ANOTHER TECHNIQUE TO IMPROVE YOUR MEMORY

In this post I will try to explain another rather bizarre memory technique that I personally use all the time. I call it the story system, although professional memory experts probably have a technical name for it. In this system, you basically create a story by forming the items in a list into a connected series of actions that can be visualized.

Here’s an example. Say you are going to the store and want to be sure to get the following 10 items: eggs, butter, soup, a roast, ice cream, lettuce, chicken broth, sour cream, cookies, and milk (which, by the way, are the same 10 items that I am still able to recall from last week’s post using the pegs). Instead of associating each item with a peg, you simply envision a story in which one item leads to the next. The more bizarre the story is, the more memorable the items will be.

Here’s a sample story off the top of my head. Envision a person throwing an egg to another person who doesn’t catch it because he has buttery hands. He goes to pick the egg off the ground but instead mixes it into an buttery egg soup, which he then puts around a roast that happens to be in a crock pot on the ground beside him. When the roast is done, he scoops it out with an ice cream scooper instead of a spoon and puts in on a big leaf of lettuce instead of a plate. As he’s eating his meal he accidentally drinks a cup of chicken broth. Then decides to form his roast into a lettuce wrap and dip it into sour cream. When he’s done, he finishes off his meal with cookies and milk.

Again, this sounds utterly ridiculous, I know. But ridiculous or not, it works, and that’s why it’s worth trying out.

If this were an infomercial, I suppose this would be a good place for a testimonial. Check out this success story. A few years ago I asked a class of 7th graders to create a random list of 50 items. I wrote the items on the board in the front of the room. It took five minutes or less to come up with a random list. Then, over the next 10 minutes or so, we used this technique to create a story with all 50 items. We took five minutes to review the story a time or two. Then I erased the board, had them each to take out a sheet of paper, and asked each to write down the list in order. Several of the students had committed this random list to memory in 15 minutes, writing down perfectly all 50 items in order. Many other students missed only an item or two of the 50. And this was after being introduced to the technique for the first time just 15 minutes earlier and having only a very short time to rehearse the story. Some of these students have told me since then that they still use this technique to memorize all sorts of lists and to prepare for tests in school. By the way, I use this technique nearly every week to memorize my sermons. But I’ll tell you more about that in a future post.