Three easy ways to improve your memory… immediately.
We ALL have a good memory. It’s just a matter of creating efficient entry points. Here’s how, and it works.
I always thought I had a very bad memory. While loving to be on stage as an (amateur) actor, I always took the safe bet: playing improv rather than plays. I just loved going on stage. The thrill about beating stage fright and the bond you can create with the audience are very special. So when three years ago, a friend in Hong Kong offered me a role in the amateur play she was directing, I first declined. There were over 400 lines of text and I thought it would never make it into my memory.
That’s when I started digging more into how our brain works: this memory thing was utterly frustrating. Why do some people seem to naturally remember names, places, movie titles or hundreds of lines in a play, and I was always struggling trying to address my neighbour?
The answer, I found, came in one explanation: our brain seems to access information indirectly, from a known place, to a lesser known place. It needs an easy starting point, and a path that eventually leads to what you’re looking for. A path across around 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections…
It’s all about finding the path.
Let’s consider the following experiment: I give you a word “panikubo” which has voluntarily no meaning, and immediately after, we discuss a totally unrelated topic. If the following day I ask you what the word was, chances are that you won’t remember it.
Now, imagine I gave you the same word, repeated it several times, and ask you to memorize it for next week. What will happen with most of us is while we are repeating and playing with the word, it will start to resonate with “more known” things. In my case, it quickly sounds like “Panic button” or “Panic boat”, and I will visualize one of these big red buttons that I really wanted to press on when I was a kid (still today !).
One week later, when asked for the word, maybe I feel a little panicky because I forgot I had to remember it, and then I will see the panic button and eureka ! Panic-bo ! Panikubo !
We memorise pretty much anything (if we pay attention)
In BOTH cases your brain has actually memorized the word. Multiple experiments have shown that we can remember hundreds or even thousands of images or words even if we were exposed for less than a second (https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2018.00688), and if we were paying attention.
But with a catch: we remember them mostly one way, from inside to outside. In other words, if weeks later we are shown any one of the thousands of images, we can tell whether it was part of the pack or not. But if we are asked to list the images we were shown, the best people (when not trained) can barely mention 10%.
The major difference between our two experiments above is that in the first case I did not leave you anytime to memorise, so your brain did not have time to create multiple paths to access the word “panikubo”. In fact, the only paths that were created at that time were a form of auditory trace, the meaningless association of sounds, together with some environment traces: me asking you to remember the word, maybe the room, some smell etc. In other words, you did not consciously memorise the word “panikubo”.
If we reuse the same path and one week later, I tell you “panikubo”, you will remember. Exactly the same effect as when a person you know you’ve met before tells you their name again — yes of course you knew. Even better, I could give you a list of 50 meaningless words with “panikubo” hidden in the middle and you’d be able to quickly point to that one.
So if the information is there, how to access it ?
As mentioned above, it’s all about finding an “easy” entry point, and following the path towards your goal.
Here are three easy steps to immediately improve your memory:
1. Be conscious!
It may sound obvious, but if you are not giving 100% of your focus to what you need to remember, it will be harder to make it stick. Consider the first time you meet someone. When they say their name, if your attention is distracted by the way they look at you, something strange in their hair or if you are still trying to remember the name of the person you met before, you will fail.
That’s why we repeat things. In a social situation don’t repeat “Mark Smith” 10 times as you will look weird, but many people use the trick to use the name of the person during the first chit-chat. “Oh hi Emmanuel, nice to meet you. What do you do Emmanuel ?” etc.
This is the same for anything. If you are distracted during a conversation, while reading a book or memorising your chemistry course, it won’t stick, because you are not putting your brain in “memory” mode.
Today’s average attention span has drastically fallen with too much sollicitation from our digital devices, so the first exercise you want to do is really one of self awareness and focus.
2. Create entry points and paths.
The second thing to do is to help your brain by creating multiple paths to what you want to remember. This can be anything and really depends on individuals, but memory athletes such as Josh Foer observed that vivid, dynamic or sometimes grotesque images are the best to help make things stick. I’m pretty sure you still remember the word I gave you above. Little panic ? Panic button ? Panikubo ! The image of a big red panic button that one would hit violently is sticky enough. Add that it’s a Japanese sumotori that is hitting it and you are guaranteed to make it stick forever.
This of course requires some training: because there are a variety of situations and things to remember — a persons’ name, a phone number or the name of a particular molecule, and sometimes not much time to remember — think about a social event where you shake new hands every other minute.
But this is fun training: it actually involves you having the most active imagination as possible to create the little stories that will stick. The story has to embrace as many details as possible of when, where and why you have to memorise what you need to. Those details will be the entry points to the multiple paths that will lead to this particular souvenir.
3. Relax, and find the entry points.
The last, but crucial point is of course to recall the memory.
You first want to relax: if you are stressed — because it’s exam time or because the person whose name you’re desperately trying to remember just walked in the door — your brain will uselessly be focusing on “I have to remember” instead of what you actually have to remember. Relaxing will come with confidence, which comes with… training.
Then you want to focus on the entry points: what are the details of the person, the movie, the book, the molecule you are trying to remember. Where did you first encounter them? Was there something unusual with the sound of their name, some rhyme, some rhythm? When did it happen? Etc. one of these entry points will eventually click and retrieving the memory is almost immediate.
These three steps are actually pretty easy and you will see that they can quickly improve your memory. You will also find that they will help you focus on the now as you will be reformulating a lot of what you are reading or listening to.
This article was written by the team at Weavit — for more information on the exciting product we’re building: check out our website here. If you’d like to get in touch to chat or join our team — reach out at hello@weavit.ai
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