Memory Tricks and Brain Plasticity

Why is it that some people have absolutely amazing memories and quick response times? Some people catch onto concepts quickly and remember the details. Some people can look down a balance sheet or income statement or profit-and-loss statement and immediately spot an error.

I had a boss like this. He was the head of a region at a large multinational corporation I used to work for. He would look at a spreadsheet on a screen and within seconds, while scanning it, he would spot a formula error. Or a ratio that was wrong.

I asked him one day about this amazing ability he had and he told me that accounting and statistics, and mathematics were his weak point growing up. He made them into a skill. He wanted to run a large corporation and the only way he would get there was to know the numbers. ‘If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.’

He had trained his brain to analyse and process numbers and ratios and formulae. I only remember stuff that makes sense to me long term. I can remember quite a lot of facts short term but if I want to remember them in the long term, they need to make sense to me.

My mind works in this way, and I am sure many others do too, that we remember stories and grouped concepts longer than we do just random facts and material that we may require passing an exam. The material needs to make sense to us, and the best way that I find works is making stories of related facts and weaving them together into larger concepts and stories in my brain.

Many memory trainers and brain training courses advise us to have a memory palace, and place the facts in your palace in different rooms. Then imagine yourself walking into that room and rediscovering what facts you placed there.

For me, I need to have a funny scene or a weird scene or a story that incorporates all the facts I want to remember.

As a silly example, take a shopping list. I need to buy drinking water, milk, eggs, a chicken for roasting, broccoli, asparagus, raw sugar and apples and bananas.

Instead of trying to memorise each item, I need to build a picture of all the items in my head, and then I have more chance of remembering all of them, and I need to make a brief story out of them.

So for my list above, my story would be:

I would imagine a chicken skiing on two bananas on a lake of milk while an evil broccoli has stolen the chicken’s eggs (babies) and is throwing asparagus spears at the chicken. The evil broccoli used the raw sugar and coated the apples, to lure the eggs into his cave, a cave behind a waterfall where he is holding the eggs hostage.

If I remember the detail of that story, I don’t need to remember each item because the story allows me to place context around each item and give it a function within the story. Each detail of the story is a reminder of what I need to buy.

The theory is that the more whacky your story the more likely you will remember it.

This works for me when I have to remember a lot of unrelated items.

I also use grouping as a technique where I group items that begin with the same letter together and make an acronym for the items, too. This works for me, a combination of both techniques. You can use them separately as well.

You can also group items that go together logically like bread and butter, and eggs and bacon, etc. Create groups that make sense to you, and create a story with the groups.

So for the above example, I would make up the word ‘BBEGGSWACMAS’ = bananas, broccoli, eggs, water, apples, chicken, milk, asparagus, sugar.

Your brain thinks more creatively and you create new neural pathways when you use these techniques to study and it makes learning a lot more fun and you remember more information when you wrestle with how to incorporate the facts into your story or acronym. It may take a little longer than just reading stuff and trying to remember it, but you don’t have to keep revisiting it to learn and remember it. When you give the information more meaning and make it more relevant, in a story format, then you remember it long term.

Our minds like to make pictures and concepts, and that is why we can remember facts better when we tap into how our minds actually work.

The greatest teachers use stories. Lord Jesus was the greatest teacher, and He used stories and parables to help people remember concepts and principles in a mostly oral tradition.

Let me know what you think and if you have any other tricks to assist with knowledge and information retention.

Thank you for reading.