Improve Your Memory

Word-Image Association

Recalling a past event is not like using a digital camera, and photographic memory is a myth, but this doesn't mean that the mind doesn’t work well with images. In fact, for most of us, that's how it works best. Making associations between something you need to remember and an associated image can also be referred to as elaborative encoding -- putting that associative stamp on something to make it memorable. This works especially well if there is a lot to remember, as your mind will then be filled with sequential images that are so outlandish as to be unforgettable.

Comes In Handy: For almost any occasion at all when you need to remember something. It's that functional.

Method Acting

You've heard of method acting, that system of acting developed in the 19th century by Constantin Stanislavski and later pioneered in the U.S. by Lee Strasberg. Robert De Niro and Al Pacino are said to be method actors, and it works by uncovering the motivations of a character and then planting emotional cues within that character's lines that come from the actor's own personal, deeply felt life experiences. This same approach can be applied to memory. As Joshua Foer writes, "Method acting is a way of making words memorable."

Comes In Handy: If you're preparing for a presentation or speech.

Chunking

Chunking is nothing more than the term suggests: turning extended strings (typically of numbers) into smaller chunks, ones that are easier to remember individually than one long string. Evidence of the practicality of chunking can be found in something with which we are all familiar: credit-card maintenance. Credit cards represent 16-digit account numbers, but they are divided into smaller sets of numbers to make them easier to remember.

Comes In Handy: When you're tasked to recall a phone number, an accounting figure or your own social-security number.

Give Numbers Some Personality

This technique, as described in Moonwalking with Einstein, was used by a famous memory master in which he gave each of the 10 numbers a personality, i.e., "7" was a man with a mustache, and he could remember long strings of numbers by simply recalling their personalities.

Comes In Handy: If you get a woman's phone number and you have an especially vivid, image-driven mind.
Connect To Prior Knowledge

Sometimes the best way to absorb new information is by linking it to similar information you already know. This may seem like a lazy technique, and in some instances it is, but conceptually it's extremely sound because of the manner in which neurotransmitters in the brain signal the hippocampus (a crucial area of memory), according to the work done by Dr. Larry Cahill, a neurobiology and behavior professor. Think of it as hyperlinks on a web page that link back to your own personal website, where all of your knowledge resides.

Comes In Handy: When what you need to remember is either incredibly foreign-sounding or entirely uninteresting.

Person-Action-Object

Person-Action-Object is a technique in which you assign an image to every number between 00 and 99, an image that involves a “person” performing an “action”' on an “object” (e.g. 22 = Nixon leaving the White House). What you choose for images is up to you, but what this technique allows you to do is create a system that conjures up mental images for numbers almost reaching one million. Why? Because PAO has three places (person, action, object), so when confronted with a six-digit number, you can chunk it into three sets of two numbers and allow the person from the first set to perform the action of the second set on the object of the third set.

Comes In Handy: If you're playing blackjack, since you can apply PAO -- with some minor adjustments -- to help you remember a deck of cards.

Embellish Key Concepts

In any idea, there are bound to be both major details and minor ones, and, even if there aren't, you can make it memorable by exploding the major ones through embellishment. This technique requires you draw out key concepts or components of what you're trying to remember and elaborate or embellish them so as to become impossible to forget.

Comes In Handy: If you need to memorize the name of an important colleague as you're being introduced to more than one at a time. For instance, you can embellish a pair of blue eyes on someone named Hanna to Montana's Big Sky Country.

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a system that involves the creation of a visual display of a concept -- using everything from colors to images and as few words as possible to fully outline the concept you're trying to remember. It is in that sense no different than a standard outline in that you're trying to pare down sections into subsections and further into subdivided subsections, except that it taps into the human mind's brilliant response to imagery and creativity instead of relying on the its less-cultivated response to the written word.

Comes In Handy: If you're in school and taking notes on an important lecture in a class you can’t fail.

Attach Personal Relevance

Acting in ways that are self-centered is part and parcel of the human condition and can be a good way to remember things since sometimes the only way to remember something is to make it personally meaningful. This allows for the thing in question to make better sense, an enormously important key to lasting memory.

Comes In Handy: If you can, never again -- never, ever again -- forget your mother-in-law's birthday

Build A Memory Palace

The so-called memory palace represents the foundation for virtually all the memory techniques in use today. It comes from Simonides of Ceos, a poet from Ancient Greece, who briefly stepped outside a banquet hall and, as he did, the hall collapsed. Simonides recalled where each person was sitting, thereby helping grief-stricken relatives find their loved ones. Or so goes the legend, which is most likely just slightly removed from being a part of Greek mythology, but the memory palace isn't. It is a mnemonic device that uses spatial memory to corral and remember lots of information that comes at you in random order. In your mind's eye, you have a house, the floor plan of which you know well (maybe you grew up there). As information comes to you, you put that information into different rooms, applying other techniques already mentioned to remember smaller details. Later you can revisit the house and discover what you need to remember.

Comes In Handy: If you're meeting many people all at once or if lots of disparate information is coming at you all at once.