paper, lettuce and eggs That’s all I need; I won’t need two bags.

Use acrostics. An acrostic is a poem, word or other form of writing in which the first letter, syllable or word of each line, paragraph or word spells out a message. The mnemonic for remembering planets is a well-known example. Take the first letter of each planet in order and make a sentence with them as the first letters of each word. Mary’s Violet Eyes Made John Sit Up Nice reminds us that the order from the sun is Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune. In our grocery list example, you can simply remember that you need BLET for Bacon, Lettuce, Eggs and Toilet paper.

Create your own acronyms. Acronyms are similar to acrostics in that they use parts of words to form another word to help you remember. Common acronyms are often more widely used than what they stand for. IRA stands for Individual Retirement Account, and DVD now stands for Digital Versatile Disc. Roy G. Biv is a commonly taught acronym to help remember the colors of the rainbow – or in physics the colors of the visible spectrum. Roy G. Biv stands for Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet. Creating your own acronyms is a great way to help your children remember daily chores or lists. For example, as they’re walking out the door for school, do a “SHLuB” check: Snack, Homework, Lunch and Water Bottle. Eventually your kids will start checking for “SHLuB” themselves (or whatever acronym you choose.) Have them help you come up with one – creating it will encourage them to have more buy-in.

Chunk it. Chunking is the common practice of breaking big amounts of information into chunks the brain can handle. Studies show the average brain can hold about seven pieces of information before it gets overwhelmed. Social security, credit card, and telephone numbers are all chunked. Consider the number 6304709631. As a 10-digit number, it’s overwhelming. But when chunked into 630-470-9631, it’s easily recognized as a telephone number, and becomes a much more efficient way to memorize the number for LearningRx Naperville.

Teach it. Teaching someone else anything will help you remember it better!

Take care of your brain. Studies continue to show that healthy brain food, adequate sleep, physical and mental exercise, and social interaction all help boost memory. Deep breathing, adequate water intake, and proper supplies of vitamins and minerals are essential to proper brain function and memory.

Is all this starting to sound like too much work and you’re tempted to just rely on a pen and paper to write it all down? Resist the urge! The average person wastes an estimated 40 days a year compensating for things they’ve forgotten. A better memory means less time searching for things, either physically or in your mind, and can lead to an improved understanding of academic material or instructions, better grades or work performance, and more opportunities.

While these at-home methods can certainly help improve memory, personalized one-on-one brain training is proven to bring dramatic improvement to long- and short-term memory skills and the other cognitive skills that make up intelligence, including: visual and auditory processing, logic and reasoning and attention. A study of 2009 LearningRx results shows graduates under the age of 25 gained an average of 3.8 years ability in short-term memory and 4.3 years ability in long-term memory. Other cognitive areas saw similar jumps, with an average IQ increase for all students of 14.9 points. To learn more, visit www.learningrx.com/chicago-naperville or call 630-470-9631.