Introduction

      Chances are, you don't know how your memory works because neither you nor your parents were ever told anything about it in school. You can remember a few things for a couple of minutes, but after that, it's gone - unless you do some thinking of a particular kind. What kind of thinking makes reliable memories? That is the question to be answered. When you finish reading this explanation, you will be able to efficiently remember vast arrays of details without using a pen or a computer. You will reliably remember what you do, see, hear, and read. You will even be able to devise your own methods for recalling any sort of experience. In addition, knowing how the human memory works will enable you to make your speaking and writing more memorable to others.

      I won't waste your time with my theories about why this information is not simply told to every child. I will just let you know how to do it.


Associations

      Each item you notice will soon be forgotten unless you somehow pay attention to it. In all cases, what we already know is used to make new experiences retrievable. Associating one thing with another is the essential act of the mind that causes new cognitive events to be retained for the long term. This may fail to occur; it may happen unintentionally; it may happen unconsciously; or it may happen both intentionally and consciously.

      Rote memorization creates a multitude of associations over time through repetition. Remembering, or even being conscious of, all the sights, sounds, feelings and thoughts that you experienced during the rote memorization process is not necessary. There are a great many associations created. The process leads to fast recall of the memorized items without the need to recall any of these many associations. Deeply ingrained associations acquired by means of long-term repetition or intensive rote training facilitate fast and automatic recall. For instance, in is sometimes dangerous to say "halt" on a battlefield because the combatant hearing this word will reliably halt, whether that is a good idea at that time or not. In psychological jargon, military people are said to overlearn such commands. It is useful and appropriate to overlearn some kinds of material.

      Associations more conscious than those at play in rote memorization can be used to speed the learning process. If this is applied to information that is frequently used thereafter, the associations used to speed the rote process eventually become superfluous and thereafter may go unused.

      Rote associations produced by the memorization of a collection of things in a particular order are inherently one-way associations. You might have difficulty reciting the alphabet backwards unless you also memorized that order of the alphabet. This illustrates a potential problem in non-rote memorization as well. Just because you associate Lake Ontario with water does not mean that water will reliably remind you in particular of Lake Ontario.

      If you identify an item as something you don't want to risk losing, and you must use this information before you have time to complete a rote-learning process, you must intentionally and consciously associating it with something you already know well.


Structure

      This act of associating a new experience with older experiences will keep the information from being lost forever, but that does not, in itself, guarantee easy recall. Imagine throwing all of your documents in the same filing cabinet without separating categories or giving retrieval any conscious thought. Later, you might be able to say only that "it's in there somewhere." Recalling an item buried in an unorganized pile of items can require you to ruminate for hours or days. Once in 2011, I wanted to recall the name Reginald Van Gleason, III, a fictional character portrayed on The Jackie Gleason Show around 1954. As a child, I learned the name of this fictional character quite unintentionally and without any conscious thought concerning recall. It took me perhaps two hours that were spent over the next two days to recall that name. Life offers much more information than we have any compelling reason to deal with. Haphazard association is a likely mental habit. A memory system is the cure.


Multiprocessing

      Your mind is capable of more than one kind of thinking. These include verbal, visual and tactile processing as well as others. Separate parts of our brains work simultaneously to help us appreciate, for instance, sound together with site. Our memories works best when more than one kind of thinking is involved in the process of associating new information with familiar information.


Mnemonics

      The first m in the word mnemonic is silent. The e is as in men, the o is as in on and the i is as in mix. The second syllable gets the accent, so it's pronounce ne-MON-ic.

      A mnemonic is any mental event that you decide to routinely use to stand for something else. A mnemonic could be a place, a sound, an action, the sight of an object - absolutely anything you choose. A mnemonic can stand for anything you wish it to.

      In ancient Greece, there were orators who dazzled audiences by reciting very long speeches from memory and precisely repeating those speeches on other occasions. Typically, their method made use of a path in the city that they had often walked. The many places along the walk (a building, a corner, a yard, a vendor who was always there) were each consciously and deliberately associated with part of the speech. Features of these places were associated with ideas, sentences or words. Each thing to remember was linked in the mind of the orator with the next. The speech was given while recalling that particular walk. The places along the walk path were mnemonics for content in the speech.

      Please don't try this at home until you get the rest of the story.

      Selecting mnemonics is necessarily a personal task. If I suggest that you permanently use the sight of your first school as a mnemonic, you might eventually tire of it - particularly if your first school is something you would really rather forget. It could not be very useful to adopt a mnemonic that sends you over Niagara Falls whenever you think of it. You will need many mnemonics. There is no chance that somebody other than yourself could appropriately specify a large collection of mnemonics for you that are sufficiently neutral and yet vivid in your past experience. Please regard any examples I might offer as provisional, temporary, and definitely slated for replacement.


Preparation

      Your existing preparation is responsible for your success in remembering new stuff. You think of the world in categories, and you have a lot of neutral and fond memories that you appropriately associate with whatever comes your way. More preparation will enhance your memory. Consider this:

      You have some errands to do. You need to go to the department store and you need to meet a coworker named Alice for lunch when you want to tell her the password for her new job in the office.

      The password is rendlesham1893868.

      From the department store, you need tweezers, a combination padlock, isopropyl alcohol, a new comb, and an empty spray bottle.

      How would you remember this information without a machine. What do you already know? Perhaps you know that ham is one of the generic forms in place names in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and that Rendles is the last name of some famous people in England. How fortunate would it be if you also knew something about Rendlesham Forest? Lacking any knowledge about the term rendlesham (and Google can be a great help), mnemonics for letters or syllables might be needed.

      Let's take all this very slowly.

      There are many two-digit numbers that are truly famous. At least they are famous to me. Certain things happen when you turn 18. Single digits are even more famous. The numbers 18, 93, 86 and 8 form the number 1893868. Are any of these numbers particularly significant to you? Think back about your experience with one-digit and two-digit numbers. You encounter strings of numbers all of the time.

      Here are some associations that you may want to discard as soon as you get my point: Any two-digit number could be the age of some person you knew or some famous person at a particular event. In my youth, I worked for a while for an armored car company. To me, 38 meant a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver with a four inch barrel. I owned it and carried it on that job. This revolver never produced any awful memories, so that's what 38 means to me - sometimes. There are also other mnemonics I use for this number. I have had various other experiences that featured the number 38. I can easily establish many more mnemonics for numbers. Things happened to me in years like '86 and '93. The more the merrier. They come in handy.

      You don't need to do this all at once. Over time, you can accumulate what you need (by recalling things) in the categories of interest to you. If you don't need to deal with numbers very frequently, it's a good idea to start with 0 through 9 and use only those for the present time. If you have a mnemonic for just each of these, and know how to link them together, then 1-8-9-3-8-6-8 is yours forever.

      Again, don't feel obligated to use these mnemonics yourself. This is an illustration: 1 = telephone pole; 8 = a billiard ball; 9 = a balloon on a stick; 3 = a metal triangle; and, 6 = a guitar with 6 strings.

      The depth of my experience with telephone poles (as lineman), billiard balls (as a player), balloons (in a business), triangles (in an orchestra), and guitars (in a band) may stagger the imagination, but these icons may have little meaning to you. Your mnemonics must be customized to your life.

      Regardless of whether they are images, words, sensations or any other kind of entities, linking items together is a separate and important matter. In this case an example can go this way: You are leaning against a telephone pole when a billiard ball strikes the pole and rolls toward a stick that has a balloon tied to it. There is a huge triangle on the ground looping both the stick and another billiard ball which has a beautiful guitar vertically and impossibly balanced upon it upside down. Another billiard ball shoots out of the guitar body, breaking some strings as it exits the guitar. 1-8-9-3-8-6-8.

      How will you use this story? You might use it only once to get through your lunch with Alice. If you need the number only infrequently, you might use the story only when you can't quite remember all the digits. Eventually, you won't need the story.

      Linking is an arbitrary and personal business. A story that links things can often strike you as contrived, artificial or goofy because the material is not yours. The mnemonics used in the story I just told you are not yours. The story itself are not yours. They and are not fashioned from your own experiences. Speaking as a person who was once caught without a pencil, the first time you make up a story in the privacy of your own mind that saves you from losing something you really value, you will become a heartless, stone-cold storyteller.

      Besides, the process gets more interesting. If you make your stories longer, they will tend to be more plausible. Why did the billiard ball strike the telephone pole?

      Associating visual information with verbal information (names and numbers) is a good way (but not the only way) to get more than one metal process involved. The more visual scenes and tactile objects you can associate with numbers, letters and syllables the better.


Practice

      Remembering what you need from the department store is a somewhat different problem. The mnemonics that were assigned to the numbers were each concrete objects that could be placed in a physical story - a story about their juxtaposition and interaction; but the items to be purchased from the department store are already concrete objects. Try linking these object yourself, in any order you like, with any added associations you like, if any.

      The items are tweezers, a combination padlock, isopropyl alcohol, a new comb, and an empty spray bottle.

      Assuming that you are very familiar with the department store, tie the item you decide is first to the that store. That will start the chain. This will take some time, but it gets easier and faster with practice.

      Knowing what is said in this article and trying it out will make a big difference right away, but continued practice inevitably cultivates the acquisition of a new skill - the ability to more quickly and easily retrieve from your long-term memory, relevant and appropriate associations with which to link the items you wish to later recall.


Distinctions

      Associations can be used to bring thoughts together in your memory, but they can also be used to make things more distinct than they might at first seem. If you need to remember a pair of things or a larger number of things that seem very similar to you, the task becomes finding associations that are very different for each of the items in the group. Make a big thing out of whatever distinguishing features you can find among the items. When it comes to making distinctions with mnemonics, that's the big trick.


Networks, Forgetting and Beneficial Changes in the Long Term

      After a few months of trying hard to enhance your memory skills (and succeeding more than you might have thought you would), you will inevitably notice that interest has an effect. Your interests tend to create large networks of associations while networks of associations having to do with subjects that you are less interested in grow slower. More importantly, the large networks in you areas of interest grow faster if you make some choices about forgetting. You don't need to force yourself to commit to memory (for life) information that you don't value. This is important because your performance in real time (on the spot) becomes faster when you are dealing with new information that is related to a vast array of items you already know. It will reach a point where you will only need to think of two or three items in the network to permanently capture the new information. I know of two brothers who both did well in high school math. One brother can remember all of the math and the other does not remember even the Pythagorean theorem. The brother who is not big on math can remember the lyrics to almost every song he ever heard. If you are interested, you might look into the memory specialization shown by recovered autistic children and savants.

      If you persistently apply the methods describe above and you deliberately select your interests, your ability to recall the information you value will be exceptional.


Contact

      Please feel free to write to me directly. My email address is jim@futurebeacon.com. You can also go to my contact page to get my full contact information.