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

walking the walk
EXERCISE TWELVE
If at first you find it difficult to recall the items that you placed along a journey,
this exercise will train your mind to make strong associations by asking you
actually to “walk the walk”.
1. Choose a journey that is short enough for you to walk – perhaps a stroll in a
favourite park. Before you go, visualize the walk and decide upon 10 stages
along it. They might include a favourite bench, the rose garden, a children’s play
area or a pond.

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2. Write the following list on a piece of paper: wheel, explosion, gorilla, car,
bishop, pencil, cage, blue, computer, champagne. Take the list, go out and “walk
the walk”.
3. When you arrive at the first stage, stand still. Make an imaginative
association to link this stage with the first item on the list. Walk on, linking all
the items to all the stages.
4. When you return home replay the walk in your mind, thinking again about
what items you linked to what stages. Refer to the list of items if you need to.
5. The next day do the walk again, this time without the written list. As you come
to each stage, recall the item that you mentally placed there. Then, on the
following day, replay the walk only in your imagination – can you remember all
the items?
Of course, there’s no reason why we should call upon only one journey. I
keep a store of different journeys (like a series of mental videotapes), each of
which I use to memorize certain types of information: my golf course to
memorize a deck of cards; a journey I made as a child to memorize the names of
people at conferences I attend. If I need to remember a shopping list, I place the
items on a journey around my house. In effect, this is an extension of the Roman
“memory villa” technique. Like the Romans, who created mental pictures of
their own homes, I believe the journey method works best if the journey takes
place in a setting that we know.