Memory tip for 29th of April 2011

Today my memory tip is: formulate rhythmic sentences to remember information which is important to you. In fact, I could say that you should make short poems that would be based on sentences that rhyme and this rhyme will help you to absorb material you want to memorize. This idea might sound stupid for you, but I do not mean that you have to become a poet. It is just one of mnemonic techniques that help you to train your memory. If you looked back to school years you would probably remember some poem that you learned by heart and you could still say some of the verses from it. Why? Because of the rhyme, that helped to push those lines to your long term memory. 

Don’t worry if the sentences or small stanzas you create are funny. You are not obliged to show them to anyone if you don’t want to. They are for you to train your ‘memory muscle’. Let me give you a few examples that I made a few seconds ago.

“When I come to see you, we will stay together: Peter me and you.

If John wants to join he will have to consult it with Ron.

And if Kate decides to leave we are going to have a nice eve.” 

I hope you can see now what I mean by formulating rhythmic sentences to memorize things. Repeat the sentences you create and they will quickly sink into your long term memory. Again, this does not mean that the method has to become the main one how you memorize things. It is just one additional exercise to your arsenal of mnemonic techniques and I recommend practicing it for a few times, because various exercises help you to develop various parts of your brain and enable you to develop a ‘universal’ memory, which is not based on one or two mnemonic techniques. 

Read my previous post:

Remember numbers by associating them with words of similar pronunciation

Memory tip for 15th of April 2011

Yesterday I started talking about ways of remembering numbers and today I will continue the topic. In my previous post I told you that it is much easier to remember a number if you associate it with some object. Today my tip for remembering numbers is this: change numbers to letters and letters to words. Before you try to change numbers to words you have to assign each number (from 1 to 9) a unique letter. You can start from the beginning of alphabet and do it like this: 1-A, 2-B, 3-C till you have paired each number with a letter. It is best to start from the beginning of alphabet because it will be much easier for you to remember the sequence of letters and numbers. 

So, let us now take a random combination of numbers, for example, 321, which we would transfer to letters CBA. To remember them better, let us turn them into a phrase, each letter corresponding to a word. Let’s say we get: Central Basketball Association. So, when you need to remember a combination of numbers 321, you just bring to your mind this ‘Central Basketball Association’ and try to change the first letters of each word back into numbers. 

To easy up the process you might as well make a visual association of the phrase with some images. Let’s say for word ‘Central’ you may imagine the central square of your city (or a shopping centre), for ‘Basketball’ you may imagine some basketball competition for kids in the square and for word ‘Association’ you can imagine Associated Press broadcasting the event for the entire world. I hope that after joining all these things together you will be able to learn numbers very fast. You simply have to make matches of numbers and letters, then letters and words and then connect the words with some visual images. Try to choose the versions of matches that fit you best.

Tomorrow I will continue my posts on how to remember numbers. 

Read my previous posts:

Associate a number with a word that has a similar image of the number

Drink coffee to remember better