How to Remember

cam•bist (kam'bist)
—n.
1. a dealer in bills of exchange.
2. an expert in foreign exchange.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on why we forget, today I’d like to examine ways to remember. Way back in college, a dorm mate asked fellow residents to take a series of memory tests for his class project. The goal was to remember a list of 10 items with three different methods. I did very well since I had read a book on memory tricks and used them. Another friend of mine, Joe, got 10/10 on the first pass with no “tricks” and did worse on attempts 2 and 3 when asked to use specific memory methods. So while these methods do work, they also require some practice.

The human brain remembers facts poorly but stories and songs quite well. I’m amazed that anyone can remember the entire Iliad or Odyssey but it was passed down orally for generations before being written down. So memory trick #1 is to create a story that unites your list.

When driving in to work today I experienced a flood of ideas for blogs posts and did not want to forget them before reaching my desk to write them down. So I made up this simple story:

“I lost the KEYS to the SCHOOL. It was over a YEAR AGO. So long in fact that I’ve forgotten the NAMES of the people involved. So much THYME gone by.”

This translates as:

• Lost Keys and why we forget (yesterday’s post)
• First Day of School advice
• Retrospective of my first blog topic (Rule of 3’s) from a year ago
• How to remember Names (which became this post)
• Substituting dried herbs for fresh

Sometimes a visual story can help to liven up boring items like a shopping list:

The CABBAGE rolled off the table and was impaled upon a CARROT. It LEEKED a red fluid like BEET juice or perhaps blood from a STEAK. I mopped it up with some BREAD.

Who knew a grocery list could be so violent?

Bottom Line

The story method is easy to use (if you’re creative and like making up stories). The drawback is forgetting the start of the story or missing a link somewhere in the middle and losing your train of thought and half the story.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss a different technique that handles items independently and not as one long chain.

Aside

The dorm I referenced above was the Honors College floor at Bryan Hall of Michigan State and many of the residents had excellent memory skills. For example, John Paola was the National Spelling Bee Winner of 1977. One day as we passed in the hall I asked, “John, can you spell ‘cambist’?" He immediately stopped and shouted, “How do you know that?” I explained that his name was in “The Book of Lists” along with his winning word. Today Spelling Bee winners can be found on the Internet.