To Remember, Make It Weird

Memories that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit other things we remember—but have a slightly weird twist. The most effective memory strategy is to relate new information with something you already know, but do it with a weird twist. This is the basic principle of well-known mnemonic strategies, like acrostics or "Memory Palace." The idea of acrostics is to construct a sentence in which the first letter of each word reminds you of what you are trying to remember, as in the names of the 12 cranial nerves:

"On Old Olympus Towering Tops A Finn and A German Viewed Some Hops"

(olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory, hypoglossal).

Acrostics and all other mnemonic aids work best if you create mental-image representations—the weirder the better. It is the  weirdness that makes things especially memorable. There are three basic techniques:

1.      Subject-Verb-Object. This linguistic sequence comes naturally to us. It is the way we speak. The mnemonic application is to create images for what you want to remember in a subject-verb-object form. For example, if you want to remember to pick up some corn, milk and sausage at the grocery store, you might mentally see yourself pushing a grocery cart in the store, throwing in a package of your favorite sausage, pouring milk on it as if you were watering a plant, and corn stalks sprout up as you approach the cashier. Weird, yes. Easy to remember, yes. If you wanted to remember the capital of Arkansas, one of the first things that might come to mind is Bill Clinton, who was governor there. Given his scandals, you might want to throw a rock at him. Visualize throwing a "little rock" at a picture of Clinton.

2.      Story Chains. With this more sophisticated method, you use the mental-image representations to create a story. You could, for example, try to memorize the order of planets around our sun by rote repetition: of mercury, venus, earth, mars, jupiter, saturn, uranus, and neptune. But the weird, more effective way would be to create a mental image story wherein you visualize the winged warrior of mercury, who is attracted to the statue of venus; they go to the NASA image of earth to get married; they go on honeymoon taking a suitcase of mars candy bars; they divorce and go to wail at the Jewish (jupiter) wailing wall;  they die and you sit on a cremated urn (saturn) of their remains; you dump the remains on the ground and it rains on you (uranus), which  washes the ashes out past the pitchfork sign of jupiter, who reigns over the sea.

3.      Memory Palace. This is one of several “peg” systems in which memory becomes easier when you attach your image representations to known objects, such as furniture in your home “palace.” This is how I memorize the names of students. I may attach mental image representations  of their names to objects in my yard and then move mentally into various rooms in my house until I complete the class enrollment. For example, for the names Bott, Carino, Castillo, Dillawn, Eckerdt, Flores, Garrett, Grantham, and Hans, I might see the following in my mind’s eye:

As I leave my back door, I see a robot (Bott) trying to hold the door shut as I turn the knob. Then as I push the button to raise the garage door, I see the button jump off the wall to my car (Carino).  As the door rises, I see my lawn, covered not in grass but in pickles (Dillawn).  Then, going left to right, the next thing I see is my my shed, which magically has morphed into Eckerd’s drug store (Eckert). Next I see my big cedar tree which is growing out of a wood floor instead of the ground (Flores). Then I see my little raised garden bed where I see Ulyssses Grant (Grantham) leading toy soldiers in battle. Then I see my flower bush, which instead of sprouting flowers has hands (Hans) hanging from all its branches. And so on. Students are amazed I can do call the roll in order from memory. They would be even more astonished if they knew I could do it backwards or in any order. The link anchors in my “palace” are already memorized and when I see them in my mind’s eye, the images I am trying to memorize pop into mind automatically.

 I discuss these techniques and other memory principles in great detail in my memory books (students will love my 5-star e-book at Smashwords.com). See reviews of my books at the author tab of WRKlemm.com.

Per Sederberg, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University says that "If we want to be able to retrieve a memory later, you want to build a rich web. It should connect to other memories in multiple ways, so there are many ways for our mind to get back to it. A memory of a lifetime is like a big city, with many roads that lead there. We forget memories that are desert towns, with only one road in. "You want to have a lot of different ways to get to any individual memory."

Once you have organized new information in a novel, weird way, rehearse it right away without distraction or interruption. New memories net time to set up, like wet concrete. The process is called consolidation, and without protection from distraction, a new memory may get erased or corrupted.

Sources

Memory Power 101 (New York: Skyhorse)

Better Grades, Less Effort (Smashwords.com; https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24623

Ohio State University. (2017, June 19). Why the 'peculiar' stands out in our memory. ScienceDaily. Retrieved June 20, 2017 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170619092713.htm

Memory Athlete Gimmicks. Tip 1: Familiar Locations

In my last article, I promised to explain five gimmicks that memory athletes use. These can be accomplished even by memory wimps, though perhaps not at the competition level. Most people don't want to be memory athletes, but they would like to remember things more easily and reliably. These techniques can accomplish that. Besides, they are fun.

Several thousand years ago, ancient Greek orators were noted for their ability to give hours-long speeches from memory. How did they pull off such astonishing feats? They invented a visual imaging technique where thoughts were mentally captured as images in the mind’s eye and they would recall what was to be said by recalling the images. Images are much easier to remember than words.

One common imaging technique is known as a method of location (MoL). This technique is also called "Memory Palace." That is, mental images are attached to certain locations in the three-dimensional space imagined in the mind’s eye. The idea is to use objects in a familiar area as anchor points or pegs for hanging the mental images of what you are trying to remember. Surveys of competitive memory “athletes” reveal that 9 out of 10 use some kind of imagined location device.

Use a memory palace to improve memory capability

 Here is a simple example. Consider the living room of your apartment or house. You are very familiar with each object and its location in the room. You use these as mental pegs, which is easy to do, because you already know what they are. You just mentally walk about the room and mentally see each familiar object. In turn, one at a time, you attach a mental image of what you are trying to remember on the object peg in the room. For example, suppose you identify the front door as a starting point. The first object encountered might be a recliner chair, then a lamp, then a sofa, then a coffee table, then the TV set, and so on. Now suppose you want to remember a daily "to do" list. You might remember the trip to the post office by imagining the mailman at your door, the doctor's appointment by seeing a stethoscope lying in the recliner, the grocery store by seeing the lamp making a stalk of celery sprout, the bookstore trip by seeing books stacked on your sofa, the kids' soccer practice by seeing them kick the ball into the sofa, the evening PTA meeting by seeing a TV film crew filming you there, and so on.

You can use other locations, such as body parts, specific places in your car, or highly familiar routes in the yard or at work. To recall these stored items, simply retrace your steps. Like fishing lines, each memory is hooked to a location and you just reel them in.

These techniques work, even in older people with no formal memory training. A recent survey that tested the usefulness of image location in older people found that it was effective in improving their memory capability. A study of people with superior memory revealed that nine of 10 employed the method spontaneously.[1]

Although generally used to remember objects, numbers or names, the MoL has also been used in people with depression to successfully store bits and pieces of happy autobiographical memories that they can easily retrieve in times of stress.[2]

Modernizing the Mnemonic

In early 2012, a team of Canadian researchers gave the ancient MoL mnemonic a 21st century facelift. [3] The team constructed several detailed virtual reality environments to serve as loci, rather than letting MoL learners generate their own. Researchers allowed 142 undergraduate volunteers only five minutes to familiarize themselves with the virtual environment before giving two thirds of them instructions in using the MoL to memorize 110 unrelated words. Some were told to pick a familiar environment, while others were allowed to use the virtual environment they just navigated. The other third didn’t receive any specific instructions on memory techniques.

Both MoL groups outperformed the controls. They were 10 to 16 percent more accurate in their recall, and students who used the virtual environment performed just as well as those told to generate their own landmarks, even though in both groups the students admitted they weren't diligent in using MoL. It does take practice to be good at it.

In a recent TED talk, Kasper Bormans described using a virtual reality replica of their home to help patients with Alzheimer’s disease “store” the memory of their loved one’s faces using the MoL.[4]

The main point is that people can improve their memory ability by learning to use MoL. However, with age the brain gradually loses the flexibility to change in response to training. Nonetheless, many studies show that MoL successfully slows memory decline in the normal aging population, but why this happens is a complete mystery. That is, until recently.

Thickening of the Brain

Any time the brain learns something, physical and chemical changes occur in the brain, even in the elderly. Thus MoL should be able to change the brain for the better. In 2010 a Norwegian team set out to look for the most obvious signs of MoL-induced structural changes in the brain.

Expert instructors led 23 volunteers with an average age of 61 through an intensive eight-week long program. These volunteers managed to use MoL to remember three lists of 30 words in sequential order in no more than 10 minutes, a remarkable feat of memory! The control group – matched in age, sex and education- were instructed to “live as usual” for the eight weeks.

MRI brain maps identified a surprisingly large morphological change in the cerebral cortex of the MoL-trained volunteers.[5] The amount of improvement in memory performance correlated with the amount of increased cortical thickening. Similarly, a later study by this group showed that learning MoL increased the integrity of elderly participant’s white matter compared to controls.

Rewiring the Brain

Two groups of researchers decided to determine whether learning MoL alters brain activity patterns. Scientists in Sweden recruited young volunteers in their twenties and elderly participants in their sixties and used PET scans to follow changes in their brain activity as they adopted MoL to remember a list of random words. All of the younger volunteers – but only half of the elderly – remembered roughly four more words than they had in their initial test.[6]

What about the half of elderly participants who didn't improve? One important clue was their complete lack of activation of MoL-associated brain regions during testing, prompting researchers to wonder whether these volunteer actually used the MoL.  A subsequent informal chat revealed that many older participants found it difficult to associate the loci with the words under the experiment’s tight time constraints, felt frustrated and gave up.

So although a promising technique for many, MoL training is difficult, particularly for the elderly who are less able to generate and rely on a mental map of distinctive landmarks. But I know from experience that practicing MoL improves one's imagination, and that in turn, improves the ability to get more benefit from MoL. Besides, this is a more fun way to memorize.

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[1] Maguire E. A., et al. (2003).  Routes to remembering: the brains behind superior memory. Nature  Neurosci. 6(1):90-5.

[2] Dalgleish, Tim, et al. (2014). Method-of-Loci as a mnemonic device to facilitate access to self-affirming personal memories for Individuals with depression. Clinical Psychological Science, 1 (2): 156-162

[3] Legge E. L. et al. (2012) Building a memory palace in minutes: equivalent memory performance using virtual versus conventional environments with the Method of Loci .Acta Psychol (Amst). 141(3):380-90

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMcduh1HEHA&noredirect=1

[5] Engvig A et al. (2010) Effects of memory training on cortical thickness in the elderly. NeuroImage. 52: 1667–1676.

[6] Nyberg L et al. (2003).Neural correlates of training-related memory improvement in adulthood and aging. PNAS 100 (23), 13728-33 PMID: 14597711