You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

language in numbers
In mathematics, the order of computation in complex equations is
remembered by the acronym “Bless My Dear Aunt Sally!” – Brackets,
Multiply, Divide, Add, Subtract.
Simple, word-based mnemonic devices can also be used to remember a
sequence of numbers. Try creating your own mnemonic device to
remember the first five decimal places of pi (3.14159). You might (as
indeed many memorizers do) use the mnemonic whereby a sentence is
constructed using words of the same number of letters as each digit in the
sequence. For example, in the sentence “I have a super technique (to help
me remember pi),” the number of letters in each word before the brackets is
14159.

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visual pegs
T
o prevent our deliberate memories – the items of information that we
consciously commit to the process of absorb-and-recall – from drifting away, it
helps to provide a way to anchor them in the flow. One of the most reliable
methods depends particularly on association, but uses imagination and location
(in its most rudimentary form) too. We mentally link our unit of information
with a “landmark” that we will easily be able to locate in the mind, again and
again. This serves as a visual peg or mailbox: we can revisit it at will. Two
questions arise: how can we be sure of remembering the landmark? and how can
we use this method to recall multiple items, such as a list of names, or a
sequence of points to make in a speech or an interview?
These questions, in a sense, have the same answer. If we imagine not one
peg but a whole set or system, the relationships between the pegs will help to fix
them individually in our minds. As a simple way of grasping this point, think of
a bird, a plane and a boomerang: to remember these three things, it helps to bear
in mind that all of them have air as their natural element. A set or system gives a
context to its components, and this context makes the components more
memorable. If we remember three things out of four, the fourth thing is more
easily recaptured if it is cousin to the other three.
A system of visual pegs may in theory have any number of ingredients,
although the number itself must be mem orable, and therefore an even number is
probably most appropriate: 10 is manageable; 20 is not infeasible.