associate with things that need doing. For me, that’s my little black schedule book where I keep my weekly agenda, phone numbers, and so on. If I happen to wake up in the middle of the night and need to remember something, I start with a mental image of my schedule book. Then I make an image of whatever I need to remember and attach it to the image of the book. So “tax” could become an image of thumbtacks, and I might imagine them sticking into the black schedule book. To make them especially memorable, I’ll imagine bright pink or glowing orange tacks. Waking up later, I’ll say to myself, “What was I supposed to remember?” I’ll go to my mental image of the schedule book and see the odd image of pink thumbtacks and soon realize that I am supposed to send in my tax return.
Let’s go a step further. You can link images in a chain. So if I have to remember to mail in a tax return, pick up my shirts, and have the car inspected, the mental image will start with my schedule book, which is the anchor I use every time. Then I’ll mentally stick tacks into it and make them a bright memorable color. Then one of the tacks will be nailing a shirt to my schedule book. I’ll make the shirts a very memorable color, too. So glowing orange tacks will be sticking a gaudy green shirt to my schedule book. Then I’ll add a car that will be driving out of one of the sleeves in a big cloud of smoke. The images should not be logical or mundane. The more nonsensical and graphic they are, the more memorable they will be.
All of this takes just a few seconds. And if the images are striking enough and connected to each other, you can doze off to sleep and easily remember everything later on. Try it, you’ll see.
So what does Ben Pridmore do? His system for creating images is considerably more complicated than my middle-of-the-night tacks and shirts, and it requires a bit of practice. But it’s basically the same idea. Instead of using a black schedule book as a starting mental image, he mentally “places” images in his grandmother’s house, with one image leading to the next.
The images themselves come from a sort of language he devised, in which the playing cards’ suits and values spell out the names of simple objects. And it is these objects that he mentally “places” at the various points in his mental journey through his grandmother’s house. If you’d like to learn Ben’s “language,” you’ll find it on the Internet, at memoryconsulting.com/pridmore.htm .
This is obviously much more challenging than remembering a few simple errands. But it works. Using similar methods, Ben has memorized the value of
pi—
that mathematical value thatour geometry teachers felt was so important—out to 50,000 digits. He starts out with 3.14159… and doesn’t quit for hours.
There is certainly no need for you to go to such lengths. But I raise this to make a point. Your memory is not a jumble, like a laundry basket or a drawer of socks. When your brain stores things away, it
connects
them in a chain. And remembering them
depends on connections
, too. Ben could not remember a single card without connecting it to something—some kind of mental image. By linking each new memory to an existing one, the process can go on, more or less indefinitely.
Here’s why this matters. Have you ever been introduced to someone and you soon realize that you had forgotten his or her name as soon as you heard it? That’s because you tossed the name into your mental laundry basket, hoping you could find it later. But your brain does not work that way. Any new name, fact, date, phone number, or anything else that is not linked to a preexisting spot in your brain will immediately just slide right out.
So as you say, “Pleased to meet you, Sidney,” you’ll need to connect your new friend’s name to something. Picture him at the Sydney opera house with its famous scalloped roofs, or imagine him skidding on his knees—anything that brings
Let’s go a step further. You can link images in a chain. So if I have to remember to mail in a tax return, pick up my shirts, and have the car inspected, the mental image will start with my schedule book, which is the anchor I use every time. Then I’ll mentally stick tacks into it and make them a bright memorable color. Then one of the tacks will be nailing a shirt to my schedule book. I’ll make the shirts a very memorable color, too. So glowing orange tacks will be sticking a gaudy green shirt to my schedule book. Then I’ll add a car that will be driving out of one of the sleeves in a big cloud of smoke. The images should not be logical or mundane. The more nonsensical and graphic they are, the more memorable they will be.
All of this takes just a few seconds. And if the images are striking enough and connected to each other, you can doze off to sleep and easily remember everything later on. Try it, you’ll see.
So what does Ben Pridmore do? His system for creating images is considerably more complicated than my middle-of-the-night tacks and shirts, and it requires a bit of practice. But it’s basically the same idea. Instead of using a black schedule book as a starting mental image, he mentally “places” images in his grandmother’s house, with one image leading to the next.
The images themselves come from a sort of language he devised, in which the playing cards’ suits and values spell out the names of simple objects. And it is these objects that he mentally “places” at the various points in his mental journey through his grandmother’s house. If you’d like to learn Ben’s “language,” you’ll find it on the Internet, at memoryconsulting.com/pridmore.htm .
This is obviously much more challenging than remembering a few simple errands. But it works. Using similar methods, Ben has memorized the value of
pi—
that mathematical value thatour geometry teachers felt was so important—out to 50,000 digits. He starts out with 3.14159… and doesn’t quit for hours.
There is certainly no need for you to go to such lengths. But I raise this to make a point. Your memory is not a jumble, like a laundry basket or a drawer of socks. When your brain stores things away, it
connects
them in a chain. And remembering them
depends on connections
, too. Ben could not remember a single card without connecting it to something—some kind of mental image. By linking each new memory to an existing one, the process can go on, more or less indefinitely.
Here’s why this matters. Have you ever been introduced to someone and you soon realize that you had forgotten his or her name as soon as you heard it? That’s because you tossed the name into your mental laundry basket, hoping you could find it later. But your brain does not work that way. Any new name, fact, date, phone number, or anything else that is not linked to a preexisting spot in your brain will immediately just slide right out.
So as you say, “Pleased to meet you, Sidney,” you’ll need to connect your new friend’s name to something. Picture him at the Sydney opera house with its famous scalloped roofs, or imagine him skidding on his knees—anything that brings
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