Remember Anything

One day you are talking to some friends at a party and you want to approach someone that you met somewhere, but you can’t remember their name. Later on you want to tell someone about the movie you saw last week, but the name of the lead actor escapes you. Then on the way home you remember that you’re supposed to pick up something from the store, but you just don’t remember what. What’s going on? Do you have some affliction? Are you losing your mind? Probably not. Difficulty remembering things is as old as the human race.

Your memory is only as good as the skill you have at using it. There are many ways to improve your ability to recall things, from simply practicing to tricks used by the professionals. If you simply make an effort to remember something (a name, a date, a new word) and use it several times a day for a while, you’ll soon have the ability to recall it with ease. Words that don’t get used often aren’t easily retained. Your mind selectively keeps your most used vocabulary available. Of course, things that are associated with major events in your life have high priority. My whole generation remembers the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated (but we couldn’t tell you much of anything about the previous day). We remember the wedding (but often not the anniversary), the game-winning touchdown (but not the first score of the game) and on and on. So for everyday life you may only need to practice more to have a better memory.

Then there is the advanced memory issue. Suppose you need to know each name of a group of items by memory. If you’re like me you could stare at a box of seven crayons of different colors for ten minutes and not be able to recall more than three or four. The pro, however, could look at them for ten or fifteen seconds and (hours later) name the color of each one. How do they do that? you ask. It isn’t really difficult. They use what is called a memory device. The way it works is that they start with seven items that are very easily remembered in association with each number. For example- they might associate the number one with a candlestick, the number two with a cobra profile, the number three with a triangle and so on. Then when they want to remember some group of items, they associate each item with one of the memory devices. One crayon might be blue, so they would think of perhaps a boy’s birthday candle. Another crayon might be red, so they would associate that with the red of a cobra’s eyes. A third crayon might be green, so a recycling triangle might be associated. And on down the list until all the items are associated with one of the devices. Now, when they want to recall the colors, they start with one (the candle), which was a boy’s birthday. What color? Of course, now we remember blue. How about the second color? Let’s see—two was the cobra profile and it had red eyes. Now we’ve got it. So on to three which was the triangle (recycling, which is always green). And that’s how it’s done.

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