Memory

Remembering things is a useful skill. Being able to rely on your memory gives you a huge advantage over those who can't. Improving your memory can be as simple as applying a few skills that can be easily learnt.

Remembering things is more to do with getting them into your memory in the first place and less about not forgetting once they're there. There are techniques available that will assist you in remembering both the structure of information and also bare facts.

Because there are a number of techniques available you can usually choose which of those suit you best as a person and then, when you come to need one, which is most suitable to the situation. And, as with using any tool, the more you use it the more proficient you become and the more effective the tool becomes.

Mnemonics
One of the most common memory improvement tools is known as a mnemonic, usually a rhyme or easy to remember phrase, like Richard of York Gives Battle in Vain to remember the colours of the rainbow, RoYGBiV		mnemonic adj of or designed to aid the memory n a mnemonic device Gk mnemonikos f mnemon mindful
Red orange Yellow Green Blue indigo Violet
or Thirty days hath September, April, June and November		mnemonics n pl (usually treated as sing) the art of improving memory a system for this
which isn't particularly easy to remember, really, but is more memorable than a list of months and numbers!
Mnemonics is also the art of improving memory - Like a mnemonic the techniques used maximise the effectiveness of some key brain functions. When you use some techniques the results are so good - amazing, really! - that it's hard to believe how effectively they work. But they do work and they work by using abilities our brains have learned over millions of years. Tapping into some very basic and very reliable functions, in fact.
How memory improvement techniques work: The theory of mnemonics
Mnemonics uses powerful brain functions that have been central to our evolution as intelligent beings. Many of the facts we are now tasked to remember are presented to us as lists and tables on the printed page or a computer screen. These are quite obviously not the kind of stimuli that our brains naturally interpret as important: They won't save our lives, for instance. The human brain considers important stimuli that involve movement, striking images and colours; sounds, smells and taste; touch, location and emotions. To improve the way our brains handle information we need to make that information more important and more memorable. We need to engage elements of the important stimuli and, wherever possible, to include as many of these stimuli as possible: A smelly, bright, sharp thing being more memorable than something red and stationary.
The process of applying tools to improve memory doesn't need to be complicated. It consists of three steps Get to know the technique - How to apply it Determine which situations it can be used in - When to apply it Practice using it - Often

Remembering lists

Using rhymes to help you remember is a powerful technique allowing you to reliably remember otherwise forgettable facts. It works over a few days or weeks and over many years - How many of the mnemonic rhymes you leant at school do you still recall?

How many people do you hear saying Thirty days hath September . . .?

Although it's a powerful and reliable technique most of us aren't accomplished poets. Creating a rhyming mnemonic in the first place is the hard part! So rhyming mnemonics are best applied to remembering a small number of key facts that will be accessed often over a long period of time. That way you benefit from the initial effort again and again over a long period of time.

What we need for day to day use is something that takes much less effort to apply but which also has a much broader coverage.

We'll start of with a technique that was developed in Roman times.

In the days of the Roman Empire its senators had to wait their turn to speak in the Senate.

Once they began to speak they had to do so from memory.

There are three basic variants to this first technique, each named by the locations used

The House
The Roman Room
The Journey

The concepts behind all three variants are identical: You associated the facts you want to remember with places that you'll never forget.

In The House variant, the sequence might be

Front door - Hallway - Stairs - Landing - Bedroom

whereas a journey you make everyday to work might be

Front door - Village Green - Bus stop - Town Market Square - High Street - Office

We'll look at the detail in the following practical exercise.

So they developed techniques that allowed them to remember each topic they needed to cover and its position in the sequence of their speech.

They achieved this feat by linking each topic to something they knew very well, like places in their houses.

Which, by the way, is the origin of the expression "in the first place" that we still use when remembering a sequence of facts!

The applicability of each of these variants is really down to the number of things you need to remember and how they are structured.

The Roman Room is good for remembering information in which facts are grouped together but where structure is less important, since it uses objects in a well known room as links to the facts.

Both the house and journey methods are good for lists where sequence can be used to determine structure. The journey can obviously be used to link many more items than the house, in which you eventually run out of places to use as links!

Let's use your house to remember the list of twelve items above and see just how easy and effective it can be. It will take less time to memorise the list than it has done to read this page. Click on next, below

Remembering a list:
A practical exercise