HOW TO DEVELOP A PERFECT MEMORY HOW TO REMEMBER LISTS A TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE A list of ten items, whatever they are, should not present a challenge to our memory, and yet it does. Take a simple shopping list, for example. Try memorizing the following, without writing any of it down, within one minute + fish + football + margarine + ladder + chess set + clock + milk + tape measure + light bulb + dog bowl Most people can remember somewhere between four and seven items. And there was I announcing in the introduction that you have an amazing memo- ry. It wasn't an idle boast. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to remember any ten items perfectly in order, even backwards in under one minute. To prove my point, try doing the following two simple exercises REMEMBERING THE FORGETTABLE Think back over what you have done so far today. What time did you get up? What was on the radio or television? Can you remember your journey into work? What mood were you in when you arrived? Did you go anywhere on foot, or in a car? Who did you meet? Frustrating, isn’t it? Your memory has no problem at all recalling these everyday, mundane experiences (ironically, the forgettable things in life) and yet it can’t recall a simple shopping list when required. If you were to take this fee peHOW TO REMEMBER LISTS exercise a stage further and write down eventhing you could remember about today, however trivial or tedious, you would be amazed at the hundreds of memories that came flooding back. Some things are undoubtedly easier to remember than others, events that involve travel, for example. When I think back over a day, or perhaps a holi- day, the most vivid memories are associated with a journey. Perhaps I was on a train, or walking through the park, or on a coach; I can remember what happened at certain points along the way. A journey gives structure to the oth- erwise ramshackle collection of memories in your head; it helps you to keep them in order, like a filing cabinet. REMEMBERING THE SUBLIME If, like me, you found the first exercise a little depressing, revealing more about the ordinariness of your life than about your memory, you should enjoy this experiment. Try to imagine a day. Exaggerate and distort your normal routine... Wake up in an enormous, feathersoft bed to the sound of birdsong; a beauti- ful lover is lying asleep beside you; pull back the curtains to reveal sun-soaked hills rolling down to a sparkling sea. An enormous schooner is at anchor in the bay, its fresh, white linen sails flapping in the Mediterranean breeze. Breakfast has been made; the post comes and, for once, you decide to open the envelope saying ‘You have won a £1 million.’ You have! etc, etc. Your dream day might be quite different from mine, of course. But if you were to put this book down and I were to ask you in an hour’s time to recall the fruits of your wild imagination, you should be able to remember everything you dreamt up. Imagined events are almost as easy to recall as real ones, par- ticularly if they are exaggerated and pleasurable. (No one likes to remember a bad dream.) This is because the imagination and memory are both concerned with the forming of mental images. Returning from the sublime to the ridiculous, you are now in a position to remember the ten items on our shopping list, armed with the results of these two experiments. Keep an open mind as you read the following few paragraphs. THE METHOD To remember the list, ‘place’ each item of shopping at individual stages along a familiar journey — it might be around your house, down to the shops, or a bus route. For these singularly boring items to become memorable, you are going to have to exaggerate them, creating bizarre mental images at each stage of the journey. Imagine an enormous, gulping fish flapping around your bedroom, for example, covering the duvet with slimy scales. Or picture a bath full of margarine, every time you turn on the taps, more warm margarine comes 00z~ ing out! This is the basis of my entire memory system: — 1 —HOW TO DEVELOP A PERFECT MEMORY Tue Key TO A PERFECT MEMORY IS YOUR IMAGINATION. Later on, when you need to remember the list, you are going to ‘walk’ around the journey, moving from stage to stage and recalling cach object as you go. The journey provides order, linking items together. Your imagination makes each one memorable. THE JOURNEY Choose a familiar journey. A simple route around your house is as good as any. If there are ten items to remember, the journey must consist of ten stages. Give it a logical starting point, places along the way and a finishing point. Now learn it. Once you have committed this to memory, you can use it for remembering ten phone numbers, ten people, ten appointments, ten of any- thing, over and over again. YOUR MAP: Stage I: your bedroom Stage 6: kitchen Stage 2: bathroom Stage 7: front door Stage 3: spare room Stage 8: front garden Stage 4: stairs Stage 9: road Stage 5: lounge Stage 10: house opposite At each stage on the map, close your eyes and visualize your own home. For the purposes of demonstration, I have chosen a simple two-up, two-down house. If you live in a flat or bungalow, replace the stairs with a corridor or another room. Whatever rooms you use, make sure the journey has a logical direction. For instance, I would not walk from my bedroom through the front garden to get to the bathroom. The sequence must be obvious. It then becomes much easier to preserve the natural order of the list you intend to memorize. If you are having difficulty, try to imagine yourself floating through your house, visualizing as much of the layout at each stage as you can, Practise this a few times. When you can remember the journey without having to look at your map, you are ready to attempt the shopping list itself. This time, I hope, with markedly different results. ‘That shopping list again: Tem 1: fish Tem 6: football Item 2: margarine Tem 7: ladder Tiem 3: chess set Tem 8: clock Hem 4: milk Tem 9: tape measure Item 5: light bulb Tiem 10; dog bowl BIZARRE IMAGES Using your imagination, you are going to repeat the journey, but this time ‘placing’ each object at the corresponding stage. The intention, remember, is to create a series of bizarre mental images, so out of the ordinary that you SpeHOW TO REMEMBER LISTS can’t help remembering them. Have you ever scen chess pieces standing six feet high and shouting at each other, in your spare room? And what are all those hundreds of smashed milk bottles doing on the stairs? Make the scenes as unusual as possible. Use all your senses; taste, touch, smell, hear and see everything. The more senses you can bring to bear, the more memo- rable the image will be. (For instance, if we want to remember a word on a page, we often say it out aloud.) Movement is also important, and so is sex. Don’t be embarrassed by your own creativity. There are no rules when it comes to exploring your imagination. You are the only member of the audi- ence. Shock yourself! You will remember the scene more vividly. The more wild and exaggerated, the easier it will be to remember. Let your imagination run riot; it is the only thing limiting your memory. PLACING THE OBJECTS To show you what I mean, here is how I would memorize the list Stage 1: I wake up in my bedroom to find that I am holding a fishing rod. At the end of the line is a huge slimy fish flapping frantically at the foot of my bed. I use all my senses: I see the rod arcing, I hear the spool clicking, I feel the pull of the line, I smell the foul, fishy odour, I touch its scales. Stage 2: I-go to the bathroom to take a shower. Instead of hot water, a thick mar- garine oozes from the shower head and drips all over me. T feel the warm, sticky texture and sce the bright, fluorescent yellow colour, Stage 3: I walk into the spare room and discover a giant chess set. Like something out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the pieces are coming alive. I can hear them shouting obscenities at each other, insulting each other's king and queen. Stage 4: The staircase is cluttered with hundreds of milk bottles, some of them, half empty, even broken. The milkman is standing at the bottom of the stairs, apologizing for the mess. I pick my way down the stairs, smelling the stench of decaying milk. I hear the noise of crunching glass, and the squelch of curdled milk underfoot. What was the milkman doing there in the first place? The more mental ‘hooks’ and asso- ciations you gather, the greater your chances of recalling the item. Stage 5: I open the lounge door. Instead of seeing the lightbulb dangling unobtru- aHOW TO DEVELOP A PERFECT MEMORY sively from the ceiling, it is sprouting from out of the floor, huge and grow- ing bigger by the minute. I walk around it, feel the heat its enormous filament is generating, raise my hands to protect my eyes from the glare. The bulb explodes and shatters into a million myriad pieces. A sudden violent experience is always memorable. It is important, however, to vary the scenes; overuse or repetition of a particular dramatic effect will only confuse you. Stage 6: A football match is in progress in the kitchen. Crockery and ornaments lie smashed on the floor. The referee’s whistle is shrill. Keep your surroundings as normal as possible. It might be in disarray but it’s still the same room. When you come to remember a different list, the journey itself will still be the same ~ familiar and reliable. Stage 7: Someone has left a ladder leaning against my front door. I can’t avoid knocking it over. My front door is not a room, but it is another stage on the route. I try to gauge my reaction and timing. How quickly do I grab the rungs, or do I jump out of the way? I hear the clatter of the metal as it crashes to the ground. Stage 8: A large grandfather clock is ticking away in my front garden, its hands whizzing around backwards. I am now outside. What is the weather like? Is it raining? If so, it will damage the clock. I walk up to it, round it, see my face reflected in the glass, What time is it? I’ve never heard such loud ticking. Stage 9: A tape measure is stretched out on the road as far as the eye can see. I press the release mechanism and listen to the shuflle of metal as the tape begins winding back into the spool at an ever increasing rate. I see the end bobbing up and down as it catches against lumps in the road. I am frightened in case it whips past and cuts me, Stage 10: My opposite neighbour has placed a huge, unsightly bowl in his garden. ‘Dog’ is written in garish red letters around the side. The bow! itself is yellow and is so large that it completely obscures his house, Dog food is spilling over the lip; great clods of jellied meat are landing in the street all around me. REVIEWING THE JOURNEY Once you have created the ten images of your own at ten stages around your house (try not to use my images or stages), you are ready to remember the list — 4 —HOW TO REMEMBER LISTS by walking around the journey, starting with your bedroom. Review each image. Don’t try to recall the object word immediately. You will only get into a panic and confirm your worst suspicions about your memory. There is no rush. Put down this book and move calmly and logically from room to room in your mind. What is happening in your bedroom? You can hear a clicking sound...the fishing rod...something slimy: a fish. You go to the bathroom, where you show- er every morning...the shower...something yellow oozing out of the head: mar- garine, And so on. TROUBLE SHOOTING I am confident that you will remember all ten items. If, however, your mind went a complete blank at any stage, it means that the image you created was not sufficiently stimulating, In which case, return to the list and change the scene. Instead of the ladder falling at stage 7, for example, imagine climbing up a very tall ladder and looking down at thi, tiny front door. It is windy up there; you are swaying around a lot and feeling giddy. The simple rule of thumb is that your brain, much like a computer (only better), can only ‘output’ what you've ‘input’ Don’t forget, you are exercising your imagination in a new way. Like any under~ used muscle, it is bound to feel a bit stiff for the first few times. With practice, you will find yourself making images and associations at speed and with little effort. SUCCESS Using a combination of bizarre images and the familiar routine of a well- known journey, you have stimulated your brain to remember ten random items. You have done more than that, though. Inadvertently, you have repeat- ed them in exact order. Not really necessary for a shopping list, but very useful when it comes to remembering a sequence, something we will come to later. For now, content yourself with the knowledge that you can start at any stage on the list and recall the items before and after it. Take the clock in the garden, for instance, you know-the ladder by the door must come before it, and the tape measure in the street after it. The familiar journey has done all the work for you. It has kept everything in its own logical order. Don't be alarmed or put off by the seemingly elaborate or long-winded nature of the method. With practice, your brain responds more quickly to cre- ating images on request. It can visualize objects in an instant (images that might take a paragraph to describe); you just have to learn how to train and control it. Before long, you will find yourself ‘running’ around the route, recall- ing the objects as you go. ‘There is also no danger that your head will become too cluttered with all these strange images. The next time you want to remember another list, the new images will erase the old ones. It is just like recording on a video tape. The journey, of course, always remains the same. It is comforting to know that you are merely developing the way in which the pe ieHOW TO DEVELOP A PERFECT MEMORY brain already works, rather than teaching it a new method. It is generally accepted that we remember things by association. If you are walking down the street and see a car covered in flowers and ribbons, for example, an image of your own wedding might flash across your brain. This, in turn, reminds you of your husband or wife, and you recall, with horror, that it is your anniversary tomorrow and you haven’t done anything about it. I will now show you an easy way to reinforce these associative images. I know this all seems strange to begin with, but remember: your memory is lim- ited only by your imagination. AN ON ‘LINKING I have shown you how to remember ten items on a shopping list by placing them along a familiar journey. Using image, colour, smell, feeling, emotion, taste, and movement, you were able to recall the wilder fruits of your imagina- tion and, in turn, the relevant, mundane item. This method is adequate for remembering a simple list; sometimes, howev- er, further reinforcement of the images is required, which is where the ‘lnk method? can be used. At each stage on the journey, try giving yourself a taste of what is to follow. For example, on our original shopping list, the first item was fish; the sec- ond, margarine. I remembered the fish by imagining one flapping around at my feet, hooked onto the end of my line. This time, I imagine the fish basted in margarine because I am about to cook it. Or perhaps it flaps its way over to the bedroom door, where a thick yellow liquid is seeping through by the floor. The linked image should merely serve as a reminder of the next item on the list. Be careful not to confuse the two items. The focal point remains the fish and the bedroom. At stage 2 of the journey, the bathroom, I imagine margarine dripping from the showerhead. This time, using the link method, I see the vague image of chess pieces moving around through the steamed-up glass door. And so on. Try to make similar links for the rest of the list. The clock hands could be a couple of rulers; the tape measure might be a dog lead. As it begins to recoil, a large dog comes bounding up the road. Once you feel confident about linking ten simple items, you will be able to extend your journeys and the number of things you can memorize. When I remember a pack of cards, for example, I use a journey with fifty-two stages rather than ten. Sounds daunting? As long as you choose a journey you are familiar with, nothing could be easier. — 16 —