How to have a Better Memory by Falling Down the Stairs

Have a better memory than an elephant!

Have you ever run down to the shops to buy a few essentials, then returned home to discover that you have forgotten something important? By using a little-known memory trick, you can easily remember and instantly recall lists of almost anything. Using this method, ancient Greek actors memorized epic poems and plays that lasted for hours. I wrote this article for another blog and thought I’d share a slightly edited version here. Read on and you will never again forget to buy milk or pick up the kids from school! It is called the “method of loci“, and it is a memory aid that relies on linking memories with well-known locations on a familiar journey. It has been successfully used by world memory champions (such as eight-time champion Dominic O’Brien) to instantly recall shuffled decks of cards, or pi to tens of thousands of places. In this article I’ll show you how to memorize an ordered list of ten items.

Here is how it is done:

Step One: Create a “Journey”. In this case we need a journey that has ten seperate locations, because we want to remember ten things. Your morning routine around the family home is a good place to start. You should be intimately familiar with it, and it should be able to accommodate ten areas. My journey is; bedroom, staircase, computer room, hallway, bathroom, lounge, kitchen, spare room, backyard and laundry. It is much more effective if you use your own, but for now we will use my journey to illustrate how it is done.

Step Two: link what you want to remember to your journey. Say you have ten things to remember; buy milk, bread, toilet paper, dog food, soft drink, bananas and cereal. After you go to the store, you also need to; post a letter, pick up the kids from school and post a comment on this post. To do this, you create a vivid association between the item you wish to remember and a location on the list. Try to be as imaginative as possible – the more striking the image the easier it will be to recall. That being said, the first association you come up with will often be the easiest to recall, so don’t strain yourself! With practice this can be done very rapidly. If I were memorizing this list, I would start with my bedroom, as that is the first point of my journey. The first item on the list is milk. To associate the pair, I might picture my bed floating on a sea of milk. To increase the vividness of the memory, I imagine my feet are hanging of the edge of the bed and are soaking wet; the room smells strongly of milk, and; the bed makes a sloshing noise as I row towards the exit. The more senses you can bring into the association, the better. I have sight, touch, smell and hearing in this particular case. By using this method you should be able to memorize the objects to buy in the list fairly easily. But you can also incorporate different concepts, such as things to do. When it came to picking up the kids from school, I might imagine 100 screaming school children stampeding around my backyard, covering me in dust and crushing my garden. That would be enough to remind me to pick up the kids from school. And because the journey and the associations on it are ordered, I can remind myself that I wanted to post the letter before I picked up the kids and comment on the most recent post of a charming personal blog when I got home. Taking my example list and associating it with my morning routine, we get:

Location	Object/Task	Association/Scene
Bedroom	Milk	Bed Floating on sea of milk
Staircase	Bread	Slip on breadcrumbs down stairs
Study	Toilet Paper	Computer has been TP’d
Hallway	Dog Food	Attacked by starving wolf
Bathroom	Soft Drink	Shower sprays soft drink
Lounge	Bananas	Couch giant mouldy banana
Kitchen	Cereal	Cereal spewing from every cupboard
Spare room	Post Letter	Wrestle Postman Pat
Backyard	Collect Kids	Marauding Hoard of School Kids
Laundry	Comment on post	Scroll down and say hi

Step Three: Go on your journey for Total Recall! The final step is recalling perfectly everything you have remembered and being hailed a hero for bringing home the milk! To recall everything, simply mentally walk yourself through your journey and remember all the associations that you have made. This is surprisingly effective and fast. With practice you can remember lists as fast as they are spoken to you and recall them faster than you can share the information! The beauty of this method is that you can reuse the journey over and over again to remember as many things as you like – the new memories simply replace the old ones, much like a whiteboard being erased to be used again. Another fantastic thing is that if you extend the the journey, you can extend the number of things that you can remember to any amount you wish! If you want to learn more about the “method of loci”, check out the Wikipedia entry here, or check out some of Dominic O’Brien’s books on memory; How to Develop a Perfect Memory is my favourite. It is a clear, straightforward guide to developing your memory; it is also pretty funny, though sometimes cheesy. This is a simple version of the method of loci; many variations exist that allow you to easily recall various types of information. Eventually you can use items in a room as steps in your journey, but start out small and build up.

Has anyone got any embarrassing tales of forgetfulness? Forgetting new names is a big one for me, what about you?

Tagged as: Learning, Memory