HARNESS THE FULL POWER OF YOUR MEMORY

IMPROVE YOUR
IMPROVE YOUR MEMORY
Whether it’s preparing for a big event like an exam, an important

MEMORY
presentation at work, or simply remembering this week’s shopping list,
Improve your Memory will help you stop worrying about your memory
– and start using it to the full. Combining the very latest research with
ancient memory-training techniques this book reveals the crucial role
played by memory in every aspect of daily life and provides a step-by-
step guide to using it better.

• Increase your memory and remember anything you set your mind on
• Boost your confidence and stretch your creativity
• Learn new skills and improve old ones
• Be confident in social situations by remembering names, faces and
personal facts
JONATHAN HANCOCK
JONATHAN HANCOCK

£12.99
SERIES DESIGN DAVID CARROLL & CO

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Visit our website at

www.pearson-books.com

CVR_HANC8329_01_SE_CVR.indd 1 10/11/2014 07:28

 brilliant

improve your
memory

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A01_HANC3292_01_SE_FM.indd 2 04/11/14 6:24 pm
 brilliant

improve your
memory
Jonathan Hancock

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 Pearson Education Limited

Edinburgh Gate
Harlow CM20 2JE
United Kingdom
Tel: 144 (0)1279 623623
Web: www.pearson.com/uk

First published as Brilliant Memory Training in 2011 (print and electronic)

Rejacketed edition 2015 (print and electronic)

© Pearson Education Limited 2011, 2015 (print and electronic)

The right of Jonathan Hancock to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by
him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The print publication is protected by copyright. Prior to any prohibited reproduction,

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All trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. The use of any
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Pearson Education is not responsible for the content of third-party internet sites.

ISBN: 978-1-292-08329-2 (print)

978-1-292-08415-2 (PDF)
978-1-292-08413-8 (eText)
978-1-292-08414-5 (ePub)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for the print edition is available from the British Library

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A catalog record for the print edition is available from the Library of Congress

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Series cover design by David Carroll & Co

Print edition typeset in 10/14pt Plantin MT Pro by 71

Print edition printed and bound in Great Britain by Henry Ling Ltd, at the Dorset Press,
Dorchester, Dorset

NOTE THAT ANY PAGE CROSS REFERENCES REFER TO THE PRINT

EDITION

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 For Lucy, Noah, Evie and Nate

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A01_HANC3292_01_SE_FM.indd 6 04/11/14 6:24 pm
 Contents

About the author ix

Author’s acknowledgements x
Introduction xi

part 1 Foundations 1

1 Switching on 3
2 Memory building 23
3 Memory boosting 45
4 Taking control 69
5 Global learning 87

part 2 Applications 109

6 Learning lists 111

7 Words and ideas 133
8 Numbers and names 159
9 Under pressure 185
10 Self-improvement 209

Conclusion 235
Further reading 237
Index 239

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A01_HANC3292_01_SE_FM.indd 8 04/11/14 6:24 pm
 About the author

Jonathan Hancock taught himself to have a brilliant memory

when he was still at school – to win a bet, and then to break
two Guinness World Records. He was one of the first people to
achieve the rank of Grandmaster of Memory and became World
Memory Champion at the age of 22. He has since shown off his
remarkable memory on TV and radio programmes around the
world.

A graduate of Oxford University and former BBC radio presenter,

Jonathan has published ten books on thinking and learning, acted
as a memory consultant for broadcasting and telecoms compa-
nies and led training courses in business and education.

Alongside his job as a teacher in a busy city primary school,

every year Jonathan works with The Learning Skills Foundation
to run the national Junior Memory Championship.

A keen marathon-runner, he lives with his wife and three chil-

dren in Brighton.

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 Author’s acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Samantha Jackson, Rachel Hayter and the whole
team at Pearson for their enthusiasm and support for this book
from the start.

Thanks are also due to my agent, Caroline Shott, and to all the
members of The Learning Skills Foundation.

And to my family: endless gratitude for the patience and con-

sideration they’ve shown me during the writing of this book.
They’re a constant reminder of the fun, excitement and joy
involved in laying down lasting memories, and my life with Lucy,
Noah, Evie and Nate has given me so many rich experiences to
remember and cherish.

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 Introduction

We used to believe that memories were made in our hearts. Then

we discovered the brilliant brain, and the last few centuries have
been spent trying to understand what’s going on between our
ears. But memory’s on the move again. The more we try to pin
it down, the more elusive it becomes. And I don’t know about
you but a great deal of my memory is now definitely in my back
pocket.

Inside my mobile phone I have all the numbers I use regularly,

plus access to online directories that let me track down anyone
else I might need to call. The internet provides me with more
information than I will ever have time to use, accessible wherever
I am in the world. My phone itself holds lists of jobs to do, calen-
dars full of important birthdays, daily schedules, email address
lists, maps . . . The alarm reminds me to wake up in the morning,
the voice-recorder allows me to gather information on the move
and retrieve it at my leisure, and the camera helps me to record
and relive any moment I choose in phenomenal detail.

And yet . . . I’m so glad I learnt to use my own memory power.

It’s changed my life, and I want this book to change yours.

There’s never been a time when memory was more important.

Thanks to the speed the world turns, the sheer amount of infor-
mation hitting us from every angle, the increased demands on
our time and energy, and the high standards we set ourselves for
what we can do in a lifetime, memory is now a more valuable

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 xii Introduction

commodity than ever before. There may be more tools to

support it, but there’s so much more going on to challenge it,
and there’s no escaping the fact that your memory is still crucial
to your success in everything you do. But it’s not just about
coping, forgetting less, stopping the rot. It’s about making very
conscious decisions to use memory to be brilliant. Your confi-
dence with memory goes to the very heart of who you are and
what you can achieve.

I’ve had some wonderful adventures with memory. I taught

myself to memorise playing cards to break world records, then
learnt how to remember anything to win memory awards and
competitions . . . and suddenly discovered a growing community
of people fascinated by the latent power of the human brain. I
found out about memory techniques that had been around since
ancient times and which still worked today. In fact they were
perfect for the modern world because they made it possible to
remember at speed, under pressure, creatively, efficiently, enjoy-
ably; and rather than simply remembering more, they revealed
the importance of remembering better. Because these days it’s
not how much you can remember, but what you choose to do
with your memory that really counts.

Anyone can have a better memory. It’s an active skill that you
learn and practise. Ancient civilisations were much more aware
of the best systems and strategies, but there’s no reason why you
can’t start using some powerful techniques immediately and get
so much more out of your memory, however old you are and
whatever your experiences of learning have been like so far.

You’ll remember more – and do it faster, find it easier, be more

accurate. You’ll get more out of everything you learn, engaging
with it on a whole new level. You’ll see the advantages of putting
your learning skills to work in areas you never thought of before,
and enjoy benefits you didn’t even connect with memory: better
communication, improved relationships, stronger imagination,

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 Introduction xiii

sharper decision making, more confidence all round. You’ll

feel good about the future, know how to make other people
remember you, and redefine your own opinion about what you
can achieve – when you put your mind to it.

My pocket memory’s good, and I use it every day, but the

memory I’ve built for myself is what makes the real difference to
what I achieve and how I feel.

I’ve written this book to get you started on your own memory
adventure. I want you to see just what a difference it makes when
you know what memory is really about, and how to use yours,
brilliantly.

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 PART 1

Foundations

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M01_HANC3292_01_SE_C01.indd 2 29/10/14 10:36 am
 CHAPTER 1

Switching on
The true art of memory is the art
of attention.

Samuel Johnson

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 In this chapter you will learn:
●● how this book works, and how to make it work for you
●● why ancient systems are essential in a modern world
●● techniques for assessing your current attitudes and abilities
●● which aspects of memory will help you most, now and in
the future
●● the dos and don’ts of developing a brilliant memory

This book is a memory manual, and you need to know that

from the start. You’ve got hold of it, opened it, started reading
it . . . and now you need to make a conscious decision to use
it – because brilliant memory is all about choice, action and
practice. It’s a different way of thinking and doing. There are old
habits to break and new behaviours to develop, and you’ll only
get there if you pay attention and commit to the challenge from
the start.

It’s an ambitious training programme, but trust the process.

You’ll be amazed at how quickly you can change the way you
use your brain, and how easy it is to start enjoying the benefits of
a brilliant memory. Be confident. You’ve got everything it takes.

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 6 improve your memory

Did you know?

Neurons, the nerve cells in your brain, communicate their
electrochemical signals through junctions called synapses,
determining the way you think and remember. Patterns of
connectivity form thoughts and handle memories, and the strongest
memories seem to involve particularly rich connections. Your brain
holds around a hundred billion neurons, each with an average
of 7000 connections to other cells. Brains simplify some of their
structures with age, but an adult still has up to 500 trillion
synapses – plenty of scope for a lifetime of complex connecting and
brilliant memory making.

Your unique brain

Your brain is utterly original, one of a kind. Even the visible folds
on its surface are different from every other brain on the planet,
and your individual experiences have built you a brain unlike any
other. There will be aspects of your thinking that operate par-
ticularly well, and others that need some work; but your memory
improvement is the complete focus of this book, so don’t worry
about comparing yourself with others. You can use their exam-
ples and insights, but this training manual will work only if you
personalise it and make it about you.

brilliant exercise
Picture an elephant. That elephant is now unique. It will probably be
similar to the one I’m imagining as I write this, and to the elephants that
other readers create; but the exact size, shape, colour, sound, smell and
everything else about that particular elephant are yours and yours alone.
The way it moves, the look in its eyes and, crucially, the way it makes you
feel: it’s all personal to you and your imagination.

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 Switching on 7

You’ll be asked to use your imagination throughout this book,

and when you do you need to relish the fact that the results will
be different from everyone else’s. In fact, the memory strategies
will work only if you make them your own. Having a brilliant
memory is all about creating powerful, personal connections;
so, follow my suggestions to get you started, but build up your
confidence in what your own powers of imagination can do.

Everything in this book is designed to offer direct help to your

memory, now. Many of the examples and exercises are based on
particular occasions, activities or professions, but they all have
something to offer – because they all develop thinking tools that
benefit everyone. You’ll find out how to apply them to your own
specific needs, but the most important thing is that you try them
all out from the start, training your brain and developing the
powerful mental habits that will revolutionise your memory.

Celebrate that your brain is different. Make the most of the

way your particular model works. Tap into your strongest emo-
tions, incorporate your interests and experiences and use all the
objects, places and people around you as you set up systems
for remembering everything. Remember: your imagination is as
private as you want it to be. Nobody needs to know what goes
on in your head as you switch on your creative brain and let it
loose on your learning.

Learning with others

So this book is about you, but you’re not in it alone. The training
process is very much about all the other people you come into
contact with along the way. Not only are you going to learn how
to speak and write in ways that everyone else remembers, and
to present yourself with a really positive impact, but you’ll also
be able to lead by example. The things you learn about memory
can change the way all the other people in your life behave, think
and remember.

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 8 improve your memory

And it’s also about some important people from the past. This
is a modern book that includes some very ancient wisdom: a
unique combination of the old and the new. The memory strate-
gies explored are relevant to all the real challenges you face, but
they’re all based on old-fashioned traditions. To build a brain
capable of coping with today’s demanding world you need to
know how earlier civilisations mastered the art of memory.

Memory, then and now

These days, in techno-speak, SIM may stand for Subscriber
Identity Module, that tiny card that stores key data on your
phone. But Sim was also a very important man in the history of
memory, and his story should help you to see why the ancient
world has such a role to play in this modern memory manual.

brilliant example
Sim’s story

Like you, Sim was interested in memory and how it could benefit his life.
He’d developed memory strategies to help him in his profession and was
making quite a success of it, but it took a tragedy to bring about his
breakthrough moment . . .

Sim had been asked to give a presentation at a big social event, but he
got into an argument when the host tried to get out of paying him the full
fee. Just as things were getting heated, Sim was called outside: remarkable
good fortune, really, because at that moment the roof of the building
collapsed, crushing all those inside. The bodies were mangled beyond
recognition. As the sole survivor, Sim was asked if he could help work out
who was whom.

To everyone’s amazement – not least his own – Sim found that he could
remember every single person at the banquet simply by thinking about
where they’d been sitting. The structure of the building provided the

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 Switching on 9

structure his memory needed, boosted by vivid images of the room mixed in
with powerful emotions and a driving need to make his memory work.

Crucially, Sim used this experience to learn how to remember better. He

recognised the things that activated his recall, and decided he was going
to find ways to keep using his memory this brilliantly.

Sim is short for Simonides, the Ancient Greek poet in this seminal episode
in the history of memory. The events described above took place at a feast
organised by the rich businessman Scopas, who wanted Simonides to
perform from memory but didn’t want to pay him properly (although, in the
end, he did pay the price . . .). Legend has it that Simonides’ insights into
the architecture of memory and the power of places and pictures set the
ancient world alight, revealing how memory could be controlled and put to
powerful use.

Throughout this book you’ll be using lessons from the distant

past to improve your success in the most modern scenarios.
You’ll need to know something of the history and a little of
the science, but what you need most of all is ‘guided practice’:
opportunities to feel what it’s like to use your memory well now.

brilliant exercise
Have a go straight away. Experience how the ancients used to switch on
their memories.

You’re going to learn the following shopping list, in perfect order, forwards
and backwards. Here’s your first chance to learn how to remember by doing it.

rice sausages wine peas cheese eggs chicken bin-bags

tinfoil washing-powder

Look at the four corners of the room you’re in now. In a moment they’re
going to be filled with shopping – thanks to the powers of your creative
imagination.

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 10 improve your memory

Pick one of the corners and keep your eyes fixed on it as you imagine a
large pile of rice there, with sausages sticking out. Superimpose this image
on the real corner of the real room.

Then turn to the next corner, clockwise from the first, and this time picture
a large glass of red wine there, with peas bobbing on the surface.

Turn again, and in corner number three imagine seeing a big piece of Swiss
cheese, with a hard-boiled egg squeezed into each one of the holes.

In the last corner, imagine you can see some baby chickens jumping into
the black bin-bag that’s been taped to the wall. Really see this strange
scene happening in front of your eyes.

Finally, in the very centre of the room, imagine that a large square of tinfoil
has been laid down and covered in a thick layer of washing powder.

This is what Simonides did: he used the structure of a building to hold on

to information for him. See if it’s worked for you. Look back around the
room and see if you can find the traces of imagery in each corner and
in the middle. There should be two items of shopping in each of the five
places, giving you the original list – in exactly the original order. And if you
start with the product on top of the purchase in the centre, can you turn
around the room anticlockwise and read out the ten items in reverse?

Opinions and beliefs

To start using the systems of the past you need to think about
what your memory’s like today, asking questions like:

●● How good is it?

●● What do you use it for?
●● How do you feel about it?
●● What are your current tactics for making it work?
●● Which bits need the most support?

As you take your first steps along the path to a trained memory,

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 Switching on 11

it’s important to spend some time thinking about where you are
now and where you might go.

brilliant research
Several studies have estimated that around 80 per cent of our ‘self-talk’,
about everything, is negative. There’s probably a good evolutionary reason
for this: our brains are designed for survival, and being cautious and
sceptical is usually a safe bet. Learning new skills, thinking differently and
stepping out of a tried-and-tested comfort zone will always ring alarm bells,
activating safety messages framed as negative thoughts.

When you’re switching on to memory training, it’s vital that

you challenge some of your instinctive reactions. The voice in
your head may tell you not to push yourself, to keep doing what
you’ve always done, to feel the fear . . . but, do it anyway. Test
yourself to see what you can really achieve.

brilliant question
. . . about your attitudes to memory

Respond to the following statements as honestly as you can. For

each one, give yourself a rating somewhere between 0 (completely
disagree) and 5 (totally agree). At the end of the book you’ll be
able to return to these responses and see if your attitudes have
changed.

‘I have a brilliant memory.’

‘Nobody really needs to have a good memory these days.’
‘My memory is getting worse.’
‘I’m happy to tell everyone I have a bad memory.’

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 12 improve your memory

‘I’m past the point in my life when I need to learn new things.’
‘I’ll be embarrassed if I try to do things from memory – and fail.’
‘I have all the thinking skills I need to learn memory systems
and strategies.’
‘My memory annoys and frustrates me.’
‘I’m excited about taking risks and learning in new ways.’
‘I’d be happier sticking with the strategies I use now, even the
ones that don’t work.’

It’s good for you to face up to these feelings and bear them in
mind as you work through the book. Keep challenging them, seizing
on to evidence that might change your opinion – and noticing
when your feelings about your memory skills do improve. The more
positive you feel, the more likely you’ll be to push ahead, to take
risks and set new targets, and to find the strategies that work for
you.

brilliant question
. . . about potential barriers to your success

Because of our negative instincts, memory training involves

breaking through some significant barriers. All the factors below
have an effect on everyone’s mental performance, although the
story isn’t always as straightforward as you might think. In fact,
some of these things could even improve aspects of your memory.
The important thing is how you feel about these issues, and how
you choose to tackle them. Too many people miss out on all the
benefits of a trained brain because they accept the negatives at
face value.

Spend the next few minutes thinking about the things that could
stop you building a brilliant memory. Remember, the important

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 Switching on 13

thing to consider is what you feel might hold you back. Rank the
ideas below, from 10 (the least problematic) to 1 (the biggest
potential barrier for you).

Your age, and the effects ageing has on your memory.

Previous habits: for good or bad, you’re stuck with particular
learning strategies.
The limited time available to you to experiment and practise.
Your education: either the ways in which it failed you or the
hard-to-break habits you were taught.
Your intelligence: surely you have to be very clever to develop
a brilliant memory?
A poor track record at learning new things.
Health issues: specific physical or mental problems, or general
tiredness, discomfort or infirmity.
Low motivation, lack of inspiration, poor willpower.
Weak imagination: I’ve heard the art of memory requires a very
creative brain.
Lack of bravery, fear of failure.

As with the attitude statements earlier, you’ll be challenging these

ideas throughout the book. There’s no escaping it, though: these
factors do have power. Ageing alters your brain. The habits you’ve
developed will affect your memory training. Time to put new
techniques into practice is important . . . and so on. But none of
these issues has to be a dead-end, and many of them could actually
become the secrets of your success.

Analysing your attitudes, fears and overall feelings about

memory is a positive step in itself. You know where you’re
starting from and can begin to build your confidence – and to
enjoy the very clear benefits that can have for your learning.
Seize on anything that might shift the ‘self-talk balance’ in the
positive direction.

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 14 improve your memory

The power of positive thinking

Deep down you know that you can do much more with your
mind. You may not remember many of the billboards you
passed in the street yesterday, because your memory isn’t that
good and you weren’t paying attention and your mind isn’t
at its best right now and . . . and . . . and if you were offered
a thousand pounds for every one you recalled, or if your life
depended on remembering ten of them, how well do you think
you might do then?

brilliant research
When volunteers in a famous experiment were asked to learn a list of 100
foreign words, they did so with 92 per cent accuracy. But another group
was given 200 words to study, and their success rate increased, to 97 per
cent. And when the target number was upped to 1000 words, accuracy
only dipped slightly, to 96 per cent – still clearly better than the original
100-word group. Expectation has great impact. Learn to expect more from
your memory, set yourself higher targets and let your brain extend itself
beyond the limits of old.

Did you know?

Your memory works best when you’re happy. Research has
shown that distractions of all kinds, including distracted
thinking like fear and worry, significantly disrupt the learning
process. Memory problems are key symptoms of depression, and
children have been shown to learn much more in lessons which
they enjoyed.

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 Switching on 15

A day in the life of your memory

Mental imagery will become one of the most important tools in
your memory kit – and here’s another early chance to warm up
your imagination. You’re going to visualise a typical day in your
life, focusing on the times when memory plays a part. Don’t
worry if this feels difficult. You’ll be getting plenty of practice at
exploring information in your mind’s eye. Just start by picturing
yourself going through an average day.

Start at the moment you wake up. How do you wake up? Does
anything remind you it’s time to get going? How soon do you
normally start thinking about what the day might involve? Do
you use any tactics or tools to help you remember what’s in
store?

brilliant tip
When you’re imagining a scene like this, you might find it easiest
to picture events unfolding from your own point of view, or to
watch yourself from the outside, like a character in a movie. Get
used to controlling the pictures that appear in your mind. Zoom in,
pan round, find a wide shot or go for an extreme close-up. It’s your
imagination and you’re in control.

As you follow the whole day through, stay alert for every time
your memory is in use. When you’ve finished and your imaginary
day has ended, spend a moment thinking about two questions:
how did you use your memory, and how could you have used it
better?

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 16 improve your memory

brilliant question
So, how many different acts of memory were involved?

It’s likely that you had to remember what to do, bring, buy, finish
. . . how, when, why and where . . . whom you were speaking to, what
to say; and, afterwards, what you said and how you felt – because
we all spend time reviewing experiences and reflecting on the past,
not always very accurately. Too often memory is thought of in terms
of details such as names, phone numbers and anniversaries, skills
consciously learnt, or particular recall challenges like presentations,
interviews and tests – and even your average day will have involved
many of these demands. But there are also more subtle forms of
remembering.

And what about the recall you take for granted, about family
names, your own address, how to operate your car – plus that
whole layer of memory that keeps your lungs going and your
heart pumping . . .? There are so many different memory systems in
operation around the clock: some we stress about, others we rely
upon, and many we have to think hard about even to spot.

You use your memory so much more than you realise. In your
imagined day, when someone was speaking to you, did you
consider the memory skills that let you hold their words in your
head long enough to put them together into a sentence? Did you
recognise how the smell of burning toast reminded you about the
breakfast you’d started making? Did you think about the songs on
the car radio that reminded you of the past?

Considering every single moment of memory is clearly a next-

to-impossible task, but trying to should reveal how big a role
memory plays in your life, and how well it works most of the
time – another bit of positive thinking to bear in mind! But what
about the things that could have gone better . . . ?

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 Switching on 17

brilliant question
When could memory have helped you more?

Keeping aside those days when memory is in the spotlight (final

exams, major presentations, wedding speeches . . .), you should
have no problem spotting room for improvement even in a typical
twenty-four hours.

Be honest: how often does your memory fail you for key details that
could make all the difference? And even if you do remember most
of them, how much more could you achieve if you knew how to
manage everyday data faster and more reliably?

Would a better memory save you time and stress? What would it be
like to have full control of all the information coming your way?

Would your targets be set higher if you were more confident

about your memory? Might you do things differently, or take on
completely new challenges?

How could memory skills improve your performance at work, in

social situations, playing sports and games – even just around
the house, sorting the DIY, shopping and finances, managing the
family?

If you had a better memory, what might your life be like? Could it
make you feel different about yourself?

Examining a typical day like this is a very useful activity, and it

shouldn’t stop here. Start noticing memory in your real life and
deepening your answers to these two key questions. It’s a vital
early step in memory training because it helps you to learn about
the memory techniques and habits you’ve developed, to reflect
on what’s working and what’s not, and to highlight areas where
memory could provide a big boost to your success. It’s honest,

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 18 improve your memory

realistic, practical and positive: everything that Improve your

Memory is about.

brilliant timesaver
It’s important to make the most of every memory aid available,
especially the modern ones that work so well. Don’t even think
about throwing out your address book, diary or personal digital
assistant. It’s how you use them that counts, and you’ll see how
they can work brilliantly alongside your trained brain. A key
message throughout this book – to save time, to boost accuracy, to
achieve more and just to make life easier – is to take all the help
you can get.

Target setting
So with all those applications and potential benefits of memory
fresh in your mind, it’s time to decide just how good you want
to be. Remember, you’re challenging your natural negativity
and setting ambitious goals because that’s the way to make your
brain raise its game. This is a memory users’ manual, after all,
designed to get you doing things differently and quickly enjoying
the rewards.

Spend the next few minutes choosing your priority areas for
improvement and imagining how things could change. The more
detailed your targets, the more likely you’ll be to hit them.

Target: attitudes
Which of your attitudes about memory do you most want to
change? Look back at the list you considered earlier. Which three
attitudes do you want to have shifted furthest by the end of the
book?

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 Switching on 19

Target: barriers
There are plenty of potential barriers to your memory training,
some of which can be tackled practically and others that
require a change in perception. Have another look at the list
of potential barriers. Which three factors are your priorities to
overcome?

Target: applications
Having thought carefully about the way you’re using memory
now, you should have some good ideas about where you could
achieve more. Choose three specific uses of memory that you’re
going to focus on. You can still experiment with all the other
areas covered in this book, but these will be your principal
targets and key measures of progress.

Target: benefits
What about the more general benefits of memory training? Some
important themes have already started to emerge, like organisa-
tion, confidence, creativity and ambition. Spend a moment
looking back through this chapter and choose three areas to
prioritise. Which benefits would most improve your life?

Target: skills
To train your memory you need to build ‘foundation’ skills
like concentration, visualisation, even your sense of humour.
So, which ones do you want to prioritise? Where do you think
your brain is currently letting you down? Choose three skills to
develop: either because they need the most work or because you
think they might have the most to offer.

The new you

Many books would leave it there for now. But this one expects
more, and you’ve already done enough careful thinking to go

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 20 improve your memory

one step further. With all your targets in mind, spend a final
moment building a ‘memory’ to live up to. Use every thinking
skill you can muster to create a mental image of what your bril-
liant memory could do for you.

With your most influential attitudes corrected and the main

barriers overcome, which memory activities will give you most
practical help, satisfaction and pleasure? How will your wider
mental abilities be improved? And what about the ripple effects
on your core thinking skills?

brilliant exercise
Choose one of your target applications. Whatever it is, picture yourself
doing it brilliantly, using your memory quickly, easily, confidently. Before
long you’ll be combining your natural memory capacity with the artificial
memory you’re going to build – so imagine that happening now. You’ll
know how to get the most out of all the external memory aids at your
disposal, combining them with your trained mental powers. In your
imagination now, focus on how it would – how it will – feel to be that
good: what it’s going to do for your overall mental confidence. Make this
picture detailed and clear. It’s a great way to practise all the thinking skills
that will underpin your brilliant memory, and to build a ‘beacon’ image to
move towards that represents everything your brain can achieve.

brilliant dos and don’ts

As you switch on your brain and click into the training, here are
some important bits of advice that could make all the difference to
your success. Like your memory itself, what you get out of this book
depends largely on how you use it. So . . .

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 Switching on 21

Do
✔✔ Do . . . give everything a go. Try all the experiments, activities
and exercises in this book. They’re all designed to develop
important skills. Even when a particular example doesn’t seem
to suit your needs, you might be surprised about what it has to
offer you in similar situations – and the impact it can make on
your general brain training.
✔✔ Do . . . try it out for real. The challenges within this book are
only the start. Take every opportunity to put memory strategies
to work in your real life. Test them in the situations that
are most important to you. Thinking habits are particularly
ingrained, but they can be changed and you can set up much
more effective ways of using your brain. The theories in this
book will quickly make sense when you try them out for real.
✔✔ Do . . . be honest. Reflect on which strategies are paying
off, and which are not. Adapt and combine the different
techniques, be clear about the things that need more work, but
also celebrate the successes as your efforts start to bear fruit –
possibly in some unexpected ways.
Don’t
✘✘ Don’t . . . be negative. However you feel about your memory
now, whatever your past experiences of learning and recall
have been, wherever you feel you may have problems . . . try
to come to this book with an open mind. As Henry Ford said,
‘Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t,
you’re right.’ In memory training, a positive attitude and
eagerness to experiment and improve are key ingredients of
your success.
✘✘ Don’t . . . focus on failure. This book has been written to help
you raise your game and to challenge you to achieve more.
You wouldn’t be here if you could do it all straight away. Some
of the skills involved in memory development involve a major
shift in your thinking, so prepare to feel your mental muscles

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 22 improve your memory

being stretched – and to go easy on yourself if you can’t do all

the exercises immediately. Memory is a skill, and you’ll need to
make plenty of mistakes as you learn how to do it properly.
✘✘ Don’t . . . look for excuses. Age, health, experience, time,
confidence: there are plenty of factors affecting your memory
abilities, but they can all be managed to allow you to succeed.
Turning them into excuses will stop you taking control of your
memory and having the best brain possible. Set your targets
high. You’ve seen the barriers to success: now you’re going to
train yourself to jump them.

brilliant recap
●● A brilliant memory isn’t something you have, it’s something
you do.
●● Take every opportunity to personalise the training, to make it
work for you.
●● Prepare to combine the latest technology with the oldest
memory techniques.
●● Challenge all your attitudes: to memory in general, and to
yours in particular.
●● Set ambitious targets for how you want memory skills to
change your life.

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 CHAPTER 2

Memory
building
Memory is the cabinet of
imagination.

Edward M. Forster

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M02_HANC3292_01_SE_C02.indd 24 29/10/14 10:39 am
 In this chapter you will learn:
●● what ‘artificial’ memory is all about
●● the traditional tactics used to improve recall
●● your place in the history of memory training
●● how to assess your abilities in the core learning skills
●● ways to start setting up your brain for memory brilliance

We’ve known how to build brilliant memories for thousands

of years. Whenever memory has been valued and celebrated,
memory skills have been developed to make the most of its
power. The Ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus called memory
‘the mother of all wisdom’; in Rome, Cicero said that memory
was ‘the treasury and guardian of all things’; and both of these
men lived at times when memory was worshipped like a god.
Modern technology may accelerate and expand our mental
powers, but previous generations knew the benefits of con-
structing personal memory capacity. They made sure that the art
and artifice of memory were woven into the fabric of life.

Artificial intelligence
The distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ memory is a
really important one. It reveals how memory skills can revolu-
tionise everything you do. It’s tempting to assume that artificial
means technological; but it’s not as simple as the memory in your
head versus the modern props and gadgets that support it.

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 26 improve your memory

brilliant definition
Artificial memory

This concept has actually been around for centuries. It doesn’t refer
to external aids, but to the things you can do with your brain: to
the art of memory. Rather than just trusting your brain to keep hold
of information, you make absolutely sure it does, by using strategies
and systems. You consciously change the original material to make
it memorable, then fix it inside the artificial mental structures
you’ve built into your brain.

When the Roman orator Cicero walked around the rooms, hall-
ways and courtyards of his imaginary memory buildings, he saw
statues, vases and other delightful things, all carefully arranged
and meticulously maintained. His mental journeys were relaxed
and inspiring, each area light and airy, the places in his imagin­
ation rich but uncluttered, filled with just the right number
of interesting objects. And each object was there for a reason:
a carefully chosen symbolic clue to remind him of an impor-
tant piece of real-life information. So, constructing arguments,
teaching or speaking from memory – sometimes for hours on
end – Cicero could walk around his imaginary architecture, find
the items he’d put there, and trigger memories for every word,
fact, name or idea he needed, all laid out in precise order.

Public-speaking was a big part of life in Rome

and it became a very powerful advert for memory
techniques. The Roman teacher and orator Quintilian
said: ‘We should never have realised how great is the power
[of a trained memory] nor how divine it is, but for the fact
that it is memory which has brought oratory to its present
position of glory.’

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 Memory building 27

Before learning more about the glorious history of man-made

memory, it’s worth thinking about some of the artificial things
you already do to help you remember. Here’s a list of common
techniques used today by people the world over, and they have a
lot to say about the way memory works (or doesn’t).

Typical tactics
Most of us collect a set of personal memory habits and strate-
gies. Some we’re shown, by teachers, friends or relatives; some
we learn about in memory guides, from newspaper articles or
television shows; others we just develop, by trial and error or
through sheer chance. And when we find that something seems
to boost our recall, we tend to stick with it.

See how many of the following habits you recognise. Give them
all a rating: do you use them very often, occasionally, rarely or
never?

Using the alphabet

To remember a name you run through the possible initials one by
one. ‘Did his secretary’s name start with A, B, C ...? Yes, C: it was
... Carrie.’

brilliant exercise
How many random words can you name in 15 seconds? And then, how
many random words beginning with P can you say in the same timeframe?
Your score for these tests is likely to be very similar, and many people
actually do better in the second test. Did you notice how much easier it felt
when your memory had an initial letter to focus on? Language is such an
important aspect of your mental filing-systems, and it makes sense to use
the alphabet to help you retrieve stubborn memories.

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 28 improve your memory

Going back
It helps if you return to the last place you remembered something. You
get to the top of the stairs, realise you’ve forgotten what you came up
for, so go back to the kitchen where you probably had the idea – and,
miraculously, you remember it again.

brilliant research
Physical spaces can act as strong anchors for memory. Research shows
that recall can be boosted dramatically by re-creating the conditions in
which something was learnt. It’s why witnesses are often taken back to
the scene of the crime or told to focus on memories of physical places
and environmental conditions. Professor Alan Baddeley proved that
divers were much better at remembering test information they’d learnt
underwater when they were back underwater. Scientists also talk about
‘state-dependent memory’, referring to someone’s state of mind at the time
of forming a memory. Retrieving that memory tends to be much easier
when they’re back in the same state; and, since places can affect our mood,
going back somewhere physically is often doubly significant as it helps to
‘take you back’ emotionally.

Following connections
Associations and mental links lead you to the answer. ‘They’ve gone
on holiday to somewhere hot, and it was in a TV show, and there were
boats ... Aloha ... Hawaii!’ Sometimes thinking backwards is the key,
retracing your mental footsteps. ‘We were talking about cakes because
Lily had one specially made, and you’d asked why she was off work,
because we were discussing ... that’s it, your job hunting. So how’s it
going?’

Our memories are stored within an intricate web of connec-

tions. Neuroscience has demonstrated what we know from
experience: that memories can be accessed from a number of

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 Memory building 29

different ‘directions’, following connections from other memo-

ries and linking through imagery, language, senses, feelings . . .
Think of a moment in your life that you remember well and
think about often. What are the things that prompt you to go
back there in your memory? How many different thoughts
might remind you of it? Could you get to wherever it is in your
brain through a smell, a colour, a particular word, a feeling,
another memory?

brilliant tip
It’s great exercise for your memory to follow these associations and
connections whenever they crop up. The next time a seemingly
random memory pops up, do some detective work. What made you
think of that moment at this moment?

Leaving reminders
You leave your bag by the front door, move a chair to stop you
touching the broken desk or tie a knot in your handkerchief to remind
you that you have something to remember.

Our brains are very good at spotting things that are out of
the ordinary: in particular, items that don’t fit the rest of a
pattern. It’s known as the Von Restorff effect – named after sci-
entist Hedwig von Restorff, who showed that it’s much easier to
remember a bit of information that’s different from the rest. So
making one corner of your handkerchief look different, placing a
bag across the doorway to disrupt your normal movements and
writing out key information in different colours are all likely to
help you remember.

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 30 improve your memory

brilliant tip
The next time you write out a list and spot something on it that’s
particularly important, don’t just underline it. Do something really
unusual to it to give your memory a powerful clue. You could turn
the word into a funny cartoon, write it five times as big as the other
words, or even say the word in an unusual way. Make it stand out
and you’ll instantly make it easier to recall.

Striking a pose
Somehow scratching your head, rubbing your chin or looking up at the
sky helps you remember.

It’s fascinating to look at people’s eye movements when they’re

trying to remember something. The eyes tend to follow partic-
ular patterns depending on the type of memory being accessed
– a phenomenon studied by enthusiasts of NLP, neuro-linguistic
programming, who analyse it to explore how we form mental
models of our experiences. Try it yourself . . .

brilliant exercise
Remember something visually (what did your first house look like?) and
your eyes (at least most people’s) will go up to the left. In fact it can feel
really hard to visualise a memory if you look anywhere else. Invent an
image, on the other hand, and your eyes will go up to the right – so watch
someone’s eyes the next time you want to know if they’re describing a real
visual memory or one they’ve made up!
●● Remember a sound (what does your ring-tone sound like?) and you look
sideways to the left.
●● Remember a sense or feeling (what was it like when you injured
yourself?) and your eyes go down to the right.

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 Memory building 31

The next time you find yourself adopting a particular pose when you’re
struggling to remember, ask yourself why. Does it help you mentally, letting
your brain work in a particular way? Does it make you more comfortable
physically, helping you to relax or be more alert or breathe more easily?
Does it comfort you emotionally, perhaps reminding you of a particular
pose or physical habit from childhood? Maybe it distracts you, gives you
something else to think about – and makes space for the memory to pop
back into your head? Or perhaps it signals to other people that you’re
thinking and buys you a bit of extra time!

Using pictures
You close your eyes and imagine a place, person or scenario as clearly
as possible. You might even be able to picture your lesson notes or
important pages from the textbooks you’ve used.

You’ll find that the power of pictures is a central theme throughout

this book. Many of our memories come with clear images attached,
so it makes sense to explore them that way. Visualising informa-
tion helps you to focus on it and carry out some of the other tactics
in this list. And you quickly start up a kind of mental dialogue,
because visualising seems to be strengthened by verbalising. It’s
like you’re discussing an image with yourself as you see it in your
mind’s eye, enriching the visualised version as you explore the
details, facts and ideas about it that you consciously remember.

brilliant exercise
Picture your first school, for example (did your eyes go up to the left?), and you’ll
probably find yourself reconstructing the images by talking things through in
your head. ‘We always came in through the main doors. The cloakroom was
tidy because we didn’t have big bags back then. The classroom belonged to . . .
Mrs Brown, and her coat always hung on a hook by the door . . .’ They say that a
picture paints a thousand words, but maybe it’s really the other way round!

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 32 improve your memory

Telling stories
You remember how to tie knots thanks to stories of pirates criss-
crossing islands and rabbits going down holes. You turn initial letters
into funny scenes and stories. You know how to spell ‘because’...
because Big Elephants Can’t Always Use Small Exits.

Information becomes easier to remember when it has meaning,

when it’s patterned and connected and gives you some kind of
story to follow – especially when that story is exciting, unusual,
funny, rude . . . You’ll be making use of these creative principles
throughout your memory training, continuing a tactic that
seems to come naturally. Long before written language, we used
stories to retain information, and even now we rely on them to
structure our thinking and strengthen our memories. We often
add stories to what we’re saying to make sure other people
remember it. You’ll see later that there’s a right way and a wrong
way of telling memory stories, especially when you’re inventing
one of those memory sentences for spellings or lists; but story-
telling in general is a very effective strategy for almost every kind
of memory challenge.

brilliant exercise
You can use the stories you know to store new information that you want
to learn. For example, have a go at learning seven items to pack for a
holiday by thinking of a day in the life of a girl called Goldilocks . . .

You must remember to bring:

camera sunglasses passport sun-cream books hiking-boots

insect-repellent

So, you tell yourself a familiar story with some new details added.

Goldilocks was wandering through the woods with her brand new
camera, taking pictures of flowers, trees, animals – and the little cottage

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 Memory building 33

she found. The cottage was painted bright white: so dazzlingly white, in
fact, that she had to wear sunglasses as she approached the door. She
took out her passport (what a terrible picture of her!) in case the owners
of the house wanted some ID, but there didn’t seem to be anyone in. So,
she left her passport on the step and walked inside – only to find that
the front room of the cottage was swimming in sun-cream, floods of it,
sloshing around the floor and up the walls. To her relief she saw three
books floating on the surface – one big, one medium and one tiny – and
she managed to pull them together and use them like a raft, until the
sea of sun-cream started to drain away, leaving her sitting on the floor
next to three pairs of hiking-boots. Whose were they? She had a look and
a prod and a sniff – and the smell told her immediately that the boots
belonged to bears. She pulled out her insect-repellent and squirted the
boots, herself, and the whole room around her, hoping it would also
work to repel any large hairy animals who might be about to return
home . . .

Now tell yourself the same story from memory and see how many of the
holiday items you can find. Your brain should respond very well to this style
of learning. Each bit of the story connects you to the next, and there’s no
reason why you couldn’t have included many more images to trigger many
more memories as the story went on, and on, and on . . .

Hearing rhythms
Do you find it easier to remember phone numbers if you say them in
a particular way? Did you learn the alphabet, history dates or science
facts using rhythms and rhymes?

Rhythms and rhymes are effective ways of giving information

the pattern and structure it needs to stick in your mind. They
also get you doing something to remember: tapping, clapping,
singing, pronouncing words loudly and clearly – all of which
helps you to hold on to your material in the short term, and to
embed it for longer-term storage.

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 34 improve your memory

brilliant exercise
Read through this excerpt from a famous poem about the kings and
queens of England. Learning it would help you to retain a great deal of
historical information, but the key thing to notice at this stage is how
naturally you emphasise the rhythm of each line. The fact that it’s such a
rhythmical poem is fundamental to its power.

Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee,

Harry, Dick, John, Harry Three,
One Two Three Neds, Richard Two,
Harrys Four Five Six . . . then who?
Edwards Four Five, Dick the Bad,
Harrys twain, Ned six the lad,
Mary, Bessie, James you ken,
Then Charlie, Charlie, James again . . .

Feeling your way through

You can type your PIN into the machine, or remember which buttons
open the security door at work – but only by actually doing it. You use
the pattern of physical movement: the way a particular memory feels.

Look out for these examples of ‘muscle memory’ in your life.

They can be very positive habits, allowing you to slip into par-
ticular patterns of movement that produce good results – like
the right door code or a powerful golf-swing. But be careful . . .

brilliant tip
Always have another way of remembering something, so that you’re
not completely reliant on how it feels. If muscle memory is all
you’ve got to go on, when it doesn’t quite click you can suddenly

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 Memory building 35

be lost – and then, as too many golfers know, conscious thought

only makes things worse. But you can disrupt these memories on
purpose. Put your kettle in a different place tonight and, in the
morning, when you reach for it automatically and find it’s moved,
you’ll remember this bit of the book!

Making it personal
You’re always on the look-out for connections with you: your age on a
car number-plate, your first name in a newspaper article, your house
number on someone’s customer reference.

These things stand out as meaningful, important, unusual, inter-

esting, fun – all important factors in making your memory work
brilliantly.

brilliant exercise
Imagine you wanted to learn the following ten numbers: perhaps houses to
deliver to on the High Street, catalogue order codes or important pages in
a revision textbook.

2 37 14 29 25 54 37 16 61 88

One idea would be to link them all to you, to make the most of the power
of personalising – and there are several ways you could do it.

First, take each number in turn and ask yourself the following question:
why is this the perfect number to describe me at this moment? Some
numbers really might be appropriate (it’s my age, the temperature right
now, the number of kids in the car), but for most of them you’ll have to use
your imagination and invent some personal significance.

37: because it’s precisely the number of times I’m going to think about my
boyfriend today.

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 36 improve your memory

25: because that’s the number of people who could squeeze into that
cupboard: five along, five across.
16: because it’s half my house number: maybe just the bottom floor.
88: because last night I ‘ate’ and ‘ate’. . .

Every good learning strategy and system relies on personal connections –

using them if they’re there, inventing them if they’re not – and remember:
this book began with a message about personalising every activity to make
the training work for you, so it’s a good idea to latch on to any available
connections to you and your real life.

Another simple technique would be to imagine that these numbers

represented you, at different ages. Flash a picture into your head of you as
a two-year-old. What did you look like? How did you speak, eat, move? Now
see yourself aged 37. What’s your appearance like in this picture?

When you’ve gone through the whole list, cover up the numbers and see
how many of them come to mind now. What sort of personal connections
work best for you?

These are just ten of the many tactics we use. They’re all
effective techniques at times, although some are often used
badly, and a few can occasionally hinder more than they help.
Considering your own typical tactics gives you a glimpse of the
way your unique brain works, highlighting the habits to keep as
well as the skills that need attention; but there’s also important
evidence here about how memory works in general. Many of
these typical tactics will return as you learn how to get the very
best out of your brain.

brilliant timesaver
Sometimes the best tactic of all is simply stopping, taking a break.
You make a conscious decision to leave the remembering until

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 Memory building 37

later – and then the memory pops back when you’re busy doing
something else. Try it now. How many Simpsons characters can you
name? (Or football teams, Bond movies or states of America?) Run
through all the ones you remember straight away, but as soon as
you come to a gap, stop. It’s particularly good if you can stop while
there’s a memory ‘on the tip of your tongue’. Tell yourself you’re
going to keep working on it in the back of your mind, but don’t
think about it consciously. See if the missing information comes
back of its own accord, while you’re reading about the history of
artificial memory . . .

To make the most out of your memory now, you need to see how
it used to be done.

Ancient masters of memory

The Greek poet Simonides is credited with inspiring great
thought-leaders like Aristotle to explore and extend memory
techniques. He’d spotted that places helped him to remember,
which opened up an interesting new avenue in brain training;
but he was already part of a poetic tradition of using memorable
imagery, and Aristotle just continued investigating the ways in
which artificial thinking could boost memory.

Memory skills through the ages

In the Middle Ages, memory systems were focused firmly
on moral and religious activity. It was useful to have ways to
remember the rules of behaviour and core aspects of belief. The
groundwork of the Greeks and Romans now proved very helpful
for honing meditation skills and developing powerful ways of
reading and remembering religious texts. ‘Illuminated’ manu-
scripts contained a vivid mix of words and pictures, and even

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 38 improve your memory

the non-religious poets and writers were eager to use memory

techniques to make their offerings as memorable as possible.

The art of memory was developed throughout the Middle Ages.

By the Renaissance, it was a key feature of visual art and public
drama, and it even had a theatre of its own, invented by the
sixteenth-century Italian Giulio Camillo. When you went inside
his ‘Theatre of Memory’ you stood on the stage and looked out
at objects and images arranged amongst the tiered levels before
you, carefully organised and displayed to be memorable. Visitors
were expected to use memory alone to get this visual ‘download’
of valued knowledge – just as audiences for Simonides’ poems,
listeners to Cicero’s speeches, meditating medieval monks,
Chaucer fans and Renaissance consumers of the arts could all
be expected to use their ‘artificial’ memory skills.

So . . . what’s happened to the art of memory since? Artificial

memory mechanisms are still present in many of our festivals,
with plenty of images, objects, rituals, songs and dances used
to help us remember and repeat. Our writers, poets, artists,
advertisers, politicians and propagandists all know the buttons to
press to switch on our memories and make their material stick.

But somewhere along the line the active art of remembering

seems to have been . . . well, forgotten. We have no shortage of
modern memory aids, but the artificial memory skills cherished
in ancient times and developed through the ages have fallen into
a pretty bad state of repair.

Thinking skills
To take control of your memory, you need to train some key
aspects of your thinking. So, how confident do you feel now
about your concentration, organisation, visualisation, imagi-
nation, creativity and sense of humour? These are all vital
components of a brilliant memory, essential skills for all the

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 Memory building 39

memory strategies and systems you’re going to try, so spend

a few moments reflecting on each of them in turn. Answer the
questions honestly and have a go at a few quick experiments to
help you judge your abilities right now.

Concentration
How well can you focus on a learning task? Do you concentrate
well when memorising foreign words, learning lines for a play
or watching a cookery demonstration – or do you get distracted
and let your mind wander? How many of your learning projects
do you actually finish?

brilliant exercise
You’ll need a watch, clock or mobile phone timer for this test. See how well
you can estimate particular amounts of time. Start with thirty seconds. Set
the timer going, then close your eyes and focus on the passing seconds.
Count in Mississippis or elephants or whatever if you want, and see if
you can say when thirty seconds have passed. Gradually extend your time
targets, estimating one minute, ninety seconds, two minutes or even more.
See if you can do it without saying a word. What difference does it make if
you keep your eyes open? How about trying this test in a busy room? Can
you imagine a clock with the second hand turning or the digits changing,
to help you keep track of the count and improve your accuracy, however
distracting the conditions?

Organisation
Is your approach to learning ordered? Do you make use of
lists and clear plans of action? When you’re studying for a
test or preparing to give a presentation, do you spend time
arranging your notes, resources and ideas? How organised is
your mind?

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 40 improve your memory

brilliant exercise
Have a go at organising some familiar information. Can you list the seven
days of the week in alphabetical order? It might help to imagine them
written down, or to visualise a diary or calendar and see the days swap
places as they slot into their new order. Can you sort them out logically,
check you’ve considered them all, and read out the new order of days from
the list in your mind?

Visualisation
How strong are your powers of visualisation? Can you view clear
images in your ‘mind’s eye’ to help you remember? When you try
to put faces to names or explore memories of the past, do mental
pictures figure in your thinking?

brilliant exercise
Here’s a surprisingly tricky test of your visualisation skills. It involves
bringing to mind something you’ve seen many times: an ice-cube. Imagine
you’ve attached a thread to one corner of the cube and you’re dangling it in
your drink, keeping half above the surface. The question’s this: as you look
from above, what shape does the cube make in the liquid? Give yourself
a moment to form the picture in your mind and examine it from different
angles. Would it be easier if the cube was a die or a foldable frame? And
once you’ve got an answer, what would you do with your mental image to
check you’re right? Could you expand it, unfold it, slice it . . . ?

Imagination
Can you go one step further and produce images of your
own: new versions of realistic ideas, or completely off-the-wall

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 Memory building 41

concepts that could exist only in your mind? Do you use imagi-
nation to explore problems, visualise solutions and create helpful
memory triggers? Could you transform programming instruc-
tions, complex formulae or dull lecture notes into something
much more appealing, much more memorable?

brilliant exercise
Start with a mental picture of your home, and see what you can do with
it in your imagination. First, think how you could transform it, if money
was no object. See the place changing, developing into somewhere
bigger, more luxurious, more exciting, more fun . . . And then, to test
out your imagination, what if the laws of science themselves no longer
applied? Now anything’s possible – so what images can your imagination
offer?

Creativity
As well as visualising familiar pictures, can you create new ones?
Can you add memorable images to help you learn directions,
essays, sports skills? When you’ve got a problem to solve, how
creatively can you manipulate memories, combine and extend
them, and view the possibilities from different angles?

brilliant exercise
Try this challenge to your creative thinking. There aren’t really any right or
wrong answers, just as many interesting ideas as your mind can conjure
up. How many ways could you use chocolate to improve the working life of
your employees? You could give them all free chocolate . . . but what else
could you do with it? Can you think of ten original ideas? Twenty? More?

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 42 improve your memory

Humour
How often do you use your sense of humour and understanding
of comedy to activate your learning? You know you remember
funny moments, but do you use humour to learn recipes, to-do
lists, foreign languages? Does it influence the way you commu-
nicate, teach, or make others remember you?

brilliant exercise
Here are three quick exercises to test your sense of humour and comedic
skill.

Number one: list five comedians that make you laugh. Picture them, recall
their jokes, remember the way they make you feel.

Number two: think about five moments in real life that still make you smile.
Were they surreal, embarrassing, surprising? How powerfully can you
re-create them in your memory?

Number three: can you write funny answers to the following jokey
questions: What did the foot say to the sock? Why is a teacher like a pot
plant? What do you get if you cross a computer with a chocolate cake?

As well as helping you to analyse your current abilities, all these questions
and examples are designed to switch on the key memory-building bits of
your brain, and to deepen your understanding of what brilliant memory
involves. You’ll be getting more powerful training tips in the next chapter;
and, by using these thinking skills to strengthen your memory, you’ll find
that you stretch and sharpen them all in return. You set yourself up to
improve at all the memory challenges you’ve tried before, but you should
already be spotting some new ways in which memory could make a big
difference in your life.

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 Memory building 43

brilliant recap
●● Artificial memory techniques boost what the brain can do
naturally.
●● Think about the things you already do to improve your recall.
●● Start extending your ‘typical tactics’ and make more of them in
your learning.
●● The training you’ve begun is part of a long and noble tradition.
●● To have a brilliant memory, you need to strengthen all your
core thinking skills.

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M02_HANC3292_01_SE_C02.indd 44 29/10/14 10:39 am
 CHAPTER 3

Memory
boosting
The difference between false
memories and true ones is the
same as for jewels: it is always the
false ones that look the most real,
the most brilliant.

Salvador Dali

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M03_HANC3292_01_SE_C03.indd 46 29/10/14 10:43 am
 In this chapter you will learn:
●● how to train the thinking skills that will maximise your
memory
●● what we know, and what we don’t, about the human brain
●● the life-spans of different types of memory
●● why you remember and why you forget
●● new ways to start forgetting less and remembering
everything

It’s time to start using your brain better, to create artificially

brilliant memories of everything. As you discovered in the last
chapter, some of your current memory methods are paying off,
so keep doing anything that helps. But you also need to try out
new ideas – and you’re about to take a very different approach to
a whole range of learning challenges, examining what your brain
does when it works best and starting to change your approach to
match. Give everything a go, develop strategies and systems that
suit your brain and your life, and prepare to feel your memory
doing some new and exciting things.

Change your mind

There’s a famous saying that goes like this: if you always do what
you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got. Albert
Einstein once said that the best definition of insanity is doing

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 48 improve your memory

the same thing over and over again, but expecting the results to
be different . . .

Chapter 2 identified the six key areas of thinking that contribute

to having a brilliant memory. You’re about to start using them
all as you change the way you learn for ever; and so, to give you
the very best chance of success, here’s a mini training session for
each one.

Concentration
To start training your concentration, why not try counting back-
wards at the same time as counting forwards? Out loud, count
‘one, two, three . . .’ up to ten, and at the same time visualise the
numbers from ten down to one. So as you say ‘one’ you picture
ten, on ‘two’ you see nine, and so on. Can you do it up to and
down from 20, 50, 100? What happens when you carry out the
two counts at different speeds?

You can also train your brain to concentrate with words. See
if you can make up some meaningful sentences in which every
word starts with the last letter of the previous one.

‘I’m making good decisions.’

‘After reading, get testing – go on, now!’
‘How will Lisa and Diane enjoy your recollections?

It’s a brilliant boost for your concentration, especially as you

have to think of several things at the same time: the sentence so
far, the last word, the last letter, the next word . . . And how easy
do you find it to concentrate on something logical while you’re
also trying to be creative? To have a brilliant memory you’ll need
to be able to operate many different bits of your brain at once.

Organisation
You can easily start to train your ‘organised thinking’ skills.
When you create memory sentences, for example, using the

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 Memory boosting 49

initial letters of words in a list, get into the habit of reorganising

them to make remembering easier.

Here’s a list of different types of energy:

gravitational electrical heat light chemical kinetic

For once the order of the items isn’t important, so why not
organise them in a way that helps your memory? My wife’s called
Lucy, so I might decide it’s useful to have her at the start of the
sentence: light (L for Lucy). I could put electrical and kinetic next,
to give me ‘electric kettle’; and then what about reordering the
last three words as heat, chemical and gravitational: ‘. . . heats cold
gravy’.

Lucy’s electric kettle heats cold gravy. It’s a very memorable image.
I can see it, touch it, hear it, smell it, taste it . . . and now I have
a much better chance of remembering those six ideas, thanks to
some careful organisation at the start.

Often, the act of organising information (focusing on it, exploring

it, doing something with it) is enough to make it memorable.
That’s particularly true when you categorise rather than just
rearrange, and it doesn’t seem to matter what categories you use
– even ones you invent.

Try it yourself. Read this list of Christmas presents and group

the items into categories of your choice, real or imaginary.
For example, there’s a group of foods in this list and a set of
round things; but maybe there are also ‘the three things that
Neil Armstrong tried to smuggle to the moon’, or ‘items in the
President’s pocket’ . . .

ham robot watch vase torch perfume remote-

controlled car aftershave wine tie bowl camera mug
necklace cheese

Now cover up the list and see how much of it stuck in your
memory. If your organising and categorising has worked, one

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 50 improve your memory

word should quickly trigger several more, and the categories

themselves should be easy to remember because each one has
several words to act as triggers. Which categories worked par-
ticularly well? If anything slipped your mind, how might you
have connected it more memorably to the other items in the set?

Visualisation
As well as strengthening your visualisation skills, this exercise
will provide you with a useful piece of memory ‘equipment’.
You’re going to build yourself an item of mental furniture to
hold your memories.

Visualise . . . a beautiful oak cabinet. It has two doors at the front

which open to reveal three drawers on the left, three on the right,
and two open shelves in between. See this piece of furniture as
clearly as you can in your mind’s eye. Walk around it, look at it
from close up and from far away and build a very clear picture
of it in your mind. Imagine opening the doors and checking that
each drawer on the left is empty, then the top and bottom shelf,
and finally the three drawers on the right.

Now you can put in some memories. Here’s a list of eight coun-
tries that you want to talk about at a meeting, in this precise
order:

France China Australia India USA Italy England

Egypt

For each country, imagine you’ve been given an intricate little

model of one of its famous buildings or landmarks. Then, gently
and carefully, put the models into your cabinet: one in each of
the three drawers on the left, one on each shelf, and then the
remaining three models in the drawers on the right.

You might see yourself putting a model of the Eiffel Tower in the
first drawer; then part of the Great Wall of China in the drawer
below, followed by Sydney Opera House in the one beneath.

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 Memory boosting 51

Carry on until you’ve visualised a model for each of the coun-

tries, and all eight models are safely inside. Practise seeing them
in their individual spaces and as part of a whole collection of
information.

And when you cover the printed list and open the doors of the
cabinet in your mind, what can you see . . . ?

Imagination
More than just seeing images vividly, you need to be able to
transform them memorably in your mind. Imagination is at the
heart of artificial memory; and the good news is that you can
train it to be brilliant.

You can practise by changing dull, lifeless, forgettable infor-

mation into something so rich and real that it already has a
good chance of being remembered. You use your imaginative
skills consciously and strategically to manipulate information,
bringing it to life in your mind in unusual and ambitious ways.

Your next challenge is to change each of the following words

into something that will excite your interest and activate your
memory.

book coat tree car plate apple

As words on a page they’re pretty flat and uninteresting – but

your imagination will soon see to that.

First, play around with the size and shape of each object. The
book could be the biggest in the world. The coat might be only
just big enough for an ant to wear. Perhaps the car is the longest
stretch limo in history; the plate octagonal; the apple flat enough
to post under a door. Picture all the images in your mind’s eye
and get used to using imagination to make them special.

Next, add one unusual detail to each picture. Use all the five
senses imaginatively. What’s odd about the way the book looks?

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 52 improve your memory

What strange noise does the coat make? Does the tree feel funny,
or smell of something, or even have a memorable taste if you
imagine biting into its bark . . . ?

Now use your imagination to make each item do something

memorable. You could pick a theme: for example, how would
they all fly, or dance, or talk? If you focused on flying, the car
might use its doors as wings, the plate could be fitted with heli-
copter blades, and perhaps the apple would burst high into the
sky like a rocket? Or, forget about a theme and make all the
actions different, creating five very memorable items with their
own individual skills.

After all of that, it shouldn’t be hard to remember the five items

– and not just the original words, but all the rich, imagina-
tive layers of detail you added. Holding them in your mind in
this heightened form boosts your memory, but it also gets you
engaging more closely with the information, so that remembering
it is just the beginning of what you can do.

Creativity
Brilliant memory involves creativity on a number of different levels.
You pick and choose from a range of strategies. You find creative
ways to organise, visualise and re-imagine information. You invent
clever images to remind you of complex or abstract ideas. And, as a
result, you start using your memory to boost your creativity. You’re
motivated and alert, thinking in pictures and patterns, and able to
bring together knowledge, experience and a wealth of new observa-
tions and ideas to produce some truly creative results.

brilliant exercise
Practise your creative thinking skills by finding images to represent the
following bits of information: random words picked from a dictionary. Use
the way the words look, how they sound, any associations that come to

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 Memory boosting 53

mind, and every other possibility that opens up when you inject creativity
into your learning.

velocity total happy eighteen torque permission

What image ‘says’ velocity to you? A cheetah, a jet plane, Usain Bolt?
And what about this particular word, which could be easily confused with
‘speed’ or ‘fast’? Maybe the plane is jetting over Velo City, home to the
fastest animals and humans on earth?

Total is another abstract idea, so perhaps you make it as bright and exciting
as a telethon ‘totaliser’, getting huge cheers at it’s used to announce the
latest total; or just break it down into a cute little boy: ‘tot Al’.

You might picture a happy hippie . . . ‘a teen’ becoming eighteen . . .

whatever combination of real meanings, creative associations and clever
word-play produces the image clues that your memory loves.

And what about some names? Here are five Roman goddesses. If you
wanted to learn them, for a talk, a test, or just to strengthen your historical
knowledge, you’d need to turn them into images – and you’d have to think
very creatively to come up with the pictures to use.

Vesta Terra Ceres Minerva Venus

Is Vesta only wearing a vest? Is Terra acting like a terror? Maybe Ceres
cares, Minerva works down a mine, Venus loves exotic venues . . . ?

This creative interpretation of the material gets you well on the way to
remembering it brilliantly. And when you’ve got your five images, why
not spend a moment trying to organise them creatively, connecting them
together somehow to keep them in your mind. Is there a clever way you
could order them, categorise them, combine them into a single scene or
link them into a story?

Humour
It’s probably not possible to train your sense of humour
(although you could explore some different types of comedy,

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 54 improve your memory

mix with funnier people and find more opportunities to relax

and laugh), but you can definitely practise using comedy to
activate your memory.

brilliant exercise
Here are two ideas to try. First, take the following famous names and put
them into a funny story involving every kind of visual comedy you can
imagine. Steal ideas from all the comedy films you’ve seen. Use slapstick,
surprise, practical jokes, farce, coincidence, misunderstanding . . . anything
you can think of to raise a smile.

Mickey Mouse Elvis Napoleon Madonna Harry Potter Dumbo

Arnold Schwarzenegger Oprah Winfrey Dracula Pelé

Maybe Mickey Mouse slips on a banana skin and lands on top of Elvis in
the middle of a song – and he jumps into a cupboard where Napoleon has
accidentally covered Madonna and Harry Potter in custard . . .

Visualise the events being played out in front of a packed audience, and
exaggerate the sound of their laughter at each moment of madness.

And as a second exercise, what would happen if your favourite comedian

became your teacher? Choose a famous comedy star, past or present, and
then imagine them giving you the following information (the directions
your friend’s just given you to the party tomorrow night). How would Bill
Cosby, Charlie Chaplin, Joan Rivers or Laurel and Hardy tell you to go . . .

. . . up the hill as far as the church, then right on to the main road for 12
miles. When you get to the garage, take the next left, go past the factory,
under the railway bridge and then right at the school. The house you want
is number 88, with a blue door.

A key component of comedy is exaggeration, so make sure your chosen

comedian supplies you with extreme examples of their distinctive style.
Imagine them pulling out all the stops to find humour even in some dull
driving instructions. How would they make them funny – and make you
remember them?

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 Memory boosting 55

brilliant impact
British comedy star Al Murray says he finds it hard to remember new
people he meets at parties. But when he’s on stage, even working at
speed and under great pressure to perform, he’s able to interact with the
audience and remember many of their names. He turns them into new
characters for his act, finds comedy in their names, jobs, hobbies, opinions
. . . and he can remember them all with ease. Making things funny simply
makes them more memorable.

Your brilliant brain

You’ll be getting many more opportunities to stretch these
skills as your memory training continues. Your new approach
to remembering relies on them. You’ll be constantly exer-
cising the core aspects of your thinking – and you’ll need to,
because memory is a complex process. We’ve been struggling
to understand it for millennia, and exploring a little of the
history now will tell you a lot about what you have to do to
be brilliant.

Did you know?

Your brain is not only the most complex organ in your body, it
is the most intricate object in the universe. It’s not much to look
at: grey in colour, wrinkled like a walnut and with the texture
of a wet sponge. Around 75 per cent water, your brain weighs
around 1.5 kilograms; and, although that’s only about 2 per cent
of your bodyweight, it uses 20 per cent of the oxygen in your
blood – carried in 100,000 miles of blood vessels. If you could
harness its electrical power, the human brain could light up a
10-watt bulb.

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 56 improve your memory

Lose it, and still use it

People have lost large chunks of their brain and still been able
to function, their mental systems shifting and sharing tasks and
finding new ways to operate. Head injuries can have remarkably
specific effects on thinking, showing that certain mental abilities
are controlled by certain parts of the brain; but neuroscientists
have found different bits of the same ‘memory’ in very different
places, and modern imaging techniques reveal the complex
interconnections involved in the simplest of tasks.

We’ve learnt much more about how the brain does specific
things, but we’re still at the very edge of understanding how its
tangle of systems becomes memory – and, especially, where the
memories are made and kept.

Mapping the memory

We think that memories are processed and stored all over the
cerebral cortex, the brain’s wrinkled outer layer. The four lobes
specialise in particular aspects of memory: the frontal lobes,
for example, play an important role in short-term learning and
co-ordinating memories, drawing on the past and planning
the future; and the temporal lobes major in autobiographical
memory. And beneath the cortex, key parts of the brain appear
to have their own roles to play.

●● The hippocampus is heavily involved in transferring

memories from short- to long-term storage and specialises
in ‘declarative’ learning, the things you can talk about, and
memory for shape and space. In a disease like Alzheimer’s,
the hippocampus is often the first area to be damaged,
leading to confusion about details, spatial disorientation and
a general inability to form new memories.
●● The cerebellum is located at the back of the brain, near the
spinal cord. This area is important for storing procedural

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 Memory boosting 57

memories and motor learning: skills involving good co-

ordination and delicate control. These memories do tend
to feel like they’re stored in a different way from the rest:
accessible without much conscious thought – and built to last.
●● The amygdala has been shown to work with emotional
memory, so if it’s not operating properly you’ll struggle
to understand and process feelings. And emotions have a
major impact on how memories are made and retrieved.

Memory is an extremely complex system. A lot has to happen for

an experience to become a memory.

Short term/long term

Your brain is good at taking in information, but what happens
next is less straightforward. We now think of ‘short-term’ memory
as very short indeed. Your sense organs detect details, get them
inside your head, and then the information is held on a very tem-
porary basis in what’s called ‘working memory’. After that, some
of it gets transferred to more lasting storage, ‘long-term’ memory
– so training your memory involves learning to do four things well:

●● gathering: using strong senses, concentrating and showing

good attention to detail
●● holding: having strategies for retaining information long
enough to do something with it
●● storing: taking ownership of the material, filing it effectively
●● retrieving: knowing how to recover key bits of information,
individually or in combination, for a variety of different
needs

The vast amount of sense information you take in stays in your

working memory just long enough to stand a chance of being
remembered, thanks to some instinctive activities in the brain.
Memory systems get to work to grasp hold of new material,

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 58 improve your memory

beginning the process that will lead to some of it being stored for
longer than the passing moment . . . .

Holding sounds
Consider what happens when someone calls out their phone
number to you. As you look for a pen and paper or your own
phone, you’re probably repeating the digits to yourself, either
under your breath or in your imagination, keeping the fast-
decaying information in your head for long enough to record
it somewhere else. You’re making use of your phonological loop.

Holding images
When you see a diagram or watch something moving you retain
it as a picture in your head – for a while. This is your visuo-
spatial sketchpad in action, and it also plays a role in planning
movements. As someone gives you directions (‘over the bridge,
right at the traffic light, past the pub. . .’) you’re likely to create a
mental picture and focus on it intently, trying to keep this imagi-
nary map in front of your mind’s eye.

Holding sequences
Your brain can integrate different sorts of information to form
memorable sequences and structures, as words form into sen-
tences, for example, or sights and sounds make up movie scenes.
There’s a limit, after which the sequence itself isn’t enough, but
up to that point you can remember ‘the story so far’ thanks to
the natural power of the brain’s episodic buffer.

All three of these systems are co-ordinated by the central execu-

tive, and together they provide you with the working memory
that holds on to information in the short term. But there are
some other important factors in play. Some things are simply
easier for you to hold on to, and understanding why is a key early
step towards boosting your brain.

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 Memory boosting 59

brilliant exercise
Throughout the history of memory testing, word lists have been used to
investigate individuals’ particular abilities, as well as to highlight common
experiences and effects. To make the most of the following powerful
experiment, try your best to switch off any active memory strategies and then
ask someone to read the word list to you out loud. Just listen to the words
and see which ones your brain retains without any conscious effort from you.

box coat oven key shark pan Elvis Presley car hole whale
laugh pencil sharpener modern octopus hat trophy grey
murder rose pin starfish book firework toast seahorse barrel
fast apple

If a computer was working properly, it wouldn’t have any problem

remembering these words. It could give them back to you forwards,
backwards or in any other arrangement with 100 per cent accuracy, for
ever. It wouldn’t be put off by someone talking, get confused by previous
word lists, be distracted between learning and recalling, lose energy or
interest half way through . . . Of course it might not find it so easy to tell
you what it was doing on the day Elvis was shot, list its favourite makes
of car or describe the wonders of the smell of toast, but it could be relied
upon to return whatever you put in, efficiently and reliably.

Human memory is different, as you can demonstrate now by trying to

write down all the words from the list that stuck in your mind – and then
spending a moment thinking about what happened in your head during
and after the test.

You may lose in a contest of simple recall, but you’re instinct­

ively doing more than just regurgitating the data as you spot
subtle patterns, prioritise particular words, make connections,
form images, personalise the information . . . Your experience
will be different from everyone else’s, but there are also things
in common that reflect some very important principles at work.

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 60 improve your memory

First and last

You’re likely to remember words from the start of the list, like
box, coat and oven. Your short-term memory had space, your
brain was alert and you were interested in what was going
to happen next. First impressions really do count: informa-
tion gathered at the start of any learning exercise has a good
chance of being recalled, thanks to what’s called the primacy
effect.

It’s also easier to hold on to words from the end of the list. There
may be ‘interference’ from the information that’s come before,
but there are no new words to overload your memory and not
long to wait before you get the chance to answer. Your spirits
tend to pick up towards the end of a learning session, adding to
the power of the recency effect.

Surprise!
Information sticks more easily when it stands out in some way.
It’s another simple but incredibly powerful point. In this list,
you were much more likely to remember the words Elvis and
Presley: the only person – and a pretty outstanding one at that
– amongst many mundane ideas. The next time you compose a
shopping list, pick the two most important items, write them in
larger letters using a different colour and style, and see if they’re
easier to remember. The Von Restorff effect says they will be. You
could even add a completely inappropriate word somewhere in
the list – astronaut, banshee, Constantinople – and see how quickly
it comes to mind later on.

Sometimes, unusual information takes our attention from the

other stuff and makes us remember less overall; but mostly, as
advertisers, artists, comedians and the owners of brilliant memo-
ries know very well, details that stick out like a sore thumb stay
in the mind longer than everything else.

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Joined-up thinking
Connections are also incredibly powerful. In the list you saw,
pencil and sharpener were clearly linked, as were all the sealife
words: shark, whale, octopus, starfish, seahorse. Spotting patterns
triggers memory and allows your brain to cluster the individual
bits together, and ‘chunking’ is a well-known memory tactic:
grouping information into more manageable bundles. So 12, 24,
10, 16 isn’t really any harder to hold in the mind than 2, 4, 0, 6,
and shoe, cake, banana, tree, elephant is as easy at s, c, b, t, e. Your
brain does it naturally all the time, but you can also start to do
it consciously: learning guest-list names in pairs, for example,
or organising your Christmas buying list into ‘themed’ groups
of gifts.

Think about the other words you remembered. Some will prob-
ably be easy to picture, like trophy or firework. Others will evoke
senses – toast – inspire an emotional reaction – murder – or
simply catch your attention in some other way, perhaps con-
necting to something you’re doing today or prompting you to
notice an item nearby.

Eminently forgettable
And the words you’re least likely to remember? They’re the ones
in the middle of the list, with nothing to make them stand out,
no connections with other words, hard to picture, uninspiring,
abstract . . . And how well that describes so much of the informa-
tion you struggle to remember in real life! No wonder so many
things never get any further than your short-term memory.

There were other tricky aspects of this learning task, more

factors that a computer wouldn’t have to worry about – like
anxiety about failing, having little real motivation to succeed,
only hearing the information once . . . And, once again, how
often are these things true of your day-to-day memory attempts?

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 62 improve your memory

Left to its own devices, your memory will remember some

things, forget others, follow typical patterns, behave inconsist-
ently and inefficiently, surprise you, frustrate you . . . but it doesn’t
have to be that way. Now that you’ve spotted the key things that
help and hinder memory, you can start putting the right condi-
tions in place to achieve a much better level of success. This is
your chance to make the most of your brain’s complex charac-
teristics, its connectedness and creativity. This is where you start
to outperform the computer, using memory skills to explore
information imaginatively and to apply it in ingenious ways. And
all the while you’re developing core aspects of your thinking that
will help you do everything better.

This is where you start to take control.

Get organised
Far too often we struggle to remember information in its most
forgettable form. A computer can either cope with a particular
format or it can’t, and tells you so; but most of the time we
just push on and try to make material stick, however badly it’s
presented. Our brain does its best to break the task into manage-
able chunks and to find useable patterns – but having a brilliant
memory involves a much more conscious approach. Like the
ancient masters of the art of memory, you find a new design for
your data: one that matches the way your brain works best.

Matchmaking
Even simple attempts at organisation can make a big difference.
Suddenly the puzzle has fewer pieces, and it can even start to
feel like it’s solving itself, giving clues about what goes where.
You can see this in action by re-reading the word list as a set
of fifteen pairs rather than thirty individual ideas. Spend a few
moments now looking through the information – basically, the

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 Memory boosting 63

same list – in this new form, thinking about each pair as a single
item. Even without much effort you’ll find that your brain is
picturing the two words combined in some way or spotting
something that links them.

box, coat oven, key shark, pan Elvis, Presley car, hole
whale, laugh pencil, sharpener modern, octopus
hat, trophy grey, murder rose, pin starfish, book
firework, toast seahorse, barrel fast, apple

It should already feel easier. You’ve instantly halved the items

and given your brain some much more memorable ideas: a ‘car
hole’, a ‘whale laugh’, some ‘firework toast’ . . . Combining con-
cepts like this also stops them being mundane and kick-starts
your imagination, giving these fifteen items a much greater
chance of staying put.

True, you’ve now looked through the list a second time – but in
real life, re-reading information doesn’t always make much of a
difference. This time, see whether it’s had any impact on your
learning. How many of the thirty words can you remember now?

And to get a feel for the ‘glue’ your brain can use to hold the
pieces together, see if you can remember what came after each
of the words below.

box __________ fast __________ modern __________

whale __________ oven __________ grey __________
rose __________ firework __________ Elvis __________
shark __________ starfish __________ pencil __________
car __________ hat __________ seahorse __________

There’s an active approach at work here, since you’ve carefully

reorganised the original list; but it’s also about allowing your
brain to do what comes naturally. We’re wired to ask questions,
look for patterns, try to survive by working out what’s going on
– so throwing together unconnected items wakes up the brain

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 64 improve your memory

and challenges it to make meaning. Normally you might not

concentrate much on words like pan, toast or laugh, but now it’s
hard not to imagine what a ‘shark pan’ might look like, a ‘whale
laugh’ sound like, or what smell might emerge from some ‘fire-
work toast’.

Storytelling
When you give it a chance, your brain loves to tell stories, finding
some sort of logic to structure separate pieces of information.
There’s a natural instinct to ‘put two and two together’ – and,
in memory terms, when it does make five, that’s even better!
Unusual outcomes are the ones that stick in the mind, as long as
there’s some degree of method in the madness.

Oral storytelling helped us to keep hold of our shared history

long before anything was written down. These days we have
countless storytelling formats: poems, songs, novels, movies,
adverts, anecdotes, instructions, video-games . . .

Throughout this book you’ll see the power of stories to make

anything memorable.

So, if you’re sitting comfortably, here’s a story about . . .

... a huge box packed with expensive fur coats. In the pocket of one
of the coats you find an oven key, and when you use it to unlock
a secret compartment in your oven you discover something unusual
inside: a shark pan, full of great white sharks. One of the sharks is
chasing Elvis Presley, but he manages to crawl through a car hole
and escape, dodging all the cars that are also coming in and out
through the hole. Just when Elvis thinks he’s free, he hears the deep,
booming sound of a whale laugh, so he hides behind a giant pencil
sharpener – where he meets a very modern octopus who’s also in
hiding. In each one of the octopus’ eight tentacles is a hat trophy, its
prizes for winning a hat-making competition. Elvis looks carefully
at one of the hat-shaped trophies and sees a strange image on it: a

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 Memory boosting 65

grey photograph of a gruesome crime scene. He peels off this ‘grey

murder’ and uses a rose-shaped pin to fix it to the starfish book
he’s carrying, pressing the flowery pin right through one of the
beautiful starfish illustrations. But this makes the book explode,
shooting fireworks made out of toast into the night sky, each firework
showering the crowds below with toast crumbs. Someone decides to
catch the crumbs in a seahorse barrel, and the seahorses inside start
to eat them noisily, until a fast apple starts darting around the barrel
and getting to the crumbs first ...

It’s a strange story. There’s no logic involved in firework toast

falling into seahorse barrels and being snatched by fast apples
. . . but there is a clear set of connections at work, an explicable if
decidedly odd chain of events, reminiscent of dreams. And if the
images and ideas are strong and memorable enough, you should
be able to follow them from start to finish – and rediscover the
original thirty words along the way.

Remembering . . .
Put it to the test. Start by looking into the huge box, see what
you find – and where the story takes you. How many of the thirty
words do you know now, and how well can you remember the
order?

See what happens when you try to recall the list backwards. The
apple was fast in the barrel full of seahorses, catching toast from
. . . what? Can you make it all the way back to the start of the
story?

And what about answering specific questions about the details

in between?

●● What came after sharpener?

●● What was the eighth word on the list?
●● Which word came before toast?

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 66 improve your memory

●● Which of these words was not on the original list: hat, oven,
candle, modern?
●● How many of the words ended in a vowel?

Remembering like this may seem silly to start with, but it works,
allowing you to perform precise, controlled feats of recall.
Suddenly, instead of just being thankful for whatever your brain
happens to hold on to, you’re taking active control – and reaping
the rewards. You strengthen your concentration, kick-start your
creativity, and develop a range of key thinking skills that will
serve you well in many different tasks. And, above all, you get a
glimpse of what it might feel like to be able to remember any-
thing. If you can learn a list of thirty random words, backwards,
forwards and inside out, what else might you be able to do?

. . . and forgetting
So would you remember the list tomorrow, next week, in ten
years from now? Unlike a computer, your brain can perform
brilliantly in a task like this one minute, then really struggle the
next. While you’re focused and motivated, and the memorable
images and links are fresh in your mind, an amazing feat of
recall is possible, and there’s no reason why you couldn’t practise
every day, repeat the same learning activity regularly and keep
remembering this list for decades to come. But if you didn’t, the
memories would almost certainly fade. Sometimes life can feel
like a constant battle to hold on to information as it slips away
like sand through your fingers.

And yet . . . some memories are there for the long haul. Some
information goes through the whole memory process, starting as
sensory inputs, being held in working memory and short-term
storage, then getting filed in a much more long-lasting way, with
no further need for repetition and rehearsal. Enough has been
done to it to achieve something close to permanence.

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 Memory boosting 67

I’ll always remember . . .

A sound or a smell takes you back thirty years to a memory that’s
still as clear as if it happened yesterday. Your daughter’s name is
on your lips without a second’s pause for thought. At the pub
quiz, some bits of information pop out of nowhere, learnt long
ago and just waiting for the right moment. And you know what
they say about learning to ride a bike . . .

Of course, illness or accident can still cause problems, and

everyone makes the odd mistake. Health and mood, time and
place, distractions and diversions: there are many factors that
can play havoc with even the most secure memories. But what’s
clear is that your brain can take some information and make it
truly memorable. And when you understand how, you’re another
step closer to putting your memory under your control.

It’s a simple idea, but a life-changing one. When you know

what’s involved in making lasting memories – and you’re about
to – you can start doing it whenever you want.

brilliant recap
●● Training your core thinking skills is a vital part of boosting your
memory.
●● Memory is a complex set of systems involving many parts of
the brain.
●● There are clear patterns to remembering and forgetting in
practice.
●● Short-term memory is very short, but the crucial first step to
learning anything.
●● Memory techniques make the most of the way your brain
works best.

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 CHAPTER 4

Taking control
When I was younger, I could
remember anything, whether it
had happened or not.

Mark Twain

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 In this chapter you will learn:
●● why some information gets stored in long-term memory
●● how your brain remembers different things in different ways
●● the seven steps to putting memory under your control
●● ways to manage your emotions and stay focused on learning
●● techniques for using your creative imagination to
revolutionise your memory

For many people, unless an experience is so powerful that it

burns itself into their brain, the only way of transferring infor-
mation from short-term to long-term memory is to practise.
Repetition certainly has an important role to play in learning,
and the things we remember regularly do gain a special place in
our minds. But there’s much more to memory than that. More
has to happen for lasting memories to be made. And even when
that’s happened – and even with those moments you know you’ll
never forget – repeat remembering is a complex process in which
the original information doesn’t stay original for long. It gets
changed as the brain’s natural creativity takes over. The details
are altered as they’re enriched and absorbed into the brain’s
interconnected storage systems – and, for good or bad, that’s
how the strongest memories are made.

This chapter gives you a step-by-step guide to the whole memory

process, revealing what you can do to take more control. You
need to be aware of what your brain does naturally, and make

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 72 improve your memory

the most of it; but there are also some very practical actions you
can take to do things differently and remember much more.

brilliant exercise
Without looking at your wristwatch, cover it up. (And if you don’t wear
a watch, do the same thing with your mobile phone or some other item
that you look at many times during the day.) Now try to describe your
watch from memory. Exactly what shape is the face, what colour is the
strap, what sort of fastener holds it on your wrist? Are there numbers
or Roman numerals? Is there any writing visible? What other distinctive
details can you remember? When you’ve remembered everything you
can, have a look at your watch to see how well you did. Most people are
very surprised at how weak their memory is for something they’ve seen
thousands of times. Clearly repetition isn’t enough to make memories,
especially detailed memories – even though it’s many people’s learning
technique of choice.

So for some types of remembering the process needs to be more

than just repetition if it’s going to work. And yet we are creatures
of habit: we do repeat certain behaviours and rehearse particular
memories. Practice can certainly fix things in our brains – and
not always to our benefit.

Ever-changing memories
Practice plays more of a part in memory than you might think.
That vivid moment from your childhood, the embarrassing
episode at work last year, even a first date two days ago that
you’ve been remembering repeatedly ever since: how much has
practice actually altered the information? You’ve strengthened
the basic space it occupies in your memory, but how many of the
details have changed, every time you remembered the last time

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 Taking control 73

you remembered . . . ? Has practice embedded memories that are

now very different from the original things they recall?

Practice helps to forge strong memories, but it’s more than just
doing the same things again and again. It’s about enriching,
adding, strengthening, and changing information in the process,
to make it stand the test of time.

What’s so powerful about the Improve your Memory approach

to learning is that it begs to be enriched. It’s not like the hours
you might have spent reading and re-reading revision notes, or
the number of times you looked through the same presentation
script without any more of it going in. That sort of memory felt
like starting from scratch every time. This sort is about making
the most of every bit of practice, strengthening the mental con-
nections and using the way your brain works to build memories
that last.

Conscious creativity
To have a brilliant memory you need to recognise the creativity
involved in many aspects of your natural memory processes,
then use it to your advantage. Your brain is already very good at
picking out some things to remember, creating strong images,
developing and exaggerating them repeatedly and embedding
memories that are intensely personal versions of the original
information – just not always the things you want to learn.

But under your control your mind can focus on whatever you
want and start to remember it brilliantly. You’ve seen what’s
going on when your brain works well, and that knowledge is vital
as you start giving your chosen information the ‘memorability’
it needs.

You’ve glimpsed what your memory can do when you start using
it differently. Now it’s time to take charge of what goes in and
stays in.

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 74 improve your memory

Survival skills
To survive we’ve always needed to prioritise. Your brain is
built to focus on the things that are likely to have the greatest
impact on your survival and success; but it’s overprotective, and
the pictures it produces can be wildly inaccurate. Hear about
a plane crash on the car-radio, for example, and the story is
likely to skew your perception of danger and make you forget
that you’re at much greater risk right there in your car. As a
child, if you’re scared by something specific, like a neighbour’s
dog or a burst balloon, your brain is very good at filing powerful
reminders to help you avoid those feelings in the future, but
they’re not always proportionate to the real risks at hand. This
is how many phobias begin: an unpleasant moment exaggerated
and fixed in the memory long after it’s served any protective
purpose.

In memory terms it’s an absolutely vital concept to understand.

With a little training you can start using this innate ability to
make things ‘big’, choosing the things you want to be significant
instead of just letting them slip by unnoticed. Giving infor-
mation significance is at the heart of memory training, and it
happens in your infinite imagination.

When need just isn’t enough

A learning task itself can be significant if it might make you
money, win you promotion, impress your friends – or avoid the
shame of failing an exam or having to retake your driving test.
But even then, as anyone who’s struggled to learn for a high-
stakes exam knows only too well, if the information you need
to remember doesn’t have the right level of importance – is
abstract, boring and flat – no amount of personal motivation
seems to help. In fact, when the level of urgency is so different
from the level of ‘memorability’, that’s when complete brain-
freeze can strike.

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 Taking control 75

Significance
As well as a certain degree of commitment to the challenge, to
get you concentrating and learning actively, the material itself
needs to hold ‘significance’ if your brain is going to prioritise
it and take it in. That significance comes in four key forms:
connection, visibility, exaggeration and difference.

Connection
It’s easier to remember things that are about you. Being inter-
ested in the information is a good first step, but it’s even better
if stronger emotions are aroused, connecting you through real
excitement, surprise, fear, delight, attraction, disappointment,
embarrassment, ecstasy.

Visibility
It makes a huge difference to your memory whether or not
you can see the information you need to learn, and how
much detail and colour and richness it has to offer. The
power of images was recognised very early in the history of
memory improvement, but we still struggle to learn material
in the least visible form possible: black and white words on a
page; or, worse, abstract ideas heard, not even written down,
offering no images at all to help. Young children use books
packed with memorable pictures, but as adults we often work
without any visual aids, handicapping our memory from the
word go.

Exaggeration
The advertising industry knows how to create memorable
images. Think about the adverts – on TV, at the cinema, in news-
papers and on billboards – that stand out in your mind. Even on
the radio it’s possible to use music, sound effects and creative
ideas to build particularly strong images.

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 76 improve your memory

The most powerful pictures are exaggerated in some way: huge

or tiny, colourful, fast-moving, loud, dazzling, extremely . . . some-
thing. In your imagination, absolutely anything is possible – just
like in the world of cartoons or fairytales – so it makes sense
to do everything you can to heighten your imagery: to make it
unforgettable.

Difference
The most memorable information is outstanding: in its own
right, but it also tends to be very different from everything else.
When you review your day-to-day experiences, it’s the unusual
moments that stand out. If they were all wedding days or compe-
tition wins or first births, they’d quickly lose their special power
as they blended into one. To stay memorable, your images need
to be special and distinct – and this will become increasingly
important as you set your targets higher and start accumulating
large amounts of information. An important feature of brilliant
memory is the flexibility of thought that allows you to create
strikingly original ideas.

brilliant tip
It’s your turn to buy the drinks at the bar and there are lots of very
similar orders: white wine, red wine, orange-juice, beer, white wine,
beer, orange-juice, white wine, beer . . . You could easily imagine a
huge white grape balanced on top of Jamie’s head to remind you
of his drink, but you’d have to do something different for Emma,
who also wants white wine: so how about imagining her pouring
a bottle of wine on to her black dress and watching it turn bright
white? Sam and Claudia both want orange-juice, so you’ll have
to make their reminder pictures distinct. How about one of them
juggling oranges wildly, and the other one pulling on a huge
orange hat?

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 Taking control 77

Memories for everything

So memory boosting involves changing information to make it
compatible with the in-built mannerisms and mechanisms of
your brain. Some learning challenges are harder than others, and
there are times when your memory really has very little chance
of working: those rushed, one-chance moments when the infor-
mation is distant and abstract and mundane and similar. There
are also particular types of memory that need special attention.

Prospective memory
This is remembering things that haven’t even happened yet. You
know you need to call the school or go to the bank on the way
home or buy your mother-in-law’s birthday present, but there’s
no experience yet to form a strong memory, and even important
jobs can be easily forgotten. This book will show you how to
create powerful images for future events, using all the key crea-
tive skills to embed these ‘memories of the future’.

Procedural memory
This involves knowing how to do things. It can feel easy when
it’s embedded and practised, but getting to that stage can be a
big challenge. A lot depends on the quality of your teacher or
manual, how quickly you get to try things out and how long you
have to practise; but crucial once again is your ability to take
control of all the information coming your way. These days,
learning new skills – and coping when old processes change – is
one of the most important tests of your memory. The training
you’ve started will show you how to hold instructions long
enough to change them, and then to do so quickly and power-
fully, to make them memorable.

Semantic memory
This is your knowledge of the world. Again, when it works, it’s
easy to take for granted the store of facts and figures and core

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 78 improve your memory

understanding you’ve built up. But adding to that store can be a

problem, especially when the stakes are high and the information
doesn’t immediately excite your imagination and activate your
memory. Revising for exams, preparing for a big presentation,
remembering names at a conference, learning enough of a new
language to cope on your travels: even with all the information
in front of you and plenty of time to study, learning can be frus-
trating and stressful – and, when put to the test, just not work
very well – unless you know how.

Episodic memory
This kind of memory can seem very easy. It’s your recall of
events and experiences, including the most personal ones – auto-
biographical memory – and many moments do stick in your mind
without any noticeable effort: but not all of them. Like anything
else they need to have certain characteristics if they’re likely to
stay there in the long term. The strategies you’re developing will
help you to remember new experiences in greater detail, and to
explore moments from the past – especially your past – in dif-
ferent and exciting ways. But most important of all, you’ll be
using your natural flair with this kind of memory to boost all the
others; because anything can be turned into a powerful experi-
ence in your imagination and remembered with as much clarity
as the real things you’ve been through.

Child’s play
Give a child a stick, tell them it’s a horse, a sword or a witch’s
broom, and they can immediately transform it in their imagina-
tion and play with their new toy for hours. As adults we still use
our imaginative skills regularly, reading books, watching plays,
designing, planning, worrying . . . but we’re likely to feel much
less confident at taking the lead and applying imagination to the
situations we face. But there’s no reason why we can’t start using
it again, to have fun, experiment, practise, and learn in a very

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 Taking control 79

efficient and effective way; although some adults find it comes

much more naturally than others . . .

brilliant exercise
The following task shows you this powerful approach in action. It’s another
list of words to learn – random information which could just as easily be
ideas for a presentation, presents to buy on a busy shopping trip or key
vocabulary in a new foreign language. It’s important to prove that you can
train yourself to remember anything – and this exercise will also reveal the
seven key steps involved in doing it brilliantly.

bag angel sausage painting field rocket sand river spoon

eye cat squeeze Hawaii queen dance socks snake car
lighthouse tomato

Step 1: Deciding
You’re going to learn all twenty words, forwards, backwards
and inside out. You’ll be putting your creative brain in control,
changing this information until it sits comfortably in your memory
and can be kept there for as long as you want. You’ll impress
yourself, boost your confidence, learn more about your memory
and start getting into the habit of remembering anything.

Step 2: Strategising
Rather than simply reading the words and hoping that they stick,
you’re about to turn them into an unforgettable story, with you
at the centre. You’ll invent powerful image clues for every word,
link them into a strong chain, and make sure that every detail
has maximum impact. You’re going to invest the time it takes
to create a new version of this material that will be enriched
every time you think about it and provide you with a robust and
reliable long-term memory store.

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 80 improve your memory

Step 3:Visualising
Each word needs to be given a clear image, and that’s easier for
some of them than others. You could think about:

●● how an artist might illustrate this word

●● the image you’d choose to represent it on a presentation
slide
●● the costume you’d wear if it was the theme for a fancy-dress
party

Push yourself to ‘see’ each image in your mind’s eye and check
it’s a good clue for the word in question. These pictures them-
selves won’t store all the information for you, but they’re already
boosting your memory and giving your brain the starting-points
it needs.

Step 4: Personalising
You’re going to turn a set of images into a memorable story,
and the most memorable stories are about you. Start noticing
any words that have particular relevance for you: favourites,
pet-hates, interests. Which words spark existing memories that
you could use? Which senses and emotions come to mind as you
look at the list?

Step 5: Exaggerating
How can you make each image special in some way, so that it
stands out and sticks powerfully in your memory?

This step is a crucial checkpoint in the process because it

ensures that you’re studying details, visualising clearly, personal-
ising where possible, and doing everything you can to make the
information memorable.

Step 6: Organising
You’re going to create a clear and organised structure for your
images, helping to hold them in your memory and giving you

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 Taking control 81

flexible access to the information they represent. The organising

technique in this case will be a story: a chain of events that links
each word to the next. You’ll need to think carefully about the
most memorable ways to connect the images so that each one
triggers the next. If your organising structure is good enough, it
will let you recall the words backwards as well as forwards, start
at any point in the pattern, and identify individual words from
anywhere on the list.

Step 7: Practising
Finally, you’re going to practise – but not in the traditional
sense of reading your material repeatedly or chanting it until
it becomes automatic. Carefully crafted images and clear con-
nections will fix the information in your mind at the first time
of asking, so that rehearsing them just enriches and strengthens
the memories further. Every time you bring the story to mind,
your imagination will subtly change the images and links, adding
new layers of detail and useful memory triggers. The act of
remembering will be enjoyable and rich, and that’s what you’ll
remember the next time you do it.

So, after deciding to do it, working out your approach and

having some ideas about how to create personal, powerful, pat-
terned images . . . it’s time to create the imaginative story that will
prove just how brilliant your memory can be.

Everybody’s story will be different – and needs to be, to make it

powerfully personal – but here’s one version that demonstrates
many of the key imaginative techniques. Use it to practise this
new way of thinking, but feel free to change any of the images
and links, to add your own associations, and to see it all very
much from your perspective. That’s how you’ll take control of it
all in your mind.

Imagine . . . (really imagine, really picture these images and

events, really bring them to life in your head) . . .

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 82 improve your memory

... opening your beautiful and very expensive new leather bag and
seeing an angel climb out, glowing and shimmering in a bright white
gown with a shining halo around her head. The angel is carrying
something: look closely at her hand and you’ll see that she’s clutching
a sausage, which you can smell from here.You’d love to have a taste,
but before you can get anywhere near, the angel hurls the sausage
across the room, hitting a priceless painting hanging on the wall:
splat. And it must have hit hard because the painting falls, sliding
down the wall and hitting the floor, the glass smashing into millions
of pieces. But there’s no time to tidy up because the accident has
revealed something: a hole in the wall behind the painting, through
which you can see a field. It’s green and calm and smells of fresh
air, but something’s about to happen that will shatter the serenity.
A rocket is sitting on the launchpad in the middle of the field, and
suddenly it takes off, exploding into the air with a mighty roar and
almost blinding you with its fiery exhaust. You watch it rise high
above your head, but you can feel something showering down from
on high: sand. Golden sand is leaking from the rocket, a long trail
of it dropping to earth where it starts to cover everything. This is
worrying: it’s falling into rivers and quickly blocking their flow. You
know you’ve got to do something, but all you’ve got with you is a
spoon, and although you try to use your spoon to dig out the sand,
you don’t get very far – especially when you accidentally flick sand
in your eye. Suddenly everything’s black, you can’t see a thing. You
stumble backwards – but luckily you feel something warm and soft
behind you. As your vision comes back, you look round to see that
you’ve sunk into the soft, furry lap of a huge cat, surely the biggest
cat in the world, sitting there and purring contentedly. It’s a lovely
feeling ... until the cat starts to squeeze you. It squeezes harder and
harder until you’re struggling to breathe. Although you fight it, you
lose consciousness: and the next thing you know ... you’re lying on
an island. The obvious question is, where are you? There are plenty
of clues around: hot weather, the ocean, girls in grass skirts, long
canoes, even the theme-tune to Hawaii Five-O playing somewhere
in the distance.You’re on a beach in Hawaii – and look, here comes

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 Taking control 83

the queen, processing towards you with her servants in tow. You’re
nervous about what to say to royalty, but she doesn’t want to talk:
she wants to dance, grabbing your hands and whirling you round
in a long and complicated dance. You move so quickly that one of
your socks – your favourite pink ones – flies off. You try to grab it;
but, just as your hand touches the sock, a snake slithers out, hissing
menacingly in your direction. Everyone screams, everyone runs, and
luckily there’s a car parked nearby and you jump inside and drive
away – but smash straight into a lighthouse. You get out to inspect
the damage. The car’s a write-off, and the tall lighthouse is now
leaning and wobbling, its beams of light flickering and then cutting
out altogether as the lighthouse topples to the ground. All you can
do is stand and watch as it falls on top of someone’s giant, prize-
winning tomato. Red juice squirts everywhere and you feel it running
down your face.You taste a bit: sweet and delicious.

The story looks long on paper, but every detail has been written
out and all the links made explicit. With a bit of practice you’ll be
able to tell a memorable story like this in not much more time than
it takes to read the list itself. The images will come quickly and the
events unfold naturally – and of course everything will automati-
cally be easier when you’re inventing the ideas for yourself.

brilliant tip
It’s a very common reaction to think: ‘But now there’s more to
remember. What if I can’t remember the story?’ You will remember
the story because it’s been written that way. Everything in it is
designed to help you remember, to suit the way your brain works
best. There’s a range of multi-sensory reminders, a clear chain of
events, questions along the way to get you predicting what’s next,
details added to be interesting, surprising, funny, scary . . . so just let
your brain pick up on the clues and trust that you’re going to find
remembering easy.

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 84 improve your memory

The memory story began when you opened a bag and found
something unusual inside. Go through the weird and wonderful
events that came next, thinking carefully about the twenty key
images and what each of them represents. Try to remember all
twenty words in exactly the right order. When you’ve had a go at
that, can you also do it backwards?

What came after field? What was the word between angel and
painting? What was the seventeenth word on the list? Which of
the following words was not amongst the original words: cat,
cone, queen, spoon?

Can you feel your memory being stretched and strengthened?

brilliant exercise
It’s important that you try this approach for yourself as soon as possible.
You’re still in the early stages of your memory training, so don’t worry if this
way of thinking feels awkward or a bit too much like hard work. Trust me, if
you start putting in the effort now, you’ll soon be doing it instinctively and
reaping the rewards. You may actually be pleasantly surprised by how much
you can do already, using the skills and strategies you’ve learnt so far.

Here’s your next list. Follow all the steps you’ve been shown to take control
of the information and change it into pictures and links that your brain will
find hard to forget.

sheep cheese paint windmill weight computer December

happy carpet love clown basketball pyjamas radio chicken
rain spider monopoly pizza dragon

Spend a moment practising your story, focusing on each of the key features and
confirming the clues and the links, then cover the list and say the words from
memory, forwards, backwards, every other word . . . Pick a word at random and
see how quickly you can say what came immediately before and after. How
many words on the list begin with consonants? What was the twelfth word?

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 Taking control 85

Notice how it feels to use your brain like this. Enjoy every
success you achieve, but also make a note of any difficulties
you encounter. The next chapter will help you to fix problems,
honing all the skills involved in getting the best out of your brain
and unleashing your full memory power.

brilliant recap
●● Repetition doesn’t guarantee remembering.
●● You remember your experiences creatively – and that can be
very useful.
●● There are seven essential steps to remembering brilliantly.
●● Your imagination can make any kind of information powerfully
memorable.
●● Recall more by being relaxed and positive, and learning from
your mistakes.

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 CHAPTER 5

Global
learning
No brain is stronger than its
weakest think.

Thomas L. Masson

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 In this chapter you will learn:
●● that there are two sides to your brain, with their own
attributes and abilities
●● how to harness both hemispheres to get the most out of
your memory
●● practical techniques for boosting your imagination
●● the power of senses to enrich memory
●● new ideas about organising information to make it stick

Your brain is capable of the most incredible things, but you

need to know how to tap all its resources and enjoy its full
capacity for brilliance. Too many people struggle on much less
than full power.

It’s easy to feel that your memory isn’t up to the task. When
you’re rushed, tired, stressed, over-worked, multi-tasking . . .
when information is presented in unmemorable ways . . . when
you just can’t find the time, space, energy or motivation to take
any kind of active control . . . it’s tempting to think that this
is it: this is the way your memory has to feel. True, there are
many things that can get in the way, but don’t give up, don’t
automatically fall back on habits that aren’t working. The best
memory strategies are actually incredibly simple, designed
to match the way your brain has been built. And often it
only takes a slight shift to get your thinking skills in gear and
working brilliantly.

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 90 improve your memory

We’ve complained about bad memories for centuries,

even though there have been plenty of people keen
to show us the light. Back in the 1600s, the multi-
talented English writer, historian, churchman and
philosopher Thomas Fuller explained that memory
‘depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and
order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want
of memory, when the defect is in the judgement; and
others, by grasping at all, retain nothing.’ He knew
that our attempts at learning will always be fallible
and frustrating unless we use our brains
properly.

Imagination . . .
Thomas Fuller called it ‘perspicuity’, and you certainly need
imaginative clarity to have a brilliant memory. Chapter 3 got you
designing and manipulating images to represent key pieces of infor-
mation, and you’ve already experienced the power of your creative
brain. In this chapter you’ll be strengthening all the skills involved
in imagining the richest, most detailed, most memorable pictures
as you discover how to get more out of your creative thinking.

. . . and order
You’ll also learn more about what Fuller called ‘regularity’ and
‘order’, exploring new techniques for organising information
in your memory. Just as the best memory techniques promote
creativity in general, they can also boost your ability to organise
your thinking and structure your approach to life – which, like
creativity, feeds back into your memory.

And when these two key aspects of thinking come together, a bit
of Fuller’s ‘judgement’ will let you apply your brilliant memory

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 Global learning 91

to a wide range of practical tasks, real scenarios and personal

challenges. All the techniques in this book are based on a pow-
erful combination of these two types of thinking: imagination
and logic. To understand why, and to see how this really is the
secret of your success, you need to spend a few minutes looking
inside your head.

Both sides now

Look at a human brain and it has two clear hemispheres, left
and right. You’ll have seen ‘phrenology’ models that cover these
hemispheres with labels, suggesting that particular areas are
responsible for things like ‘language’, ‘affection’ or ‘memory of
people’, and no doubt you’ve also heard about ‘right-brained’
and ‘left-brained’ thinking – the idea that mental processes
are grouped on either side to give the hemispheres distinct
characteristics. For around two hundred years now, neuro­
scientists have been trying to map the geography of the brain,
aiming to localise particular functions and to define the work-
ings of the two hemispheres, separately and in combination.
Important discoveries have been made; but, despite temptingly
neat phrenology maps and all those right brain/left brain tests
you can take, the emerging picture is a very complex one. The
good news is that it contains some essential information about
improving your memory.

Broken minds
There are some useful clues in early research on damaged
brains. In the 1860s, two influential scientists, Pierre Paul Broca
and Carl Wernicke, found locations in the left brain responsible
for particular functions of language, meaning that patients had
very clear deficits when those sites weren’t working. But they
also demonstrated that a skill as complex as ‘language’ is distrib-
uted to different areas; and, significantly, that the ‘logical’ bits,

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 92 improve your memory

like vocabulary and grammar, seemed to be controlled by the

left side, while more subtle, creative skills like pronunciation and
reading of context were associated with the right. That left brain/
right brain contrast would become a key theme in thinking-
about-thinking in the years to come.

In the 1940s, Wilder Penfield’s open-brain experiments dem-

onstrated that the left and right brains have different motor
functions, the left controlling the right side of the body and
vice versa. He was also able to map how the brain handles
particular senses; but although some of his work emphasised
localised thinking, his biggest discovery was about the intercon-
nectedness of the brain – especially regarding the making and
storing of memories. When his patients had particular parts of
their brains stimulated with electrodes – while they were con-
scious and communicative – they reported incredibly realistic
memories of moments from their lives, rich in all the senses at
once. It seemed the memories had been made that way, packed
with information drawn from different sense centres across the
brain. Initially, Penfield saw this as evidence that memories were
stored in specific physical sites, but his later research suggested
that those sites were more like ‘access points’, and that memo-
ries were distributed much more widely, stored somehow by the
whole brain.

This was backed up by Karl Lashley’s experiments with rats.

He found that they could still remember their way through
mazes even when significant parts of their brain had been
removed. Karl Pribram, a student of Penfield’s, noticed that
his patients didn’t lose particular memories when large parts
of their brain were gone, they just developed hazier pictures
of the past. And when he read an article about holograms, he
realised that science had come up with a very powerful analogy
for memory.

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 Global learning 93

brilliant definition
The holographic brain

A hologram is one of those 3D photographs created by laser on a

glass plate: a ‘virtual image’ that seems to exist before your eyes
but has no substance when you reach out to touch it. For the
memory researchers, a crucial aspect of holograms is that, when
they’re smashed into pieces, each individual bit still holds the
original image, just with a weaker resolution. The information is
stored somewhere and everywhere, the virtual image constructed
from the pieces but not just any one piece, and not necessarily
all of them . . . The holographic brain model has had a huge
influence on the way we’ve thought about memory in the
decades since.

Split thinking
But while the whole brain seems to help with managing your
memory, your two cerebral hemispheres do have particular
roles to play in the way you think. In the 1960s, Roger Sperry
and his team in the USA revealed a number of processes
clearly specialised in either side of the brain, defining the
‘character’ of each hemisphere; but, once again, their research
also showed that our two brains are designed to work together,
and follow-up studies have revealed more about the overlap
between left and right – more capacity for the brain to do
anything anywhere.

Matching the early findings of men like Broca and Wernicke,

Sperry showed that the left brain is dominant in logical thinking,
while the right is biased towards creativity.

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 94 improve your memory

Left versus right

The left brain is good at analysing, organising and defining. In
terms of language, this means remembering the definitions of
words and the structures of grammar and syntax. In maths, it’s
exact calculation and precise comparison.

The right brain excels in responding to language, emotional

reactions, subjective judgements. Its mathematical skills are
approximation and finding more general patterns.

So clearly you need both sides to be working well. The left brain
manages the details but you’re lost without the right brain’s
vision of the bigger picture. If your right brain recognises faces,
you need your left brain to help you with the names. Left-
brained computation and reasoning need to be backed up by
right-brained understanding and intuition. Skills like music,
poetry and visual art may be more right-brained in nature, but
they’re all underpinned by left-brained thinking.

Excuses, excuses
Although it should have demonstrated the powerful, intercon-
nected brilliance of the brain, the left brain/right brain theory
has had some rather negative results. Quickly people started
labelling themselves as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ and using
that label as an excuse for difficulties rather than as an incen-
tive to improve. Thinking styles were separated – scorned,
sometimes: ‘She’s far too right-brained to get the finer points’;
‘Luckily I’m a right-brainer and I know how to have fun’.

Our individual characters certainly make us more inclined to dif-

ferent types of thinking, and we’ll find some things harder than
others. But the goal for everyone should be to achieve ‘both-brained’
status, able to use either side when necessary but always to get
the most out of both. Bringing them together is what brings real
success, especially when you want to get more out of your memory.

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 Global learning 95

Whole-brain memory
You needed to glimpse some of the science in order to under-
stand the memory techniques you’re developing in this book. It’s
really important to realise that all the best strategies and systems
have been designed to suit the way the brain works – and that,
yes, your brain is perfectly capable of putting them into practice.

It’s no coincidence that every effective memory method brings

together both sides of the brain. You design powerful pictures,
add rich layers of senses and emotions, have fun, take risks, use
your right-brained creativity to the full . . . but you also organise
your imagery, give it structure, connect it together, learn strate-
gically, and use left-brained logic to complete the task.

When it comes to recalling what you learnt, you have left-brain

access to the details and can analyse, calculate and compare.
And . . . you can explore it all with engagement and emotion, and
see the potential power of the whole.

Then and now

The right and left sides of your thinking also relate to different
times in your life. Spend a moment considering how your
learning skills have changed over the years, the pros and cons
of different stages of memory maturity, and you’ll realise that
whole-brained thinking requires all of you.

When you were a child you learned fearlessly. You explored

the world through all your senses, shaking, biting, smelling.
Learning was active, adventurous and fun. Your books were
full of colourful pictures. You played while you worked, with
physical toys but also in the limitless world of your imagina-
tion. Your teachers used stories and games to activate your
memory. Some things, like languages, were learnt in a richly
contextual way that would never be possible again. And yet . . .
your memory was also very hit-and-miss. Children’s memories

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 96 improve your memory

can easily be manipulated, and you only have to look in the

lost-property box in school to realise how often children forget.
As a child you had easy access to many of the most important
right-brained modes of thought, but lacked some key thinking
tools from the left.

Adults are more competent at logical, left-brained thinking.

They have responsibilities, priorities. The success or failure of
their work has big implications. The grown-up you can certainly
still enjoy learning through play, exploring with your senses
and investigating in your imagination. But life is very different
now. Your learning materials tend to have far fewer pictures.
Information comes at you in a much less prettified and pat-
terned form. Rather than building up your understanding in
context, step by step, you’re often called upon to process ideas
piecemeal and to handle abstract bits of data. You do have
the ability to be strategic, though, to prioritise tasks and set
up systems to give your memory the best chance of success.
You juggle information more efficiently, multi-skill and balance
long- and short-term tasks. Your left brain is well-used now, but
what’s happened to the rich resources of the right?

Kick-start your imagination

You may think you have a poor imagination, but you’re probably
showing it off every day – and night, in your creative, surreal,
richly imaginative dreams. As adults we’re constantly challenged
to find imaginative solutions to problems. We visualise scenarios
when we’re chatting at the water-cooler. We manipulate imagery
as we talk through complex issues on the phone. We bring audio-
books and radio plays to life in our imagination, lose ourselves in
books, movies and video-games . . . But what we’re not so good
at is switching on our imagination consciously when it comes to
learning, especially when the material in question seems to cry
out for logical, left-brained thought.

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 Global learning 97

The following exercises will help to train your visual imagination

as well as strengthening all the other senses you could use. The
more sense connections you include, the more vivid and acces-
sible your memories will be.

Sight
You’ve got eight jobs to remember, and you’re going to create a
clear mental picture for each one.

●● Go to the bank.
●● Pick up the dry cleaning.
●● Book an appointment with your child’s teacher.
●● Buy flowers.
●● Get petrol.
●● Send a birthday card to Scott.
●● Return the library books.
●● Pay the vet’s bill.

Go to the bank
What would be a strong image to remind you of the first job on
the list? Perhaps a security van full of money, the heavily guarded
underground vault or the bank teller’s window. Choose your
picture, then spend a moment focusing on it in your mind.

brilliant timesaver
To begin with, trust your instincts and accept the first picture your
brain throws up. You have a vast store of representative images,
so it makes sense and saves time to start from something that’s
already there. There’ll be plenty of occasions when you do need
to put your creative imagination to the test, inventing images for
complex or abstract ideas; but, when the information is familiar, go
straight to a familiar version of it in your memory.

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 98 improve your memory

View your picture from one direction and think about its overall
shape. Make sure you’ve captured the image as a whole, but then
take a closer look at its colours, shapes-within-shapes, writing,
unusual features . . . Finally, practise seeing it from different per-
spectives. Imagine getting close up and far away, inside, round
the back, underneath, high above. You’re used to using your
imagination to think through practical problems from different
angles, but it can take a bit of training to switch it on like this
and start using your visualisation skills to the full.

Pick up dry cleaning

You could create an image of the inside of the dry cleaner’s itself,
a bag of newly cleaned clothes, or anything else that would rep-
resent this task in your mind. Again, get the basic picture sorted
first, then add more and more visual details. Use ‘extreme close-
ups’ to read the writing on the hangers or focus on the textures
of the clothes. Alter your perspective until you’ve imagined your
mental image from every angle.

Follow this same process with the other six ideas on the list,
reflecting on how well you’re able to visualise the objects, places,
people and scenes you choose to represent each one. Do you
find it easier to picture small objects or large ones, things or
places, images from the front or above? Throughout this book
you’ll need to monitor your progress so that you know the
natural strengths you can utilise as well as the areas you need
to improve.

And when you’ve done it, see which images come back to
your mind first. Can you remember all eight pictures, and the
jobs they represented? You might be surprised at just how well
you do, bearing in mind that all you did was spend some time
thinking in pictures. Doing anything to information is always a
valuable start, and creating visual imagery provides your mind
with its most reliable building block. You’re likely to find that
you recall the pictures in roughly the original order, too. And

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 Global learning 99

when you do remember them, you know for certain that they’re
right – which is particularly useful when it comes to this sort
of list. For example, did you have to go to the DIY store? What
about the library? Should you pay the newsagent’s bill or the
vet’s? The answers should come quickly and definitively, even
after such a simple activity.

And of course images are the perfect starting-point because

they can easily be linked together and fixed memorably in the
brain.

Try it now: not a particularly complex or creative story, just

a simple chain of connections based on details visible in each
image.

Perhaps the bank teller is actually holding your dry cleaning. The
tag on the bag is addressed to your child’s teacher and fastened
to a bunch of flowers, which seems to be dripping petrol on to a
birthday card tucked inside a library book about vets . . .

Now you should be able to remember all eight images even

faster, backwards as well as forwards. If it was important to
do the tasks in order, you’d know what to do after visiting the
library or where you should have been before calling the school.
Although it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the things on your
plate every day, and unable to use your memory to cope, you’ve
just proved that efficient recall isn’t far away. Remember: it starts
with a decision to do it, a sensible plan, and then some vivid
pictures that take seconds to paint. Once the images have been
established they can be linked, grouped, removed, updated . . .
Priority tasks could be imagined in particularly bright colours,
or you might add a vivid detail to each picture to tick it off when
it was done. Try it now: imagine a bright red tick painted across
the side of the bank, or see yourself imprinting the dry cleaning
bag with a stamp saying done. Thinking in pictures immediately
activates so many practical uses of your memory.

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 100 improve your memory

Sound
Stop for a moment. Listen. See how many sounds are entering
your consciousness right now. Even if you’re sitting alone in a
quiet room, you might be surprised at just how many different
noises are detectible. Close your eyes. Which sounds are nearest
to you and which ones furthest away? What’s the highest-pitched
noise and what’s the lowest? Are any of the sounds similar?

Now that you’ve tuned into the sense of hearing, try imagining some
familiar sounds. If your mobile phone went off at this moment, what
would you hear? Don’t just think of the sound, really try to hear it.
What about the sound of a baby crying, an ambulance racing by,
or your mother talking to you? See how well you can imagine those
distinct, familiar sounds. It’s also worthwhile reflecting on how they
would make you feel, because sounds have a particular power to
alter our mood and provoke an instinctive reaction.

Here’s a quick exercise to show you how sound can enrich

memory. Below are six names. Say them to yourself a few times
and listen carefully to the way they sound normally: each name
as a whole, but also the individual syllables.

Ian Fish
Deborah Brown
Pareen Singh
Derek Marr
Tony O’Reilly
Wendy Cooper

Next, see if there are ways in which you could exaggerate the
pronunciations to produce even more memorable sound effects.
Spend a few moments playing around with the sounds, out loud
and in your imagination.

You could imagine ‘Ian’ spoken in a high-pitched voice, the first

syllable a squeaky door. With ‘Fish’, why not exaggerate the

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sh so that it sounds like a librarian telling noisy customers to

‘shhhhhhhhhhh!’

Perhaps you repeat the last bit of ‘Deborah’: Deborah-rah-rah-rah . . .

You could make ‘Singh’ ring like a bell. Maybe you pronounce the
first syllable of ‘Tony’ on a low note and the second one up high . . .

And when you’ve made the noises out loud, read through the list
again and hear all the sound effects purely in your ‘mind’s ear’.

Doing this when you met someone new would immediately

boost your chances of remembering their name. You could
imagine them making that noise when they told you their name,
or the sound following them round like a character theme-tune
in a video-game.

What happens if you blend sounds together? Could it create

memorable connections, helping you to remember the names
in order?

Try it out. Read through the list in your mind, repeating your
sound effects and focusing on the end of one name and the start
of the next.

And spend a moment returning to the to-do list you learnt

earlier. Can you add an imagined sound to each of the eight
images? Bring to mind the chink of the gold bars in the bank
vault. Imagine talking to the teacher over the background noise
of children playing. Hear the drip, drip, drip of the petrol. When
your memory works well, a variety of senses are combined, so it
can only help to add sense details whenever you can, providing
you with more ways of connecting with stored information and
bringing it back to life.

Taste
Memories of tastes are significant for survival. You need to
remember how something should taste to know when it’s gone
bad and could harm you. Taste memories motivate you to hunt

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(or go to the supermarket) for things you’ve enjoyed and which

have been good for you in the past. Your enjoyment of a plate of
food begins before the first mouthful as you anticipate the tastes
and feelings by accessing memories of previous meals.

Spend a moment thinking about your favourite food. How does

it feel when you bite into it? What’s its texture like in your mouth?
Is it one flavour, or several combined? What emotions come to
mind as you imagine devouring your own personal delicacy?

And what about your least-favourite taste? Maybe it’s something

you’ve always hated, something that once made you poorly,
or even a food you’ve never actually tasted but the smell and
appearance and just the thought of it turn your stomach. Notice
how powerfully an imagined taste can affect your facial expres-
sion, the feeling in your mouth and your overall mood.

Practise imagining tastes and adding them to your memories

with the following exercise. It’s based on a trip around the town
centre at Christmas. You’ve got seven presents to buy, and you
can use tastes to help you remember them all.

dark chocolate blue cheese soap toffee book chutney

gold chain

Take each item on the list and imagine biting into it. With some,
that’s straightforward; for others, it’s bizarre. But for all of them
it should certainly be memorable!

Imagine the snap of the bitter dark chocolate and the rich cocoa
flavour filling your mouth as you chew. The blue cheese is
crumbly and slightly sweet. The soap is . . . disgusting, perfumed,
cloying; but luckily it’s replaced by rich, buttery toffee . . .

When you’ve enjoyed (or endured) this entire taste experience,

see how many of the seven Christmas presents you remember.
Then read the list again, and this time focus on the contrasts
between the flavours. The hard, bitter chocolate compared with

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the crumbly savoury/sweet cheese, then the chemical tang of

the bubbly soap, followed by buttery toffee, dry and indigestible
paper, into sharp, tangy chutney, and finally teeth-shattering,
metallic gold.

Now how many of the seven can you remember, and how close
can you come to the original order?

And could you add tastes to the to-do list? A baby would try to
explore the money and the dry cleaning and everything else with
its mouth, so why don’t you try including the sense of taste as
another layer in your memory making?

Touch
The next sense is quite a challenge: touch. In reality, it’s usually
very easy to tell the difference between the feel of a silk gown
and a bristly nailbrush – but in your imagination? It’s difficult to
re-create sensations in detail, although it can be done, and it can
really help you to remember.

Touch affects emotions powerfully. An icy bathroom floor, a

calming hug, the kick from an electric fence. The impact is
immediate, and using touch and texture in your memory tech-
niques can help to create the all-important connection required
to make information truly memorable.

Have a look around the room you’re in now. Imagine touching

some of the things you can see: a range of different objects,
fabrics, natural substances and manufactured materials. Do
they feel rough or smooth, warm or cold, dry, sticky, hard, dusty,
sharp? You’ll find that your fingertips feel alive even though
you’re doing the touching in your mind. Then try touching some
of the same things for real. How accurate was your imagination?

Here are six DIY tasks to sort out before your house goes on the
market next week. Use them to practise remembering through
texture and touch.

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●● Finish grouting the tiles.

●● Repair the brickwork.
●● Glue the drawer.
●● Oil the door hinge.
●● Tack the carpet.
●● Paint the skirting board.

Start by imagining the smooth, cold texture of the new grouting.

Then bring to mind the rough surface of the brick wall, the feel
of sticky glue on your fingers . . . Create a ‘touch memory’ for
each job, and then see what happens when you connect the tex-
tures together: squeezing grouting between the bricks, which are
covered in glue mixed with oil, with tacks floating in it that have
been gloss painted.

Return to the to-do list earlier in the chapter and see whether
you can add touch into the mix of sense triggers: the texture of
crisp banknotes, the thick, sticky feel of petrol, the sharp edge of
the greetings card . . .

Smell
Smells evoke memories with a particular intensity. Like touch,
they can be hard to imagine, although their impact on emotion
can help. Spend a moment bringing to mind a few favourite smells
and some that you hate; then some smells that take you back to
happy times; and any others that connect you with unpleasant
memories. Your feelings will help to re-create the smells in your
mind, the reverse of what happens so often in real life.

Other smells are instantly recognisable but hard to pinpoint. It’s

great memory training to try to pick out individual smells in a
kitchen, garden or even a busy office.

See how quickly you can name them, and be alert to any memo-
ries they evoke.

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Imagine you had to buy the following ingredients for your

Christmas cake recipe:

●● raisins
●● lemon
●● brandy
●● nutmeg
●● mixed spices

To practise incorporating the powerful sense of smell into

your learning, try to imagine the smell of each of these items
in turn. Use your other senses to help: imagine seeing the
food, touching it, tasting it . . . and then allow the smell of
it to fill your mind, along with any feelings or emotions it
activates.

You’ll probably find it hard to escape memories of Christmas,

since many of these smells are particularly associated with that
time of year, and the cake as a whole should take you back to
moments from Christmas past.

And to stretch your ability to connect information together, to

balance your sensitive, experimental, right-brained thinking with
left-brained logic and order, have a go at blending these scents
– just like a perfume manufacturer blends individual ingredi-
ents to make the perfect fragrance. In this case, it might make
for a rather unusual aftershave . . . but a very evocative smell of
Christmas. Imagine this was a very carefully designed scent,
beginning with sugary raisins, going into sharp, citrus lemon,
blending with some heady fumes of brandy, being softened by
sweet nutmeg and then finished with exotic mixed spice. Can
you tell a ‘smell story’ and explore yet another way of using your
whole brain brilliantly?

Finally, go back to the to-do list that’s already been enriched

with four types of sense information. See if smells can make

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your imagery and ideas even more memorable: sniff the

money, check the dry cleaning smells fresh . . . go through the
list one last time, making use of all the other memory triggers
you’ve attached as you add a final layer of connection and
significance.

Total recall
As you spend a moment thinking about the list of jobs you
need to remember, you may well find examples of humour,
horror, surrealism; things to attract and things to repel; excite-
ment, violence, action, surprise . . . With strong images as the
foundation, covered in layers of sense triggers, the original
information has been brought to life memorably in your
imagination – but you’ve also given it logic, ‘imagining’ it into
a very robust order. The pictures tell a story, but the sounds,
textures, tastes and smells also provide clues about how the
ideas fit together.

In this chapter you’ve seen how right- and left-brain thinking

can come together to make memories, consciously, creatively
and consistently. Your imagination lets you use all your senses
to enrich the dullest information; those senses themselves can
help to knit together the individual details; and your logical left
brain joins the party by creating stories and patterns and making
connections that will keep the memories firmly fixed. Suddenly
your memory is tapping into your strongest emotions to allow
learning to hit a new level.

In the next chapter you’ll see more of what you can achieve with
this sort of whole-brain approach. All the techniques you’ve
practised in this chapter will be invaluable as you learn about the
most important ancient memory system of all: the one that will
revolutionise the way you think and learn.

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brilliant recap
●● Your right brain specialises in imagination, your left brain in
logic.
●● Brilliant memory involves using both sides together.
●● Mix the liberated learning of children with the ordered
approach of adults.
●● Strengthen your senses and incorporate them all in your
learning.
●● Emotional reactions activate lasting memories.

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 PART 2

Applications

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 CHAPTER 6

Learning lists
Memory is the treasure house of
the mind.

Thomas Fuller

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 In this chapter you will learn:
●● that the Greeks and Romans invented a way to remember
anything
●● why the system of loci matches the way your memory works
●● how to turn familiar places into mental buildings and routes
●● strategies for remembering shopping lists, instructions,
directions, talks . . .
●● where else this technique might take you, with a bit of
imagination

For centuries we’ve known that place triggers memory. Going

back somewhere – for real, or in the mind – can remind you of
detailed information from decades before, peeling back multiple
layers from the past and activating your memory in rich and
vibrant ways.

In Ancient Rome, Quintilian wrote about the powerful

connection between memory and place: ‘for when
we return to a place after a considerable absence, we not
merely recognise the place itself, but remember things that
we did there, and recall the persons whom we met and even
the unuttered thoughts that passed through our minds when
we were there before’.

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 114 improve your memory

The Greeks and Romans put this intriguing aspect of memory

to use. They developed a system that made it possible to learn
large amounts of information with remarkable ease. It helped
them to explore, remember and communicate their ideas in truly
impressive ways – and the good news is that it still works bril-
liantly today. It makes your memory work efficiently, flexibly and
creatively. It even comes complete with a user-guide.

The Journey System could be exactly what your memory’s been

waiting for.

The Journey System

Ancient origins
The Greeks had the idea first but it was the Romans who devel-
oped it into a practical memory tool. It’s a simple concept with
infinite applications: you use the places you know to hold the infor-
mation you want to know. Familiar buildings and journeys become
mental structures which can be filled with memorable information,
rediscovered when you return there in your mind. Cicero, one of its
most skilful users, explained the system in a nutshell: The order of
the places will preserve the order of the things to be remembered.

brilliant definition
Loci

Loci is the plural of locus, the Latin word for ‘place’. This powerful
memory technique is often called ‘the system of loci’, based on
mental tours around carefully built and delicately decorated places.

Rooms and routes

It’s also known as the Roman Room System, reflecting another
take on one key idea. You can use a single room, several rooms

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 Learning lists 115

within a building, landmarks on a journey – even tours of entire

cities – to give your memory the sort of frameworks it finds so
useful for storing information. Everything you want to know
is converted into images, using all the tried-and-tested strate-
gies for making them memorable, and then those images are
arranged around the rooms or routes you’ve set out in your
mind.

Global learning in action

Memory journeys work particularly well because they get both
halves of your brain – both sides of your thinking – working
together.

There’s clear, left-brained logic in the arrangement of places,

allowing you to move forwards or backwards through the infor-
mation, to pick out particular details and to add or delete images
whenever you want. But there’s also a wonderful amount of
right-brained imagination involved in creating memorable pic-
tures and fixing them into place with colour, action, comedy and
chaos. The imagery promotes creative connections; so, as well as
remembering the original material, you’re also exploring it on an
exciting new level.

Although you’ll be using the journey system to boost your

memory in the modern world, you’ve been left some useful
advice from the distant past. The anonymous Roman text Ad
Herrenium outlined some practical rules:

●● Your loci – the different areas of rooms and buildings or the

landmarks on journeys – need to be deserted or solitary.
They start empty, ready to be filled with images, but they
should stay uncluttered and clear in your mind’s eye.
●● To avoid confusion, each stopping-place also needs to be
different from the rest. Ancient users of this technique were
very creative with furniture and décor to make every locus
unique.

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●● You need to have ‘checkpoints’ along the way to make sure

you don’t skip images, and to help you access individual
images. The Roman tradition was to ‘tag’ every fifth and
tenth locus in some memorable way.
●● It’s a good idea to have fairly regular intervals between loci.
Your memory journeys should be fluent and steady, with no
cramped movements or giant leaps from one image to the
next.
●● Be careful with the size of loci – not too big or too small
– and make sure they’re well lit, allowing you to see the
images you’ve stored there in all their glory.

You need to see how good this system is for yourself. To get you
started, here’s a ready-made route for you to use: a ten-point
journey around a grand country house. After all, if you’re going
to design some mental architecture from scratch, you might as
well make it beautiful, spacious and calm.

Spend some time getting to know the place. Take a walk around
it in your imagination.

Locus 1: Driveway
Your journey starts on the wide driveway leading up to the
house. Imagine the pristine white gravel beneath your feet.

Locus 2: Front door

Stand on the stone step in front of huge oak-panelled doors,
preparing to step inside.

Locus 3: Entrance hall

You’re in the house now, standing in the middle of a large, gal-
leried entrance hall, gazing at the beautiful works of art on the
walls. An open door on the right takes you to . . .

Locus 4: Cloakroom
This is where you hang your coat on a fancy hook and put your

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 Learning lists 117

bag on one of the polished wooden shelves, before walking

through to . . .

Locus 5: Sitting room

The furniture here is suitably sumptuous, so take a moment to
relax on a long, velvet sofa. And since this is the fifth stopping-
place on the route, stay a little longer than normal – and notice
the number 5 that’s been carved into each of the sofa’s wooden
legs.

Locus 6: Dining room

From the sitting room, a door takes you into the long, formal
dining room. The mahogany table here is laid for a banquet –
but you’re more interested in what goes on behind the scenes,
so step into . . .

Locus 7: Kitchen
A big house needs a big kitchen. This one is equipped with every
possible appliance, everything brand new and immaculately
clean.

Locus 8: Staircase
From the kitchen, a set of double doors takes you to a wide,
sweeping staircase and up towards the first floor of the house.
Feel the quality of the carpet under your feet as you climb the
stairs and reach . . .

Locus 9: Bathroom
This is the first room you come to at the top of the stairs, and it’s
the most luxurious bathroom you’ve ever seen, with solid marble
surfaces and gleaming gold fittings.

Locus 10: Bedroom

The final stopping-point on your tour of the house is a bedroom,
complete with stately four-poster bed, antique furniture – and a
large number 10 embroidered on the quilt.

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 118 improve your memory

Now go back through the ten loci from memory. There’s a very
clear path to follow, taking you from the first place, the driveway,
all the way to the last, the bedroom. As you imagine standing in
each location, bring to mind all the details you can. Check that
each locus is different, with space to be filled, uncluttered and
well lit; that you know where to find the mid-point, locus 5; and
that the tour is a well-spaced, regular route from start to finish.

brilliant tip
To check you’re confident with a new memory building or journey,
always take the tour backwards, from locus 10 to locus 1 – and
when you can do that, you’re ready to put it to use.

Seven steps to success

Remember the seven key stages of the memory process? Your
memory journey is the perfect opportunity to put them all into
practice:

Start by deciding to memorise the ten items on a shopping list:

carrots strawberries pineapple-juice cake bread

porridge sugar jam bacon butter

Your strategy is simple: to invent a powerful image for each

product and then position them all around the country house,
one in each room.

As you visualise the images and then organise them around the
route, make everything as personal and exaggerated as possible.

Imagine . . .

... standing on the driveway and seeing hundreds of bright orange

carrots sprouting up through the white gravel. You bite the top off

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 Learning lists 119

one of the crunchy carrots before crunching along the gravel to the
front door – which is shaped like a strawberry. It’s the same colour,
too, because someone has smeared it with sticky strawberry juice,
which gets all over your hands as you open the door and walk into
the entrance hall. This room is swimming with pineapple juice, almost
reaching the paintings on the wall. You’re not a good swimmer and it’s
scary as you paddle and splash your way through the thick yellow juice
to the other side of the room. In the cloakroom, an expensive cake has
been squashed on to each hook, and you have to move a cake to put
your bag down on the shelf. Brushing cake crumbs off your hands, you
walk into the sitting room – and feel very relieved that this part of the
house is warm and cosy and smells of freshly baked bread: probably
because all of the furniture here is made from large loaves of bread.
Pause for a moment, wondering who’s carved the number 5 into the
breadstick sofa legs ... before walking into the dining room. You’re
horrified to see that there seems to have been a food fight. Porridge is
dripping from the table, the ceiling, even the chandeliers. Do you dare
to taste a bit of the cold, lumpy porridge? The dining room leads to
the kitchen, which is bright and white – mainly because every surface
here is covered in a dusting of sugar. You draw your name in the
sugary worktop (and lick it to take away the taste of the porridge!)
before heading for the stairs. Someone’s piled jars of jam on the stairs
and you almost get to the top without knocking them over ... but then
you catch one with your foot, that jar hits another jar, and suddenly
they’re all tumbling down the staircase like dominoes, smashing and
covering you and the expensive carpet with thick, sticky blackcurrant
jam. The bathroom would be a good place to clean up, but the sink is
blocked with a huge pile of bacon. There’s bacon filling the bath, too,
and although you do your best to clear the cold, greasy mass of meat,
it’s stuck fast. Exhausted, you’re really glad to see the tall four-poster
in the middle of the bedroom next door. You leap on to it – but instead
of sinking into the soft mattress and comfy covers you slide straight off.
Someone has smeared butter across the quilt, giving the embroidered
number 10 a glistening sheen but making it absolutely impossible for
you to get into bed for a well-deserved rest, however hard you try ...

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 120 improve your memory

You’ve now organised the information carefully in your memory.

And the seventh step is to practise: so now close your eyes and
go back through the ten rooms of this stately home, letting all
the clues you’ve left remind you of the ten items of shopping you
need to buy.

brilliant tip
You can often speed up your recall by asking questions. It’s what
you do naturally when you visit new places, and in this case there’s
no shortage of things to be curious about! What’s here, why is it
that colour, where’s it coming from, who did that, what’s going to
happen next . . . ?

When you’re ready, see what it feels like to be completely in

control of your memory. Get your country house to ‘tell’ you the
ten items in perfect order – forwards, and then backwards. What
was the fifth thing on the list? What came before the pineapple-
juice? Was coffee on the list? What about sugar, lemons, jam?

Just the beginning

You’ve put in the effort to erect a whole building in your imagi-
nation, so why not use it again and learn some new information
straight away?

brilliant tip
In ancient times, the loci were often compared to wax tablets, easily
wiped clean of information and reused, and you’ll find that this
happens remarkably easily – if you want it to. But in this case, keep
the original images – the shopping list – in place, and use them to

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 Learning lists 121

give your memory even more to hold on to. Each new image can be
connected to whatever you’ve just put in, building up multi-layered
memories that have an even better chance of staying put.

Here’s a second list to learn: ten items of clothing. Perhaps you

need to buy them, or talk about them, or remember them for a
fashion show or school play.

socks skirt coat gloves trousers ball-gown scarf shirt

hat shoes

Just follow the lead of the ancients, remember all your seven
steps to success, and have a go yourself at creating vivid mental
images to activate your memory. Enjoy exercising both sides of
your brain.

Perhaps you pull a sock on to each carrot, wipe off the strawberry-
juice with a new, clean skirt, wear the padded coat to help you
float in the pool of pineapple . . . It shouldn’t be hard to create
surreal images, with you at the centre of every strange scene.

When you’ve fixed all ten new images in place, practise remem-
bering them on their own – the gloves, the trousers, the ball-gown
– but also see what happens when you juggle them with the food
you remembered first. What clothing was in the same room as
the bacon? What came before the room that smelt of bread? You
might have got used to thinking of your memory as disorganised
and lazy, but look what happens when you start using it well! You
can learn and remember with phenomenal precision – in fact,
the more information you absorb, the easier it becomes to keep
everything in place, each image connecting to others in ways that
you can really use.

Could you even add a third layer of memories to this creative

collection? There’s certainly room in your mind: just be confident

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that the amount of information you’re learning doesn’t matter

as much as the way in which you learn it. You know the order of
rooms; you now have even more ‘hooks’ on which the new images
can hang; and you’ve got your brain firing on all cylinders, ready
to keep learning powerfully and precisely . . . so give it a go!

Here are the ten animals you want to write about in your science
essay, or discuss in your talk on conservation, or visit as you walk
around the zoo with your kids . . .

zebra lion meerkat eagle giraffe beetle monkey

snake mouse rhino

So now can you remember three lists, thirty items, forwards,

backwards, from any particular starting-point . . . finding food
and clothing by naming an animal . . . seeing three images in the
seventh room . . . saying the food that went with the trousers and
the clothing that came before the room full of porridge . . . ?

Has your memory ever felt this brilliant before?

Home sweet home

If you’re going to design your own set of loci, where better to
start than at home?

Follow the four steps below to create a memory framework based

on the building you know best: the place where you live. It doesn’t
matter if it’s a house or an apartment, a cottage or a castle; you
can turn any kind of home into a solid structure to store images
of anything. You make the most of all your associations with the
real location, and get a real boost to your confidence from trans-
porting yourself to a place that’s familiar and safe.

Step 1: Overview
Before you choose the ten memory ‘zones’ inside, spend a
moment thinking about the sort of places they’re going to be and

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 Learning lists 123

how they’ll be organised. Trust the wisdom of the Romans and

try to spread them throughout your home, making good use of
all the space available. You can choose rooms, passageways, stair-
cases, yards, gardens, lofts, roof-tops – even individual pieces of
furniture. It all depends on the options offered by the real loca-
tion, and how you can make the most of them.

Step 2: Route planning

When you’ve considered the ‘big picture’, start to focus on the
details. Choose ten very clear, very different spaces within your
home and sort them into a route that makes sense. Write it out
on paper – as a numbered list or map. You need to be absolutely
sure about the order of stopping-points on your mental journey,
from the first locus to the last. Keep it as realistic as you can,
making the most of your instinctive knowledge of the real place
– but also breaking the rules here and there if you find a wall in
your way or need to go up a floor without any stairs . . .

brilliant tip
It can help to imagine you’re filming a mental movie. Your camera
can go through walls, squeeze into the smallest bits of furniture or
even swing outside the house to look in: whatever makes it easier
to travel fluently from the start of the tour to the finish.

Here are two example routes – although of course yours will be

completely unique.

1 Front garden
2 Hallway
3 Living room
4 Dining room
5 Kitchen

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 124 improve your memory

6 Staircase
7 Landing
8 Children’s room
9 Master bedroom
10 En-suite bathroom

1 Lift
2 Apartment door
3 Coat rack
4 Sitting area
5 Dining table
6 Food cupboard
7 Fridge
8 Shower room
9 Bedroom
10 Balcony

Step 3: Room design

Now visit each room, area or piece of furniture in turn in your
mind’s eye (or movie camera’s lens) and visualise these spaces
in as much detail as you can. Set up the viewing angle for each
one – and stick to it, so that each locus looks basically the same
every time. Remember the Roman tips about good lighting and
staying free from clutter, but make a note of any useful features
you find. Distinctive details can become very useful ‘hooks’ for
the images you create. Make sure there’s something in the fifth
area to remind you it’s the halfway point on the tour.

Step 4: Rehearsal
Finally, make the whole journey in your mind. Visualise yourself
standing in each of the ten loci in turn, looking from the same
angle every time and focusing on as many details as you can.

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 Learning lists 125

View your mental movie to make sure the route from start to
finish is crystal clear – and check that you can also rewind it and
move backwards through the memory zones.

brilliant exercise
Put your ‘home journey’ into action straight away. Here are ten bits of
information you might want to remember about your family’s busy life this
week. Turn them all into images, then fix each image into its ‘slot’ in the
route.

1 Send out party invitations.

2 Book dentist’s appointments.
3 Pay the electricity bill.
4 Check on your next-door neighbour.
5 Order new curtains.
6 Discuss summer holiday plans.
7 Mend the shower.
8 Pick up dry cleaning.
9 Wash the car.
10 Invite the children’s friends for tea.

Make use of everything you’ve learnt so far about memory as you take
ownership of this information. Give everything significance, make it connect
powerfully with you, and follow those all-important seven steps to set up
artificial memories that the ancient masters would be proud of!

You might imagine standing in a garden littered with old birthday

invitations, or seeing that the front door has been decorated with party
balloons and banners. Perhaps the hallway has become the dentist’s
waiting room, or maybe the door to your apartment is now shaped like
an open mouth. Pick one aspect of each note on the list – electricity, your
neighbour’s face, some floral curtains – and exaggerate it, give it impact
in any way you can, and fix it into the next place on the tour. You can add
more details if you need to – a brochure about your chosen holiday spot;
the particular part needed to mend the shower – but make sure the ‘big

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idea’ of each reminder is clear: the bags of dry cleaning in the children’s
toy-box, the dirty car being washed on your bed, the kids’ tea-party going
on in your en-suite . . .

When you’ve created ten images and fixed them in place, spend a moment
going back through the loci and strengthening the memories. Which senses
and emotions would enrich the journey? How could you make better use of
the distinctive details already there? Could any of the images be confusing,
or are they all as clear and powerful as possible?

And then, see if it’s worked. Move fluently through the ten spaces in your
mental framework, rediscovering the image clues you’ve left for yourself
and saying exactly what they mean.

brilliant dos and don’ts

Do
✔✔ Do . . . give a running commentary on the journey. Talking
to yourself can make sure you go the right way and trigger
memories of key images, especially when you ask the right
questions. ‘I’m through the apartment door and I go straight
to . . . the coat rack. Why are all my electrical gadgets hanging
there?’ ‘So let’s go upstairs . . . and I know I have to be careful
here, because . . . yes, there are buckets and spades all up the
staircase . . .’
✔✔ Do . . . improve the images every time you remember them. This
is the self-supporting brilliance of memory at its best. Imagine
your reactions to finding these strange things around your
home. Picture yourself doing something at each point in the
journey, strengthening your memories of whatever’s there.
Don’t
✘✘ Don’t . . . go too fast. There’s a temptation to rush around the
route, gathering up all the imagery you placed inside – and

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missing out key loci in the process. Keep visualising yourself

making the journey for real and you won’t forget to look in
that cupboard or to stop on those stairs.
✘✘ Don’t . . . worry if you come to a gap. It’s unlikely, the system
is so strong; but if you do find you can’t remember what’s in
a particular place, leave it for now and continue with your
journey. The rest of the information should still be in place,
all held in the right slots. Something later may well remind
you of what’s in the ‘empty’ room, especially when you take
the tour in reverse. Keep asking questions and following any
associations – even vague ones like ‘there was something
funny here . . .’ or ‘why can I smell burning?’ Don’t give up until
all the clues you created lead you to the memory store.

brilliant impact
As well as lists of words, objects and jobs, you can use memory journeys to
remember instructions and directions. When the order of your information is
so important, the route system is ideal. Even abstract ideas like ‘turn right’
or ‘fold lengthwise’ can be turned into something concrete and memorable
and fixed in place in your creative mind. The structured mental journey
keeps you on track as you follow the instructions in precise order, forwards
or backwards, and you can add as much detail as you need to complete the
task brilliantly.

What about adding another set of information to the journey

you just used? Try coming up with images for the following
travel directions, then put them into the first five loci around
your home. Combine them with the to-do list pictures already
there to create some surreal and unforgettable scenes.

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 128 improve your memory

1 Turn right.
2 Go to the top of the hill.
3 Turn left.
4 Go past the cemetery.
5 At the school, take the second road on the right.

To remember which way to turn, you could fix image-clues in

place on the right or left side of your memory space. So a huge
model hand on the right of the garden would remind you to turn
right. Maybe there’s a magnet on the far-left coat hook, pulling
you in that direction. If you found your kitchen had been trans-
formed into a school, and noticed not one but two flashing signs
pointing out of the window on the right, you’d think: ‘definitely
second right at the school’.

And have a go with some practical instructions: the start of a

cake recipe. Carry on from zone 6 in your home route and add
images telling you to . . .

6 Heat the oven to Gas Mark 4.

7 Butter a cake tin.
8 Beat together the butter and sugar.
9 Add a few drops of vanilla.
10 Mix in the flour.

Use your artificial memory the first few times you make the
journey or bake the cake and soon the physical actions will come
naturally – but you’ll always have some detailed reminders ready
if you ever get stuck.

Working memory
To round off this chapter, build yourself one more memory
route – based on the place where you work. Once again it’s
just common sense to start using your most familiar structures

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to manage your mind. They’re ready-made memory stores,

full of powerful associations and connections. Follow the steps
above, take your time to get the details right, and set yourself
up with another ten-locus framework ready to absorb all the
images you create – and to keep you in complete control of
your memory.

In the following chapters you’ll find out how to turn the most
specific information – detailed facts and figures for every
purpose – into vivid imagery to slot into this and many other
kinds of memory frame. But for now, how about practising with
the list below, which could be:

●● subject-areas for a team-building talk

●● topics for a night-class essay
●● revision for a sports quiz
●● reminders about the exercise plan that you’re definitely
going to stick to this time . . .

It’s actually the ten events in the Olympic decathlon, in the

order they happen: useful general knowledge, but it’s also there
to get you thinking about the sort of real information that you
could start remembering right now, using the power of memory
journeys to make an impact in so many different areas of your
life.

Decathlon disciplines
1 100 metres
2 Long jump
3 Shot put
4 High jump
5 400 metres
6 Hurdles
7 Discus

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 130 improve your memory

8 Pole vault
9 Javelin
10 1500 metres

Use this exercise to practise everything you’ve learnt about

memory so far. Turn the information in front of you into
memorable images and fix them all firmly into your new
memory store. Make the experience active and personal and
unforgettable.

Maybe you start by joining the sprinters in their race across the
car-park, then break the long-jump record as you leap across the
lobby, before heaving a huge metal ball on to the receptionist’s
desk . . .

What next?
So, how can you start putting memory journeys to use in your
real life? What are the best ways to learn all the detailed infor-
mation you need, at work, in your studies, during your social
life – and to stay on top of all the challenges you face from day
to day? What would happen if each image you created was just
the starting-point for a memory story, so that every room in
your ordered imagination was filled with as much information
as you chose to store? What would that mean for your general
knowledge, communication skills, learning power – and overall
confidence to succeed?

Memory is boosted by questions of every kind. The good news

about these questions is that the answers really are life changing
– and they’re coming next.

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brilliant recap
●● Since ancient times, physical locations have been used to
manage memories.
●● Memory journeys bring together both sides of the brain.
●● Use familiar routes to trigger memories of new information.
●● Fill rooms with memory clues that activate senses and feelings.
●● Make sure your mental journeys match all the principles of
brilliant memory.

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 CHAPTER 7

Words and
ideas
The palest ink is better than the
best memory.

Chinese proverb

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 In this chapter you will learn:
●● a new way of handling all the words you want to
know
●● how to create lasting memories of abstract ideas
●● the ‘active reading’ technique for remembering complex
texts
●● strategies to improve your spelling and widen your
vocabulary
●● techniques for memorising foreign words and phrases

Sometimes it feels like you’re drowning in a sea of words. So

much of the material you need to remember comes as text: revi-
sion notes, journal pages, web encyclopaedias, vocabulary lists.
In daily life you’re expected to retain tiny details of spellings
and subtle differences in definitions and meanings, but also to
manage the vast stores of information contained in long and
complex passages. Words often present you with abstract ideas
that give your brain very little to go on. And as well as feeling
more confident in your own language, how much more might
you achieve if only you could learn foreign words in a way that
really worked?

Modern technology delivers us more words than ever before:

verbal information that we need to know, plus a wealth of mate-
rial that we’d love to learn and put to use. But what’s easy to read
on paper or screen can quickly fade when you try to inscribe it in

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your mind. To succeed in so many areas of life, you need a range

of techniques for remembering words efficiently and effectively
– and then using them brilliantly.

Continue what you’ve started

You should already have realised the possibilities. In your
training so far, most of the material you’ve practised with has
been in the form of words: random words in pairs, groups and
lists, and more meaningful ideas expressed in single words,
phrases or sentences. You’ve got used to developing the strongest
images for real things, and you’ve learnt how to think creatively
about more abstract information and to turn that, too, into pow-
erful pictures. But now it’s time to start working with the words
of real life – which involves looking at language in a new way and
starting to do some very powerful things with it in your mind.

brilliant tip
Imagine you’re a crossword compiler, analysing and dissecting
every word to turn it into something clever and memorable. In
the world of crosswords, a river can be a flower, because it flows.
A capital letter is a London landlord. If a plane crashes anywhere
it’s likely to be Nepal (anag.). And when Brian is poorly inside at
the junction, it’s brilliant (brILLianT). Crossword experts are used
to playing around with how words look and sound, finding puns,
creating anagrams, spotting words-within-words, and using every
kind of abbreviation, shorthand and clever clue to explore language
in exciting ways. And that’s a great way to remember words, too,
because it’s active, creative, organised and engaging. It brings
words to life.

Dismantle the following seven words and see what images you
can find inside. They’re seven fairly abstract ideas, but very

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 Words and ideas 137

important ones: the seven key stages of the memory process.

You’ve been reading these words and using these concepts for a
while, but now it’s time to build them into your brain.

deciding strategising visualising personalising

exaggerating organising practising

To begin with, spend a moment thinking about the real meaning

of each word. What does this idea ‘look like’? If you were illus-
trating it in a children’s book or giving it an image in a business
presentation, what sort of picture would you use?

Then start to look for new ideas. Focus on what the word
really looks like, how it sounds and what it reminds you of.
See what happens when you change a letter here or there,
swap vowel sounds, split up the syllables. Remember: you’re
looking for anything that might suggest some memorable new
imagery, lifting your thinking to the level where it works best
– but eventually leading your brain back to this word on the
page.

Make sure you have a go yourself before reading the suggestions

below. Don’t worry if you find it hard. It’s a new way of thinking
about words, but you’ll quickly get better with practice and start
spotting connections and clues in seconds. You don’t need to
turn the whole word into something new: just look for something
inside it that will trigger your memory.

Deciding
The real meaning could be illustrated by a ballot paper, a judge
giving his verdict or a Roman emperor’s down-turned thumb.
And being more creative with the word, you might think about
cider, use an association with Deeside in Scotland, or make some-
thing out of the first three letters: Dec for December. Make the
most of whatever ideas come to mind. It’s great to have a range
of options when you come to organising your images and fixing
them in your mind.

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 138 improve your memory

Strategising
Perhaps you think about military leaders making their battle
plans, or friends playing a strategy board game; and then play
around with the sound of the word to make ‘straight edges’ – or
spot the rat hiding in there.

Visualising
This could be a sportsman seeing himself ‘in the zone’ or a
fortune-teller imagining the future; or, change the sound of the
first syllable to give you a racing-driver’s visor, or the spelling, to
make it fizz . . .

Personalising
You could think about a personalised number-plate, a com-
pletely customised car – or someone pursing their lips, a purse or
a purring cat.

Exaggerating
The real word might suggest a caricature painter or a mime
artist. With a bit of creative thinking you could also use images
of eggs, something hexagonal, or someone gyrating.

Organising
A tidy desk or perfectly organised Zen garden; and maybe an
organist wearing organza.

Practising
Your first thoughts might be of sports stars training or actors
in the middle of a dress rehearsal, and then your creative brain
might suggest packed ice or pricked icing.

Looking at words like this gives you a wide selection of images:

some based on real meanings, but others produced by your crea-
tive brain to enrich the memories you make. So, when it’s time
to arrange them around one of your memory routes, you have
some truly striking scenes:

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 Words and ideas 139

. . . a judge drunk on cider

. . . a strategy game being played by rats
. . . a fortune-teller wearing a visor
. . . a personalised number-plate fastened to a purse
. . . a mime artist gyrating
. . . a tidy desk being played like an organ
. . . a team training-session held on packed ice

Of course these are just suggestions. The details visualised by

every person who tries this task will be different – and they need
to be: personalised by you, exaggerated as much as you possibly
can, and made to match your unique brain.

You might imagine:

●● the cider-loving judge in your front garden

●● the rats sorting their strategy in the hallway of your house
●● the visor-wearing fortune-teller relaxing in the living
room
●● a personalised purse on every chair in the dining-room . . .

And you’d remember it all because you’d have:

●● actively engaged with the information you wanted to learn

●● set up general reminders of the big themes
●● left yourself specific clues about the exact words you’re
learning
●● given your memory various ways to reconnect with the
original ideas

Push yourself to remember these words in a way that really

works. As well as proving that even abstract ideas can be
given powerful, precise image clues, it teaches you the seven-
step memory method that underpins all the training in this
book.

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 140 improve your memory

brilliant impact
When you get into the habit of looking at language in this detailed and
creative way, you’ll find your overall confidence with words improves.
As well as strengthening your spelling, expanding your vocabulary and
pushing you to try out new languages, this approach sets up your brain to
solve puzzles, make jokes, read between the lines – and to choose and use
your own words better than ever before.

How far you’ve come from simply reading something through

a few times and hoping it might stick! This new approach
to learning puts you in complete control, leaving you with
multi-layered memories – the multiple connections that your
brain relishes – and a clear path through all the rich and vivid
reminders that you’ve arranged carefully around your brain. It’s
like a 3D film, using two cameras at once to create richness and
depth. In your mental movie studio, real meanings and creative
interpretations – the logical left and the imaginative right – are
the two angles that come together to bring your learning to life.

Memory texts
When you know how to turn individual words – any words
at all – into memorable images, you’re ready to start learning
whole documents: essay notes, revision texts, finance magazines,
history books . . . whatever you need to know, in as much detail
as you want to remember it.

And that’s something very important to consider when you’re

deciding to use your memory and strategising your approach: how
much of your document do you really need to know? Will it be
enough to remember the key points? Do you need to learn par-
ticular names, facts or quotations? Is the order in which things

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 Words and ideas 141

appear important? Learning enough of a magazine article to

discuss it at an ideas meeting at work will be very different from
studying textbooks before your seminar or memorising the struc-
ture and detail of an exam essay. Careful thought at this early stage
will pay dividends during the rest of the memory-making process.

brilliant tip
How often do you find yourself looking at a document but not
really reading it? It’s tempting to read something passively and
then tick it off as a job done, even though you know none of it
has gone in – but that’s such a waste of time. Give up on aimless
reading. Learn how to remember texts properly, be strategic and
invest time in the active approach that will make all the difference.

Key points
Start by highlighting the most important bits in the text: the
main ideas that will form the skeleton structure of your learning.
If you were making prompt cards for a talk, or writing sub-
headings into an article, what would the key points be? Doing
this ensures that you understand what you’re reading, so you’re
already activating your memory – and you’ll find that useful
images already start to emerge. Use the ‘3D’ technique you’ve
been exploring to create both literal and creative illustrations,
getting your whole brain involved and giving yourself a variety
of connections back to the central ideas.

brilliant tip
If possible, highlight key words on the document itself or write
in your own sub-headings, either in gaps between paragraphs

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 142 improve your memory

or alongside sections of text. And while you’re doing so, don’t

be afraid to use colour, draw cartoons, put in some of your own
thoughts and start making the printed page eye-catching, unusual,
personal and memorable. Later, as well as using your specific
strategies to learn the text, you might be surprised at just how well
you remember what you did to the words on the page.

Set up the structure . . .

Once you’ve got your key points, and each point has been given
some powerful images, slot them into a memory journey, one
point per place. In that way, even if you do nothing else, you’ll
know all the main ideas in the right order. Practise travelling
through the loci in your mind’s eye and fix this skeleton structure
into your memory.

. . . then add the details

Now you can add as much extra detail as you want, creating
new images to include in each locus. There’s a key idea in each
one, but soon there can be a whole collection of detailed ideas
leading from it. This is where the storytelling technique comes
back into play. Within the overall structure of a memory journey,
each image can be the starting-point for a mini memory scene
or story. In that way, you can quickly go to a particular place in
your memory building, trigger your memory about a big theme
– and have all the details about it at your fingertips.

Here’s how it might look in action, using a textbook chapter

about wines of the world. If you were studying this information
for a night-class test, a social-club talk or to prepare for a real
wine tasting, the names of particular wines might well be your
main themes – to which you could add as much detail as you
wished.

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 Words and ideas 143

So, you’d start by reading the text carefully and highlighting

the key ideas: the ones to turn into the ‘headline’ images for
each locus in your mental journey. Perhaps you’d pick out six
main wines and focus on the order in which you wanted to talk
or write about them. Then you’d simply put image clues about
them into the first six loci of a memory journey.

Beaujolais Perhaps a wine bottle wearing a bow and looking very

jolly.
Zinfandel A Zen fan called Del?
Pinot Noir Pinning a note to Noah.
Sauvignon Blanc Savage Sophie on Mont Blanc.
Pinot Grigio Pinocchio the Gigolo.
Chardonnay Cher and Donnie (Osmond?), charred onions, a shard
of glass on some hay ... or whatever associations your brain
squeezes out of the word.

brilliant tip
If you already know something about the real meanings of words,
make sure you use that to give you some specific images too. But
this technique works even with material that’s brand new to you.
Get into the habit of pinning images on to words you’ve never
even heard of before and you’ll be a step ahead when it comes to
learning foreign languages, names, jargon and all the other verbal
material that doesn’t come with meaning ‘attached’.

As you slot these particular images into a memory journey –

one based, for example, on your local supermarket – you might
notice that the wine bottles stacked up in the car-park are all
wearing bow-ties and making jolly noises: Beaujolais. By the
automatic doors, maybe a group of Zen fans are all chanting

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 144 improve your memory

the name of their leader, ‘Del, Del, Del . . .’ Zinfandel. In the veg-
etable section, a shop assistant is pinning a note on Noah, who’s
sitting in his Ark on top of the carrots: Pinot Noir . . .

With those main images in place you’d be ready to insert extra

details. Reading your textbook carefully, you might choose the
following facts to add:

●● Beaujolais is the name of a wine-making region of France.

●● It produces mostly red wine.

●● Zinfandel wine is known for its rich, dark colour.

●● This grape grows best in climates that are warm, but not
hot.

●● Pinot Noir is a difficult grape to grow.

●● It’s one of the more expensive varieties.
●● This wine is known for its berry flavours.

. . . and, to do so, you’d simply return to each locus and add more
images to trigger your memory.

Maybe you’d visualise the wine-bottles in the car-park sur-

rounded by villages and fields, and the whole region stamped
with the distinctive red, white and blue Tricolour flag of France.
Then the red colour could seep out of the flag and turn every-
thing red, including the bottles and their jolly bow-ties.

The Zen fans by the doors could all look particularly rich and
be dressed in dark suits. You could zoom in your mental movie
camera to see the beads of sweat on their faces. They like being
warm, but not hot, and soon they’re all taking off their dark
jackets to keep the temperature just right.

In the vegetable aisle, perhaps Noah is finding it difficult to plant

grapes on his Ark. You could picture a very expensive price-tag
attached to each grape. Maybe they’re so expensive that Noah
replaces them with strawberries, blackberries, raspberries . . .

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 Words and ideas 145

Active reading
This is word learning at its best. By this stage, after beginning
with the printed page, you’d have extracted the key points,
created main images to put into a memory story, then pulled out
just the right amount of detail to incorporate into each scene.
And when you walked back through the journey in your mind
you’d rediscover the key points, and each one would trigger its
own mini memory-store of extra facts.

With practice you just get used to reading texts in this way –
at least when you want to learn them. You can still read for
pleasure, skim articles or learn just the top level of informa-
tion. But when you need to – when you decide to – you can
work with texts on a new level, adding layers of imagination
and organisation that let you explore and remember them
brilliantly.

brilliant impact
One big advantage of remembering like this is that the learning isn’t fixed,
as can often be the case with learning-by-repetition. Existing images can be
tweaked, new ones can be added, and each locus has endless space as you
do more research and want to remember more.

Put all these techniques to the test now by absorbing informa-

tion from the text below. To help you become even more of an
expert on wine, here’s the first part of a guide to wine tasting
– for you to read, actively, and transform into something truly
memorable. You’ve been shown the steps, now simply put them
into action.

Step 1: Read the text carefully, looking for the key points. (For
example, Chardonnay.)

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 146 improve your memory

Step 2: Create images for the main ideas, reflecting anything

you know about their real meanings. (Maybe a bottle of your
favourite Chardonnay white wine.)
Step 3: Choose some extra images based on whatever creative
inventions your mind conjures up. (Like Cher and Donnie or
charred hay.)
Step 4: Fix these main images into place in a memory journey.
(Perhaps bottles of Chardonnay in a pile of charred hay in your
back garden.)
Step 5: Attach extra images for any other details you want
to remember: new facts, key words, follow-up instructions,
supporting ideas. (Maybe the Eiffel Tower rising up out of the
hay, reminding you of this wine’s French origins.)

Keep in mind all the other principles and practices you’ve

learnt during your training so far, and push yourself to use your
memory at its brilliant best.

Tasting Wine: A Beginner’s Guide

Start by using your eyes. Fill the bottom of your glass and hold it up
to the light. Look carefully at the colour and clarity of the wine. The
tint of every bottle is different, and with practice you can learn a
great deal simply by looking at wine.

Next, search for clues with your nose. Lift your glass to your nose
and smell the wine. If you lower the glass for a moment, hold it by
the stem and rotate it for a few seconds: the swirling wine will be
oxygenated and release even more flavour. Note any smells you
detect: fruity, woody, smoky, leathery ...?

Now it’s time to examine the wine with your tongue. Start with
a small sip and move the liquid around your mouth. This helps to
cleanse your palate for the full taste to come. Take the second sip
more slowly and swish the wine in your mouth to extract the full
flavour. Make a note of all the tastes you can pick out.

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 Words and ideas 147

When you’re ready, close your eyes and explore the information
you’ve just installed in your mind. If you want to learn more,
you’ll find there’s space here to add as much extra detail as
you want – but even this short text should have given you some
useful starting skills, because you knew how to make the most of
every word you read.

Now have a go at writing down everything you learnt about

wine tasting, talking about it to someone from memory, or even
putting it into practice at a real wine-tasting event.

brilliant impact
This is remembering at its best – and it keeps getting better. Every time you
walk back through a memory journey and engage with the information, you
alter it slightly and heighten the memory. And even if you haven’t gone
back for a while, the main images will still be there, and the smaller details
can be quickly refreshed. You’re not starting from scratch every time you
rehearse or revise: you’re strengthening and extending memories that have
been built to last.

You’ll be using this strategy when you learn how to speak from
memory, and again when you explore the ultimate approach to
exams. But for now, take every opportunity you get to practise
it in real life: with newspaper features, web-pages, research
notes, science guides, history leaflets. See how much more you
remember, and how much more you can do with it all, when you
know how get the best out of your brain.

Language learning
When you can manipulate words in your mind and make them
memorable, you can boost your confidence with language in

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 148 improve your memory

general, improving your spelling, widening your vocabulary and

giving you a whole new approach to learning whole new languages.

Spellings
General advice
As always, the process starts with a decision to do more than
just hope for the best. Take an active approach and start making
every spelling powerfully memorable.

●● Highlight difficult details in bold colours in your mind.

●● Exaggerate the easy-to-miss bits: make tricky letters huge,
3D, moving . . . whatever makes them stand out.
●● Take a mental photograph to imprint every customised
word on your brain.
●● Hold your paper high and look up at the spellings. This
matches your upwards eye-movements when remembering
words; and most people seem to find it easiest to look up
left to learn spellings, because that’s where they look in their
mind to find them again.
●● Practise re-creating the word in your mind’s eye – and make
sure it’s there securely by spelling it backwards.
●● Write out spellings on paper to build up muscle memories.

Targeted techniques
You can also make yourself very precise memory triggers for the
words you always get wrong. Often you only need to remember
one small detail to get the spelling right every time.

Double/single letters
To remember the double letters in address, why not picture
Donald Duck (DD) and Steven Spielberg (SS) living at the
same address? See it in your mind’s eye and use this image
whenever the word address crops up.

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To remember that there’s only one t in the middle of commitment,

you could imagine someone showing complete commitment to
the IT department at work.

Silent letters
If you were having problems with the silent h in character, you
might focus on the word char that’s visible when it’s spelt right.
You could then decide to get a match and char a picture of every
character in a particular book or TV show; or even just give them
a chair to sit on. And don’t just think about it, push yourself to see
it. With this active approach you can start imprinting very strong
image-clues about all the spelling details you find difficult.

There’s an easy-to-miss i in miniature, so why not imagine a

miniature pottery figure coming to life and stuttering ‘I . . . I . . .
I . . .’; or go one step further and make it a miniature eye.

Tricky vowels
Is it relevant or relavent, seperate or separate?

You might spot the girl’s name Eva in the correct spelling of
relevant: maybe the office assistant who helps you to find the
relevant paperwork.

How could you separate two golfers who par every hole on the
course?

brilliant tip
Always be on the look-out for words-within-words (when they’re
spelt properly), familiar initials, names, anagrams, patterns . . .
anything that gives your memory something to hold on to –
especially if it suggests useful images to fix the tricky bits in your

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mind. It’s a very practical approach because it exercises your eye for
detail and your ability to spot spelling patterns, as well as filling in
particular gaps in your knowledge. Picture yourself trying to tell an
intellectual he’s wrong; building a sink with an oversized U-bend;
thinking up an eg of every possible category of spelling . . .

Memory sentences
For longer or more unusual spellings, memory sentences can
be your best bet. I still remember how to spell beautiful because
I was told in infant school that Big Elephants Are Useful To
Indians For Unloading Logs, because . . . the initial letters spell
out the tricky word. This technique isn’t foolproof so use it
sparingly – and carefully.

brilliant tip
●● Write memory sentences with exactly the right number of words.
‘Rhythm Helps You To Hear Music’ is better than ‘(I’m) Really
Hoping (That) You’ll Teach Him (The) Macarena’.
●● Make your sentences memorable in their own right: interesting,
appropriate, surreal, surprising . . . something that helps them to
stick. ‘Your Anchor Could Have Tangled’ for yacht offers a clear
picture and an intriguing problem.
●● Try to find a connection with the original word. It’s not always
possible, and other things can just as easily remind you of the
sentence you need: for example, I remember the elephants,
Indians and logs by picturing the teacher who told me about
them. But it can be a useful trigger for your memory if the
theme of the sentence matches the word in question: ‘Egyptians
Give You Pyramid Tours’, for instance, for Egypt.

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●● Practise saying the sentences and get used to how they sound.
It’s a bit like the muscle memories you build up for movements
with your hands or feet: you get used to the feel of the words
as you say them aloud. If I tried saying ‘Big elephants help
Indians . . .’ I’d spot the change in rhythm immediately and know
something had gone wrong.

Vocabulary
Which one is it?
There are some confusing pairs of words that look or sound the
same but have very different meanings and uses. Your new atten-
tion to detail and understanding of memory will help you set up
useful reminders about which is which.

Desert/dessert
In the desert there’s only sand, and desert has only one s; but in
a dessert there could be lots of things beginning with s: sugar,
strawberries, suet, semolina, syrup . . . Use imagery to help you
see the clear contrast between two very similar words.

Principal/principle
If your school Principal was called Al, and you pictured him
with Al written on his door and saw him wearing a name-badge
saying Al, you’d remember that a Principal is usually a person –
unlike a principle which is always just an idea.

Stationary/stationery
Picture the stationer, the person who sells you your stationery
supplies. Imagine what they might be holding or doing and
create a memorable image of the stationer – to remind you of
stationery.

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Memorable meanings
You can also set up images to link individual words to their spe-
cific meanings. You play around with letters and sounds, find
new ideas to turn into memorable pictures, then connect those
pictures to the real meanings you need to know. There are several
steps involved but soon you’ll be doing them almost without
thinking. It’s active, energetic learning – but it feels right because
it suits the way your memory works. It’s particularly powerful
when you want to remember unusual vocabulary, like . . .

Agelast: a person who never laughs

You might split this word into two: age and last. If you never laugh,
maybe you age last because your face doesn’t get any laughter
lines. Picture the smooth, unlined skin of any agelast you know . . .

Agrestic: rude or coarse

How about combining aggressive with tic – one of those annoying
little parasites you can pick up in the woods. Visualise, personalise
and exaggerate . . . by picturing a particularly aggressive tic being
rude to you and using the coarsest language you’ve ever heard.

Rugate: wrinkled
Remember that rug you ate? Think about how wrinkled it was,
how the wrinkles felt as you ate them, and how you wrinkled up
your face in disgust.

Logophile: a lover of words

A useful play on words here might be ‘logger file’: the cardboard
file that all loggers keep containing all the words they love about
trees . . .

Foreign vocabulary
Here are examples from German, French and Spanish, but this
strategy works with any language you want to learn. In practice

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 Words and ideas 153

you’ll always have many more clues to help you – like links with
other words, familiar spelling patterns, and of course all the words
that don’t change much or at all between languages. But this exer-
cise should prove that any word or phrase, even if it’s been taken
completely out of context, can be memorised brilliantly.

In each list of random words and phrases below, use the ready-
made imagery to learn the first five items, then have a go at
memorising the next five yourself.

brilliant tip
Remember, you don’t need to invent images to represent the
whole of a word: just think up ‘bridging’ pictures that get you close
enough to the right sound or spelling. Find words-within-words, pick
out key syllables, extract associations based on the way a word
looks or sounds – and then, if you connect those images to the
real meaning, your brain will always have a way of bridging the
language gap.

German
Das Bett: bed
Maybe you have to win a bet at the miniature casino on your
pillow before you’re allowed to come to bed.

Zu Fuss: on foot
Everywhere you walk on foot there are zebras, lions, tigers and
monkeys causing chaos – a ‘zoo fuss’.

Der Abend: evening

Do a bend to exercise your back every evening.

Die Mutter: mother

How she likes to mutter! Hear her mutterings echoing in your head.

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 154 improve your memory

Rot: red
Every red thing is starting to look and smell like it’s starting to
rot . . .

Die Birne: pear

Das Hemd: shirt
Der Kiefer: jaw
Das Becken: basin
Guten Tag: hello

French
L’armoire: wardrobe
What if you found that a spooky old suit of armour was now the
only thing hanging in your wardrobe?

La tasse: cup
Imagine the look and feel of a French cup covered in tassels.

Le traiteur: deli
How do you know the woman behind the deli counter is a
traitor?

Le pain: bread
Feel the searing pain as you bite into a slice of French bread.

Le chou: cabbage
Imagine finding something green and leafy inside your
shoe . . .

La carte: map
Le lait: milk
Merci: thank you
Blanc: white
Le loup: wolf

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 Words and ideas 155

Spanish
El pollo: chicken
What would a polo-playing chicken look like?

El tenedor: fork
Use your fork to prise a tenner off the door.

La cartera: schoolbag
If your schoolbag turned into a ‘car-tearer’, what level of destruc-
tion might it wreak?

La lucha libre: wrestling

Picture yourself eating lunch in the library and watching the other
readers wrestle.

El camarero: waiter
Imagine the waiter taking your photograph, but asking why the
viewfinder says ‘camera error’.

Algo mas?: anything else?

Rosado: pink
El parpado: eyelid
El horno: oven
El raton: mouse

brilliant tip
To remember the gender of foreign words, why not develop
your own simple image code? Whenever you create a picture to
remind you of a masculine word, you could give it a particular
colour – blue, say, to contrast with feminine words painted pink.
And if there are neuter words, maybe you could visualise them in
various shades of grey. Alternatively you could position the images
in different, well-defined areas of your imagination. Maybe you

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 156 improve your memory

designate a particular building to hold images of all the words in

a new language, and put the masculine words upstairs and the
feminine ones down. Or you might visualise foreign words arranged
around an entire town or city, giving you plenty of appropriate
locations for all the new vocabulary – and more than enough
space to have exclusive districts for masculine, feminine and neuter
words.

So, to apply your memory skills to learning languages:

●● decide to use your brain brilliantly

●● think strategically to choose key words and phrases
●● personalise the information: make it mean something to
you
●● visualise ‘bridging’ images to link new words with their
familiar meanings
●● exaggerate every detail
●● organise your imagery to keep hold of it in your memory

. . . and then step seven, practise, is more important than ever.

Memory skills install new words in your head and give you
the support you need to start speaking and writing them; but
it’s by using them in real situations that you become fluent.
Too many people never get to that stage – and quickly forget
all the words and phrases they thought they’d learnt. But if
you can use trigger images to give you the confidence to chat
and shop and travel in a foreign country, that’s when the real
learning begins. Say hello in Berlin; eat a pomme in Paris;
connect your imaginary ideas with the real things, the real
experiences, the real, living language . . . and you’ll be making
memories that last.

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brilliant impact
Now that you’re so good with words, why struggle to remember passwords
any more? When you’re choosing new passwords for computer systems,
social networking sites or online accounts, simply choose ones that match
the way your memory works. You can be extremely strategic by choosing
the words and the image triggers to remember them at the same time.

So you might imagine logging on to a dating website and seeing your

favourite film star appear on screen and say hello to you personally:
password 5 bradsayshi.

You could think about the gadget you’re saving up for as you log on
to your bank account, and imagine yourself viewing the details on it at
that very moment, a wide, flat screen filled with numbers: password =
hugeplasmatv.

Choose passwords based on personal information that no one could

guess. Focus on the details of words to remember them, but also to make
them even more secure: running words together, for example, including
deliberate misspellings or using made-up words that only you’d be likely to
remember, thanks to your new memory skills.

To make your passwords even more secure, why not mix words
with numbers?

The next chapter will show you how to develop complete

confidence with numbers in every form: times, dates, prices,
codes, sums . . . More than just coping with numbers you’ll start
choosing to use them, improving your success in some surprising
areas and taking your brain training to new levels of brilliance.
Now that you know how to handle words, you can start holding
on to even more of those detailed bits of data that make such a
difference to everything you do.

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 158 improve your memory

brilliant recap
●● Look at words like a crossword compiler and extract every
memorable detail.
●● Assign ‘trigger images’ to words, based on real meanings and
free association.
●● Highlight key points in a text, then add picture clues about
everything else.
●● Give tricky words powerful, visual reminders of how they’re
spelt.
●● Use ‘bridging’ images to make links between new words and
their meanings.

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 CHAPTER 8

Numbers and
names
Do not trust your memory; it
is a net full of holes; the most
beautiful prizes slip through it.

Robertson Davies

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 In this chapter you will learn:
●● a range of systems for remembering numbers
●● easy ways to learn everyday digits: TV channels, times,
dates, prices, PINs . . .
●● the skills involved in putting names to faces
●● simple techniques for helping other people to remember
you
●● how to manage your life by linking numbers to names

You’re not alone: everyone finds numbers and names hard to

remember. Numbers are abstract ideas, hard to hold on to, easily
confused. Names are arbitrary labels that can be too common,
too rare, too complicated or just too straightforward to stay in
your head. Both are often presented in the worst ways imagi-
nable: a long phone-number called out across a busy office; five
new names fired at you around a restaurant table. And both are
particularly frustrating because they have such a major impact
on your life.

brilliant impact
Just think – if you could cope with numbers, you’d be able to:
●● remember meeting times, appointment dates, birthdays, anniversaries

●● make better judgements about prices, negotiate more favourable deals

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 162 improve your memory

●● save time making phone calls, following directions, finding addresses

●● recall DIY measurements, recipe amounts, clothes sizes

●● learn history dates, geography statistics, science facts, literary references

If you knew how to learn names, you could:

●● strengthen your relationships with colleagues at work

●● improve your networking skills and make powerful new contacts

●● feel more confident in social situations

●● boost your knowledge about famous figures, past and present

●● make sure other people remember you for all the right reasons

And if you were brilliant with them both, you’d be able to bring a new
level of order to every area of your life: linking people to their birthdays;
connecting names and addresses, ages, phone-numbers, order references,
team positions; recalling whom to meet in which office at what time . . .

The benefits of knowing numbers and names are clear; but

so too are the dangers of forgetting them. If you’ve ever sent
something to the wrong address, bought a piece of furniture that
was just too big, missed an important appointment, forgotten a
special birthday or anniversary or made a mistake about some-
thing as clear cut as someone’s name . . . then you’ll know how
embarrassing, frustrating and costly it can be to let these par-
ticular ‘prizes’ slip through the net.

Memory is what tells a man that his wife’s birthday

was yesterday.
Mario Rocco

This chapter is about getting to grips with some of the hardest-

to-hold information. It will provide you with practical strategies
for storing these vital details; show you how to make the most of

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 Numbers and names 163

everything else you’ve learnt about your memory; and give you
a wide range of applications so that you can start putting your
new-found confidence to use.

You can do it. You’ve already seen clear evidence of your

memory’s phenomenal power. You’ve proved that strategies and
systems can have a revolutionary impact on your learning. Now
you’re ready to get your brain in gear and master numbers and
names once and for all.

Numbers
Systems for remembering numbers have been around for centu-
ries, and they all work on the same basic principle: that numbers
are hard because they’re intangible and abstract, so to make
them easier you need to make them mean something. We do that
naturally when we spot familiar number-facts or find patterns
that suggest some sort of meaningful design. Number systems
simply give you a way to do it quickly and easily every time.

Number rhymes
Rhyme has played an important role in the history of number
learning. As well as individual verses, like: ‘In sixteen hundred
and sixty-six, London burned like rotten sticks’, a very specific
strategy has been around for centuries that uses rhyme to make
numbers so much more memorable.

Instead of thinking of abstract ideas – ‘one, two, three’ – you use

rhymes to give you concrete images: ‘bun’, ‘shoe’, ‘tree’. These
can be used as ‘pegs’ for other bits of information, or the images
themselves can be linked into pairs or larger sets, connected to
other kinds of information, organised into imaginative stories or
arranged around journeys of the mind.

The Number Rhyme System is quick to learn and it delivers

immediate results. It can struggle with longer lists or large sets of

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 164 improve your memory

numbers, but it’s a useful strategy to have up your sleeve, and a good
way to see what happens when you turn numbers into pictures.

Start by setting up ten rhyming images. Here are some suggest­

ions, but it’s your memory, so use rhymes that are going to work
for you.

1 sun, bun, gun

2 shoe, loo, goo
3 key, tree, sea
4 door, saw, war
5 hive, jive, drive
6 bricks, sticks, tricks
7 heaven, Devon, Evan
8 skate, gate, Kate
9 wine, vine, mine
10 hen, pen, wren

For digit learning you’ll also need 0: so how about ‘port’ for
nought or ‘hero’ for zero?

So you simply choose your favourite rhyme for each of the

numbers, zero to 10. Then, whenever you want to learn a num-
bered list, you have a ready-made row of ‘pegs’ on which all
the items can be hung. And to remember numbers themselves,
you’ve got some very clear pictures to use instead.

brilliant tip
The seven steps to building strong memories still hold true. Plan
what you’re going to do with the images, visualise them with as
much personal, powerful detail attached as possible, organise them
in effective ways – and then practise with them until the memories
are fixed.

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Learning a list
To learn the following inventory of household objects . . .

lamp TV bath vase bed curtains computer

dishwasher fridge toaster

. . . simply create a strong mental picture for each one and link it
to the appropriate number image, using the sort of connections
that form the organising structure of your memory stories. One
thing can be joined to another, or transform into it, explode
to release it, smash into it, play with it, eat it . . . Remember to
include all your senses, to imagine your own reactions to what’s
going on, and to exaggerate every memorable detail.

Here are some ideas:

1 lamp: if your rhyme for ‘1’ was ‘sun’, you could imagine the
lamp burning as brightly as the sun itself. If you’d chosen
‘bun’, you might design your lamp to look exactly like a
delicious currant bun.

2 TV: smashing the TV with a shoe, a show about loos, or

a TV-set covered in sticky goo.

3 bath: perhaps there’s a tiny key floating in your bath, or a

tree growing up through the water.

4 vase: open the door and knock a priceless vase to the floor,
or picture the vase painted with vivid scenes of war.

5 bed: a tiny bed for every bee in the hive; a jive competition
being held on your bed; or the bed being moved from the
bedroom to sit in the middle of the drive . . .

Now it’s your turn. Have a go with the next five items on the list.

6 curtains
7 computer
8 dishwasher

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 166 improve your memory

9 fridge
10 toaster

When you’ve designed your five image links and given yourself a
couple of minutes to practise, see how many of the original ten
objects you can remember, using the number-rhyme ‘pegs’ to
organise your creative ideas. Can you go through the whole list,
backwards as well as forwards? What was the eighth item? What
came before the curtains?

brilliant timesaver
Just like memory journeys, the number-rhyme system lets you
use one memory to trigger another. Each image hooked on to
one of the ten pegs can be the starting-point for a scene or story
designed to store as much information as you like. The bun-shaped
lamp might fall over into a luxurious chocolate cake and have
to be prised out with a long stick of celery. After being smashed
by your shoe, what if the TV set started leaking litres of coffee
on to the carpet – with juicy green olives floating in it? The key
could be floating in a bath full of strawberry jam, and a passing
chicken might get its feet stuck . . . until it pulled on a long sausage
and dragged itself free – only to fall into a huge pot of sugar . . .
Suddenly, ‘3’ isn’t just bath, it’s also strawberry jam, chicken, sugar
. . . and you’ve got a detailed shopping list that you won’t forget in
a hurry!

Learning numbers
Your friend’s new house number is 48, so you might imagine
them holding a saw with a pair of skates hanging from the end.

Rob’s extension number is 72, so you could visualise a heavenly shoe

sitting on his desk: bright white, decorated with angels and haloes.

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 Numbers and names 167

Your top price in the negotiations is £56,000, so perhaps you

imagine hitting a hive with sticks, releasing the bees, being stung
. . . and the pictures in your mind would help you to avoid being
stung for real.

Have a go yourself. Check you have ten images based on number

rhymes, then use them to learn the following facts.

You need to go to a meeting in room 39.

The security code on your bank card is 924.
The prize is behind door number 6.
Your hotel room is 1875.
Your favourite TV show is starting now on channel 606.

brilliant tip
Sometimes the basic pictures will work fine, but you can always
be creative about the way you interpret the rhymes. The number
7 starts as ‘heaven’, but it might also be ‘heavenly’, ‘heaven-sent’,
angels, haloes, fluffy clouds . . . The number 2 could be any kind
of footwear. Zero might turn into the super-hero of your choice,
a costume or gadget – or even one of his special powers. So
720 could be an angel wearing shoes decorated with pictures of
Superman, a cloud holding up a ballet shoe and a utility belt, or a
heavenly shoemaker leaping between tall buildings.

Did you know?

With a bit of creative thinking you can write sentences that
represent long sequences of numbers. There’s a technique called
the Word Length System in which you simply choose words with
particular numbers of letters, then weave them into memorable

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 168 improve your memory

sentences and stories. Zero is a bit of a problem, but you can solve
it by using a ten-letter word or including some other agreed detail
– maybe just a word beginning with z. To learn the serial number
on your bike, 45597, you might use a memorable phrase like: ‘lock
every night, defeating thieves’. ‘Contains my precious yesterdays’
could be how you remember the combination lock on your secret
diary: 8280.

The Major System

French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Herigone invented
this memory system back in the 1600s, but it’s been developed
over the centuries and used by people all around the world. The
idea is that each digit is represented by a designated consonant
or consonants, which can be turned into words and phrases by
including the vowels of your choice. And once you’ve got mean-
ingful words to work with, rather than tricky, abstract numbers,
the rest of your memory skills can do their thing.

The most common version of the Major System looks like this:

0: s, z or soft c: z is the first letter of the word ‘zero’, and the

other consonants here sound similar.
1: d or t: like the number 1, these letters both have one
downstroke.
2: n: like 2, it has two downstrokes.
3: m: this time both the number and its letter have three
downstrokes.
4: r: the last letter of ‘four’; and 4 and R are almost mirror
images.
5: l: in the system of Romal numerals, L stands for 50.
6: j, sh, soft ch, dg, zh and soft g: a handwritten j looks like a 6 –
and g like a 6 upside down.

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 Numbers and names 169

7: k, hard c, hard g, hard ch, q or qu: there are two 7s in a K.

8: f or v: a handwritten f looks like an 8, and v sounds similar.
9: b or p: b looks like 9 rotated, p could be a mirror-image 9,
and the two letters have a similar sound.

The Major System is phonetic: sound-based. Spellings don’t

matter because it’s the consonant sounds of a word that give you
its number code.

So the number 974190 could be learnt as BiG ReD BuS.

Castle holds the numbers 705 (CaSL).
To remember that your car is parked in bay 31 you might
picture it covered in MuD.
To learn the first eight digits of Pi, you could use the Major
System to give you MeTeoR TaiL PiNK: 3.1415927.

brilliant tip
Don’t get confused by double letters. The real word you’ve chosen
may need them to be spelt correctly, but if they make one sound
they should only represent one number. For example, the word bliss
would be used to remember 950, not 9500. For 9500, blue seas
would work perfectly. Kill is 75, not 755; but 755 could be Kill Lee.

The Major System takes a bit of learning but it’s a very powerful
way of memorising specific numbers, allowing you to create
strong images and to connect them directly to your subject
matter. It can be a bit complicated and time consuming for
everyday number learning, but it’s great for longer numbers –
especially the ones you want to learn long term.

To see if the Major System might work for you, try using it to
memorise the following information.

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 170 improve your memory

Remember the key steps:

●● Turn each digit into a consonant from the list.

●● Group the consonants into real words, inserting vowels as
necessary.
●● Create strong images for the words you’ve chosen.
●● Find ways to link these images with the numbers you
started with.

Your new fridge can’t be wider than 67 cm.

The antique vase was made in 1743.
Your mother-in-law’s birthday is 24/11.
The catalogue code for your new television is 349658302.

And what about the other way round? See how quickly you
can change the following images back into the numbers that
count.

Every time you press the buttons on the security door at work,
you imagine hearing an EVIL LION. So, what’s the code?
Think what would happen if you had NO PROOF that your
credit card actually belonged to you. What’s your PIN?
When you want to phone your friend Alice, you think about
her wearing an OLD BLUE SHEET – so what’s her number?

(The answers, by the way, are 8552, 2948 and 519561.)

brilliant timesaver
If you need to remember lots of two-digit numbers (like birth years,
Bingo calls, football squad numbers) or long number sequences, it’s
a good idea to invest some time in developing your own double-
digit system. You could easily use the Major System’s number/letter
combinations to turn every two-digit number into a familiar person,

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 Numbers and names 171

giving you a powerful, ready-made image for every pair of numbers,

and instantly cutting your workload in half.

You might decide to turn 00 into Steven Spielberg

01 could be Sammy Davis Jr
19: Tweety Pie
36: Michael Jackson
64: Julia Roberts
77: King Kong

It’s great memory training to design and rehearse your own

system and then put it into practice, turning pairs of numbers
into people that can be incorporated in any of your other memory
techniques.

Number shapes
This strategy is popular because it’s easy to remember the key
images, but they can all be extended to provide a wide range of
possibilities.

Each of the ten digits has a main image based on the way it
looks. Here’s one set of ideas, but you can easily customise it to
suit the way you see numbers – as long as each image is different
from all the others.

0 looks like a ball

1 is the same shape as a pencil
2 could be a swan
3 on its side resembles hills
4 might suggest the sail on a yacht
5 looks like a sharp hook
6 tipped forward might be a cannon
7 resembles a lamp

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 172 improve your memory

8 could be a snowman
9 looks like a lollipop

You can use these ready-made images for remembering straight-

forward information like:

House numbers
Picturing a swan sitting on your aunt’s doorstep holding a pencil
in its beak would remind you that she lives at number 21.

Measurements
Seeing a snowman sailing a boat across your kitchen table would
remind you that it’s 84 cm wide.

Statistics
Imagining a cannon on the banks of the Amazon shooting doves
over snowmen playing football . . . would tell you that this river’s
length is 6280 km.

You can also expand the main images to give you more options.
As well as being a ball, 0 could be any kind of sporting equip-
ment: golf club, tennis racket, bike helmet. For 3 you could go
beyond hills to think about anything in the countryside: trees,
flowers, rabbits. The number 6 could be more sorts of weaponry
than just a cannon: crossbow, slingshot, atomic bomb . . . Just
make sure that any extra ideas you pick are clearly connected to
a number’s main ‘theme’.

brilliant tip
For longer sequences of numbers, make it easier to write memory
stories by including verbs and adjectives as well as nouns.
With practice you can create concentrated stores of detailed
information.

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 Numbers and names 173

●● The number 2 could be a bird, aeroplane or kite – or the action

of flying, floating or gliding.
●● You might want to visualise 7 as a lamp, torch or candle – or
‘bright’, ‘shiny’ or ‘hot’.
●● If you needed to know the security code 2170674, you could
tell yourself a story about a penguin (2) writing (1) on a
glowing (7) golfball (0) and then firing it (6) into the hot (7)
sea (4). Stretch your creative brain and start turning numbers
into the most varied, rich and memorable stories imaginable.

When you know how to handle numbers, you can add them to
other collections of information.

Improve your passwords

Make your passwords more secure by inserting seemingly
random numbers. If you’ve chosen the password myfriends for
your social networking website, and you’re already used to visu-
alising a group picture of your friends on the computer screen,
you could now imagine the person on the left holding a beach-
ball (0) and the one on the right trying to spike it with a hook
(5). Now your password is 0myfriends5: much safer!

Add extra detail to your life planning

Remember the to-do list you learnt in Chapter 5? Rather than
just remembering to go to the bank, you could now leave your-
self a reminder to withdraw £40 (a wet tennis ball on the bank
teller’s desk) from account number 7523 (a glowing hook stuck
into a floating tree in the lobby).You’ve already got ­multi-layered
imagery to remind you about Scott’s birthday card, and now you
can include a reminder about his address (a lollipop (9) and a
rose (3) sticking out of the model castle on the card). He lives
at 93 Castle Street.

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 174 improve your memory

Personal numbers
Lots of other numbers you need to know – birthdays, phone
extensions, team numbers – are linked to people; so, to learn
them, you need sound strategies for remembering names. And
names are a very powerful example of the complexities of
memory. The names you know well are some of the easiest things
to recall, but new names can be hard to hold in your head even
for a few seconds. Your right brain helps you to recognise faces
you’ve seen before; your left brain should lead you to the details
of their name; but bringing the two sides together – often under
time pressure and amidst a range of distractions – can be frus-
tratingly hard.

Did you know?

Context is particularly significant when you’re trying to remember
names. Memory relies a great deal on expectation. You know
you’re likely to meet your colleague Sarah in the corridors at work,
but when you bump into her in the middle of town it’s so much
harder to remember who she is, let alone what she’s called. We also
expect people to look a certain way – so any changes in hairstyle
or clothing can play havoc with our memory. It’s one of the reasons
why people are so hard to remember: they change location and
appearance, and your natural memory needs lots of artificial help.

Expecting to forget
Another reason why names are so tricky is that we try to learn
them in the worst possible conditions. Your memory training
should have shown you the importance of taking control:
deciding to use your memory well, making a clear plan about
how to do it, and utilising your whole brain to fix information
firmly in your mind. But when it comes to learning names, all
too often we:

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●● assume it’s going be impossible

●● do nothing to improve the quality of the information that’s
given to us
●● rely on nothing more than our natural recall

No wonder names prove to be such a problem.

The solution is contained in the seven steps of memory making.

Now more than ever you need clear strategies for taking charge
of challenging situations, and active learning techniques to get
your brain working brilliantly.

Remembering names
Step 1: Deciding
You have to assume that you’re going to remember the names
you come across and the people you meet: not just by trying
harder, but by doing it better. You need to concentrate from the
start and put in the right sort of effort – and you need to prepare
yourself to find the space and time to do it properly. Going into
any name-learning situation, you’ve got to be very clear about
what you want to get out of it, and what you’re going to do to
make your memory work.

Step 2: Strategising
Your strategy for success needs to kick in the moment you hear
someone’s name – because, unless you listen carefully, your
memory really doesn’t stand a chance. It’s hard enough to
stop and focus on the names we read, but in real-life situations
they’re often fired at us so quickly or quietly or while we’re so
busy shaking hands or thinking of something to say that they’re
extremely hard to take in. At business events or on social occa-
sions there are usually numerous other distractions, too: in the
room around us, but also within us – nerves, excitement, our
eagerness to please . . . Even when we’re just reading names in a

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document our brains are often too busy with other things to take
much notice. So the first stage of remembering people has to be
looking and listening, concentrating on a name, actively taking
it on board and starting to do something with it. It’s an area of
learning where we can often be extremely strategic, choosing
exactly whom to remember – and how.

brilliant tip
Be interested in names, ask how they’re spelt, what they mean.
Repeat them immediately: ‘Hello Chris, really nice to meet you.’
Hear the name, look at the person, and tell yourself that you’re
going to put together a memory that will last.

Step 3: Personalising
Some of the things that make name learning hard – like the
emotional strains involved in meeting people – can be turned
round and used to your advantage. As you meet someone new,
consciously consider how you feel. Say their name in your head
as you think: do I like this person? Are they attractive? Is what
they’re saying interesting? Would they make a good colleague,
friend, partner . . . ? Set up connections through feelings and
you’re much more likely to recall the meeting, but you’ll also be
creating mental links to their name – especially when you focus
on what the moment ‘means’, and on your reasons to remember.

Step 4: Visualising
As well as looking at the person in front of you, look at their
name – in your mind’s eye. Picture it written across their face
or picked out in a neon sign hanging above their head. Imagine
what their signature might look like. Whether you’re reading
a name on paper or seeing it in your head, treat it just as you

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 Numbers and names 177

would any other word: as a collection of letters and sounds that

can provide you with memorable possibilities. What does the
name sound like or look like? Do particular syllables suggest
objects, people, places? Are there words-within-words that could
give you useful associations? Unpick names to reveal images that
you can work with. For example:

Harry Floris
Harry looks and sounds like hairy. Floris is very similar to florid,
red-faced; and to florist, a flower-seller. The first syllable of his
surname sounds like floor, but it also looks like flow. Flow rice?
Rice flowing across the floor? The name Flo is in there, along
with Lori – and Rolf, backwards: perhaps the people being swept
away by the flow . . . ?

Angela MacDonald
There’s an angel in Angela, maybe one with gel in its hair.
The Mac could be a raincoat. Donald might get you thinking
of Donald Duck, or another famous Don: Johnson, Quixote,
Corleone . . .

Step 5: Exaggerating
As soon as you’ve extracted some image ideas, make them
important. Imagine they’re part of this moment, revealing key
aspects about this person in front of you and providing you with
big clues about who they are. Ask yourself questions and exag-
gerate the answers – along with everything else that you start
seeing in your mind’s eye.

●● Why is this red-faced man taking his flowery shirt off so

flamboyantly? To show you his hairy chest. The hairs reach
to the floor, which also seems to be covered in rice, flowing
around you and hairy Harry Floris.
●● Why has this woman got a halo hanging over her gelled-
back hair? Imagine she’s holding a mac that seems to be

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 178 improve your memory

wrapped around a writhing, quacking duck. Clearly Angela

MacDonald has a very famous character in her heavenly
raincoat! As always, make the imagery bold and bright, funny,
strange, violent, surprising – and powerfully memorable.

Step 6: Organising
On paper or in person, names need to be connected to their
owners. You’ve already started this process by using your feelings
about them, picturing their names imprinted on them and visu-
alising strange and memorable things happening to them. Even
just reading the name of a party host or conference delegate
should get you linking imagery with a real character – even one
you’ve never actually seen.

brilliant tip
If you’re learning names on paper, connect the images you create
to what the real person could look like or might be expected to do.

●● Your new colleague is called Fred Bloom. Imagine him walking

into your office wearing bright red clothes and carrying a bunch
of blooming flowers. Maybe he’s half red, half blue (for Bloom).
Why does he seem so worried about finding the loo? As he sits
down at his desk, why is he setting up a loom?
●● If you learnt that Henry the Eighth’s first wife was called
Catherine of Aragon, you could imagine her doing something
with a cat and a rag, being arrogant, getting into a rage . . . put
her into a scene alongside her infamous husband . . . and set up
memorable images even before you found out anything more
about her.

But when you’ve got the real person in front of you there’s so
much more you can do to connect them with their name. As well

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 Numbers and names 179

as seeing them act out the images you’ve designed, you can use
the way they look and the things they’re wearing to help you.

Lookalikes
Does this person remind you of someone else? It could be a
famous face or a family member, but it makes sense to use any
resemblance they have to someone you already know. What
if they were really that other person in disguise? How would
that make you feel, and how might it change the things you
imagine?

●● If your new neighbour Andy Webster happens to look like

Elvis, you could imagine him using his huge hands (Andy)
to stir the webs (Webster) on his garden fence – dressed
in a Las Vegas jumpsuit and gyrating his hips like the
King. When you next bumped into him, you’d have the
Elvis connection to take you straight to the images based
on his name. You’d still be able to get there by picturing
him standing by his fence, and you’d still have the ‘fake’
recollection of how you felt when you saw his cleaning
and dancing in action; but you’d also be using his physical
appearance as a direct link into your multi-layered memory
for Andy Webster.
●● Maybe your colleague Helen Martino looks like the Queen
of England. Imagine this really is the Queen in disguise,
arriving at your office in a royal limousine decorated with
devils and fiery furnaces (images of hell for Helen) and
drinking from a huge Martini cocktail (Martino). Look for
clues in the jewellery she’s wearing (are those miniature
crowns on her necklace?) or in the way she walks (like
she’s in a regal parade?) that will remind you of the royal
connection. Even away from the context of your office
her appearance should trigger you to think about a very
memorable mental scene: this Queen lookalike in a hellish
car drinking Martinis . . . Helen Martino.

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 180 improve your memory

brilliant tip
Don’t forget how important location is to memory. If you’re ever
struggling to remember the name of someone you’ve met, think
carefully about where you were when you last saw them. Focus on
the exact part of the room, building or town; see the two of you
standing there; but also imagine what you could see from that spot,
using every available detail to reconnect you with the memory.

Features and fashions

Like a caricaturist painting an exaggerated portrait, highlight
any details that you could emphasise in your memory and use as
links to someone’s name. Temporary ‘hooks’ might be details of
clothing, jewellery, make-up or hairstyle; but you can find more
permanent links in face-shape, nose-size, birth-marks, height
– anything that you’d be sure to notice about the person in ques-
tion when you met them again.

●● If Amira Khan had a very round face, you could imagine

her looking at herself in a very round mirror (Amira) made
out of tin cans (Khan).
●● If Rick Carpenter was particularly tall, you might imagine
him using his carpentry skills to build an incredibly high
wooden shelf to hold all his model rickshaws.

Step 7: Practising
You need to start practising new names straight away, while the
real person’s still there in front of you. Make sure you drop their
name into conversation a few times, but you can also be saying
it ‘aloud’ in your own head, getting used to how it sounds and
building up the association with its owner. At the same time
you’ll be creating the images and links that will keep this person
in your mind for the long term; so, while you’re talking to them,

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 Numbers and names 181

run through the triggers you’ve set up and practise following the
images and associations that take you back to their name.

brilliant exercise
Try out these techniques for yourself on the following names.

With this first set, practise creating memorable images and connecting
them to the people in question.

Your travel agent is Doug Reddy.

The party is being hosted by Maddie Tan.
Your new neighbours are Bart and Sue White.

With the next group of names, create images for them all and then fix
them into the first five loci of a memory journey.

Lily Sato Jake Moody Rowan Carter Imogen Fox Carlo Mancini

Put these strategies into practice in your everyday life and see
what a difference they make. If you follow the steps carefully,
you’ll start remembering people for long enough to do some-
thing more permanent with their names: putting them in your
diary, adding them to your phonebook or filing them mentally
in stories and journeys.

And because you know how name learning works, you can start
activating memories about you.

brilliant tip
To give other people the best chance of remembering you . . .

●● Introduce yourself clearly – and make sure they’ve heard.

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 182 improve your memory

●● Help them to visualise your name by mentioning how it’s spelt

or what it means.
●● Give them information about you that’s easy to picture.

●● Talk about logical details and imaginative ideas to activate

both sides of their brain.
●● Give people reasons to remember you. What’s in it for them to
learn your name?
●● Back up their natural memory with business cards, thankyou
letters or follow-up emails.

In the next chapter you’ll learn more about using memory

techniques to affect other people’s memories: writing unfor-
gettable exam answers, giving powerful presentations, making
the best possible impact in interviews. But first, to round off
Chapter 8 . . .

Names with numbers

It’s time to bring together the two main themes of this chapter:
connecting names to numbers. This skill will also feature in
many of the high-pressure memory challenges to come; but for
now, you need to see how easy it is to link numbers to names.

Carol Wu lives in apartment 702.

Imagine a carol singer trying to woo Carol Woo at her apart-

ment. She has nothing to wear for a date – until a heavenly hero
gives her some beautiful shoes. In the Number Rhyme System,
heaven/hero/shoe 5 702.

Leon Morales’ date of birth is 23.06.71.

Perhaps you picture a lion (Leon) shouting for ‘more ales’

(Morales) at Leon Morales’ birthday party, wearing a gnome’s

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 Numbers and names 183

jacket (because, in the Major System, NoMeS JaKeT 5 230671)

There’s plenty going on in this scene, but every detail is clear –
and memorable, when you put all your training into action.

Use everything you know about memory – and both sides of

your brilliant brain – to remember that . . .

Tom Fischer’s extension number is 849.

Holly Santos owes you £458.
Rocky Singh has ordered 26 TVs and 15 DVD players.
Lola O’Neil was born on 15.09.78.

. . . then cover up the information and test your brilliant memory

for numbers and names.

brilliant recap
●● Abstract numbers and names are easy to forget – but can be
made memorable.
●● Number systems let you turn digits into images and fix them in
your mind.
●● To remember people, create powerful links between names and
faces.
●● Use your memory training to help other people remember you.
●● Link numbers and names to store key details about all the
people in your life.

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M08_HANC3292_01_SE_C08.indd 184 29/10/14 10:50 am
 CHAPTER 9

Under
pressure
The existence of forgetting has
never been proved. We only know
that some things don’t come to
mind when we want them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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 In this chapter you will learn:
●● that imagination can help you relax and focus, ready for big
tests of memory
●● the importance of boosting interest and attention when
you’re preparing for exams
●● effective memory techniques for key subject areas
●● how to speak from memory – and make everything you say
memorable
●● emergency tactics for memory chasing under pressure

It’s time to focus on those moments in life when your memory

really is put to the test. Some of them are planned, even chosen:
exams, job interviews, audition pieces. Others come out of the
blue, but still push your memory to the limits: giving witness
testimony, finding an important possession that’s been lost,
straining your brain to remember your PIN before the ATM
swallows your cash-card . . . Pressure makes things much harder
– which is why you need a trained brain to perform brilliantly,
whether you were expecting the memory challenge or not.

Did you know?

Stress makes us activate our most primal memories, our survival
instincts, rather than the thinking skills we really need to succeed.
Nerves about that make-or-break business presentation, your starring

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 188 improve your memory

role in a play or a final university exam can trigger deeply ingrained

fight-or-flight responses, making your muscles twitch and your heart
race and your sweat flow, but channelling energy away from the parts
of the brain involved in recalling the specific information you need.
It’s why off-by-heart learning often fails completely under pressure,
and why you really do need to have strong, artificial memory supports
in place, ready for the times when your brain is jettisoning knowledge
for action and needs something, anything, to hold on to.

Calm and collected

Although your imagination can quickly run away with itself and
ramp up the pressure with prophecies of doom, you can learn to
use your creative thinking to calm everything down. When you’re
preparing for any mental challenge, it’s a good idea to take con-
scious control of your imagination and get into the right frame of
mind for success. Think about the task at hand, but focus on it in
the most positive way possible. You know how to create detailed,
exaggerated, memorable pictures – so paint some that will help
you feel good about the challenges ahead.

There are three questions to answer.

What’s in it for you?

Focus . . . on all the good things that will come from doing well:
the new job, the place at college, entertaining your audience,
getting your driving licence. Start with ideas but quickly turn
them into pictures: your luxurious new office; meeting friends
in the college bar; the loud applause as you finish your speech;
taking the kids on holiday – with you at the wheel. Use all your
trained powers of imagination, activate both sides of your brain,
and concentrate on the feelings generated by seeing these posi-
tive pictures. Build happy ‘memories’ that will motivate you to
achieve these things for real.

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 Under pressure 189

How will you be brilliant?

Focus . . . on the way you’re going to achieve your goals. See
yourself taking control of the memory process, setting up the
most effective conditions for learning and doing all the right
things with your brain. Use your imagination to take you inside
your own head, where you can picture the two sides of your brain
being brought together in precisely organised and richly creative
memory making. Rehearse everything involved in putting your
brilliant memory into action.

Where can you go to get ready?

Focus . . . on the state of mind that will maximise your memory.
With your motivation clear and your strategy sorted, use your
trained visualisation skills to calm your nerves and leave you
feeling focused and confident. Choose a real place where you
always feel relaxed, or invent somewhere perfect, and take your-
self there in your mind’s eye. You know how to activate all your
senses, so use them to immerse yourself in the sights, sounds,
textures, tastes and smells that say peace and calm. Put your-
self in your comfiest armchair, smelling and tasting hot cocoa,
hearing classical music; or escape to a desert island beach where
you can feel the sun on your skin, hear the birds, smell the salt in
the sea . . . Use these imaginary experiences to counter-balance
any negative pictures your mind offers up, and enjoy the way you
can regulate your breathing, steady your heartbeat, and fill your-
self with the calm confidence you’re going to need to perform
under pressure.

brilliant tip
Whenever you visit this imaginary ‘confidence zone’, to prepare
yourself mentally for a memory challenge, squeeze your thumb
and index finger together. As well as being an appropriate symbol

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 190 improve your memory

of perfection, it acts as a physical trigger – so that, the next time

you need to draw on those positive feelings, repeating the physical
action will help you to repeat the mental journey.

Tests and exams

It’s particularly important to ask yourself those three ques-
tions and to paint the most useful mental pictures when you’re
starting to prepare for an exam – and again just before you sit
the paper or take the practical test. But most exams require you
to maintain the right frame of mind all the way through a lengthy
revision period, so there are some other useful tactics to help you
boost two key elements of your success: interest and attention.

Interest
It’s simply easier to remember things you’re interested in.

Did you know?

A group of African tribesmen proved to have very normal memory
powers for most things – apart from information about buying and
selling cattle, which was a hugely important aspect of their lives.
Questioned about cattle deals they’d done, they could remember
the details with remarkable accuracy – because they were interested
in the information and motivated to keep it fresh and accessible in
their minds.

Too often we try to revise information that doesn’t interest us.

We all have to study some subjects that we don’t immediately
engage with, however strong our motivation is to do well. The
trick is knowing how to make the material more interesting, and
then keeping it that way.

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 Under pressure 191

brilliant dos and don’ts

To boost your interest while preparing for exams:

✔✔ Do . . . everything you can to maintain your motivation. As well
as your positive mental pictures, find inspirational images
and quotations that you can pin to your fridge or use as your
screensaver. Give yourself regular ‘wins’ to keep you interested:
little treats for achieving interim targets and reaching key
points in your revision plan.
✘✘ Don’t . . . try to learn things that you don’t understand. It’s
tempting to think that you’re time wasting if you have to
get to grips with the meaning of your material – but it’s
actually an essential investment. Understanding something
automatically helps you to highlight key points, engage with it
personally, organise it in your mind and connect it memorably
with everything you already know.
✔✔ Do . . . make the most of your personal reactions to the things
you’re learning. Examine your opinions; debate the key ideas
with yourself and others; be aware of the areas that don’t
inspire you and look closer to find something exciting. And
when you do find a topic that particularly interests you, go
with it: do more research, go deeper, learn new things that will
help your memory anchor everything else.
✘✘ Don’t . . . keep going if you’re not engaging with the information.
Learn to spot the times when you’ve lost interest and stopped
connecting properly with your material – and stop. Refocus
on the seven steps of memory making, especially step three:
personalising. You need to know why you’re doing it, what
the information means to you personally and how to make it
connect with you through all your senses and emotions. Revision
needs to be a rich and immersive experience if it’s going to work.
✔✔ Do . . . make your artificial memories as enjoyable and
interesting as possible. Choose images that appeal to you.

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 192 improve your memory

Go on memory journeys that excite you. Transform all the

information you study to make it interesting and completely
memorable.

Attention
Your memory training should have shown you that there’s a big
difference between passive and active learning, and nowhere is
that more important than exam revision. It’s all too easy to fool
yourself that you’re learning, when what you’re actually doing
is wasting your time. You need to direct all your attention to the
task at hand – and, crucially, to how well it’s going, so that you
can make sure your memory is being used at its brilliant best.

brilliant dos and don’ts

To boost your attention while preparing for exams:

✘✘ Don’t . . . fall into the trap of ‘assumed learning’. It’s all too easy
to think that, because you’re sitting at your desk and reading
your books and notes, you’re learning – when actually you’re only
taking in the information on a very surface level. The trick is to
test yourself regularly. Research shows that the testing process
itself deepens memory, and it’s a crucial way to make sure that
your learning is working. If it is, keep going; and if it’s not, you
know you’ve got to do something different before it’s too late.
✔✔ Do . . . everything you can to limit distractions. Think carefully
about where and when you’re doing your revision. We’re
all different: some of us need a bit of background noise,
others work best in silence. Do you concentrate best early in
the morning or late at night, in the house or outside? The
key thing is to be honest and do what works for you. If the

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 Under pressure 193

learning’s important and the goal’s real, you need to give it

your full attention.
✘✘ Don’t . . . just tell yourself you’re going to stick to your plans.
Have a practical response ready for when the going gets
tough. Studies have shown the importance of being properly
prepared to resist temptations and equipped to get back on
track. If you’re too tired to revise today, what will you do? If
your friends invite you out when you’d been planning to study,
how will you respond – to carry on with your normal life but
also to keep focused on your goal?
✘✘ Don’t . . . let other people get in your way. Working with others
can be extremely effective, when you help each other to
understand, take turns to test and keep each other’s motivation
alive. But if friends or relatives are distracting you, tempting
you back to bad learning habits or getting you down with their
negative views, it’s time to go it alone.
✔✔ Do . . . make the most of all your active memory skills. Maybe
you used to revise purely by reading and re-reading – and
hoping . . . but now you know how to take complete control of
the whole learning process. Pay attention to all the details as
you form your plan of attack, use your imagination to engage
powerfully with your subject matter, and fix it into your mind
with all the care required to remember it brilliantly.

brilliant tip
However powerful your memory skills, you need to organise your
learning time effectively. Make sure you break up your revision into
manageable chunks. You’ve seen that you naturally remember best
at the start and end of every learning session, while your recall
takes a dip in the middle. More, shorter sessions will make the most

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of the primacy and recency effects, and minimise the much weaker
times in the middle. They’ll also give you more mental down-time
– when, in fact, your brain is sorting things out and laying down
long-term memories. You’ll keep your motivation strong with rest
periods and little treats, but you’ll be ready to get back to learning
– knowing that each active memory session is taking you a step
closer to your final goal.

Subject strategies
After deciding to use your memory, the strategies you set up
depend a great deal on your subject matter. Your training has
taught you to learn individual words, ideas, numbers and names;
to store them in lists and longer collections of data; to connect
them to each other flexibly; and to absorb just the right level of
detail from information texts. Pick and choose from these tech-
niques wisely – always with a clear idea about how you’ll have to
recall and use your learning in the final exam.

History
Preparing for a history test, you might have picked out some
important dates:

1215: Magna Carta signed

1773: Boston ‘tea party’
1945: UN formed
1969: First man on moon

You could easily use a number system to convert these dates into
words and pictures, then learn them as a list, in a memory story
or route, or combine them with other stores of information.

In the Major System, 1215 could be DNDL: a ‘DoNe DeaL’.

In the Word Length System, 1773 might give you: ‘a protest:
dumping tea’.

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For several dates in one century you could save time by inventing
your own code: perhaps using one particular colour for all the
images you create, linking them all to one key character or setting
them all at the same appropriate location. For twentieth-century
dates you might make all your images red; put Winston Churchull
or Marilyn Monroe or Mickey Mouse in them somewhere; or see
them all happening on the moon – since you know this was the
century of the first moon landing. You can be even more precise
if necessary, creating codes for decades or even individual years.

If you’d decided to link all your twentieth-century years to

Mickey Mouse, you might:

●● Use your personal version of the Number Rhyme System

to turn 1945 into Mickey Mouse opening the door (4) of a
hive (5) to find the UN gathered inside.
●● Use the Number Shape system to change 1969 into Mickey
Mouse sitting in a cannon (6) licking a lollipop (9) while he
waits to be fired towards the moon.

Have a go yourself with three more memorable moments from

the twentieth century:

1968: Martin Luther King Junior assassinated

1975: Microsoft founded
1985: Wreck of the Titanic discovered

brilliant tip
When you’re learning from a text document – a page from a book, say,
or the lecture notes you’ve made – use the memory journey method to
help you understand the information as well as remember it.

●● Reading carefully and choosing the key ideas will ensure that
you know the overall themes of the material, the ‘big picture’.

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●● Organising them into a route will help you to see patterns of

ideas, the order of events and the structure of arguments.
●● Designing memorable images will get you thinking even more
deeply about what it all means and spotting connections within
the material.

You’ll understand the information better, have efficient access to

the facts and ideas, be ready to use them more creatively, and
take it all with you into the exam in the most memorable form
imaginable.

Geography
Subjects like Geography often involve remembering names,
definitions and linked facts – like the capital cities of countries
around the world.

It’s the same technique you use for learning languages: creating
‘bridging’ images to connect the pairs of words. Here you might
have to play around with the names of both the country and its
capital to find vivid images to bind into a memory.

The capital of Gambia is Banjul. Maybe you imagine Gambia

as a gambling den, and every gambler inside is playing the banjo.

The capital of Jordan is Amman. You could picture a large statue

of a man (a generic man, or a particular man of your choice)
erected in every village and town square in Jordan – and, if you
need help remembering the country, maybe every person in the
crowd could look like basketball legend Michael Jordan.

Try the next three for yourself:

Country: Oman Capital: Muscat

Country: Tuvalu Capital: Funafuti
Country: Tanzania Capital: Dadoma

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Science
You can use creative memory techniques to store detailed scien-
tific facts and figures.

Here’s a collection of facts about acids. They:

●● turn litmus paper red

●● have a sour taste
●● react with metals to form salts
●● neutralise bases

Create a key image for ‘acids’ – maybe a cartoon acid barrel,

fizzing and steaming menacingly – and then turn each fact
into a visual detail that can be added on. A lit mouse (litmus)
turns bright red when it’s dropped into the barrel of acid.
Imagine using a long, lemon-coloured straw to sip the liquid
– which tastes as sour as lemon-juice. Imagine a heavy metal
band playing a concert on top of the barrel, and being turned
into pillars of salt. Their bass (base) guitars are completely
neutralised . . .

You could even start learning facts and figures from the periodic
table.

Hydrogen is the chemical element with the atomic number 1. It is

abbreviated to H. Hydrogen is the most abundant substance in the
sun.

Your main image for hydrogen could be an H-bomb, with a

glowing letter H printed on the side. Imagine poking it with a
long pencil (1 in the Number Shape system) and setting off an
explosion that’s as bright as the sun.

Helium has the atomic number 2. Abbreviated to He, it was discovered

in 1868.

Picture a helium balloon in the mouth of a swan (2) which has

been sucking the gas and giving itself a very high-pitched laugh:

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 198 improve your memory

‘he-he-he . . . !’ When another bird tries to share the gas, the swan
gives the dove a shove – because, in the Major System, dove/shove
is 1868.

Try the next two yourself.

Lithium is element number 3 and is labelled Li. It has been used as a

treatment for depression.

Beryllium is the element given the atomic number 4 and is abbre-

viated to Be. Beryllium is low in density and very stable at high
temperatures, and has been put to use in many areas of the aerospace
industry.

Maths
Your memory for numbers will give a big boost to your cal-
culation skills, but you can also remember key bits of maths
vocabulary, important rules and useful formulae.

In a scalene triangle, all the sides are different lengths.

Imagine a scaly monster, misshapen and irregular.

In a graph, the x axis is horizontal and the y axis vertical.

Imagine eggs rolling along the ground. Picture a little man

sitting on the top of the graph shouting: ‘Why am I up so
high . . . ?’

The formula for calculating the area of a circle is A 5 pr 2.

There are many different ways that you could make this infor-
mation memorable. It sounds like ‘A equals pi r squared’, so you
might imagine your friend Andy – who’s looking hairier (Area)
than ever – on one side of some weighing scales, balanced by a
perfectly square rabbit pie on the other.

Or, maybe you’d decide that the equals sign looks like a
sandwich, the symbol for Pi a picnic table and the letter r
a stool. You could visualise the penalty area on a football

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pitch and notice that someone has dropped a sandwich right

in the middle. So, you set up a table and stool – but before
you can sit down to eat, a tiny bird (2 in the Number Shape
System) lands on the stool and starts pecking at the bread.
This strange story would help you store all the specific details
you need.

Literacy
You already know how to use active memory techniques to
learn spellings and definitions, memorise character names and
important details, and absorb all the information you need from
notes, essays and text documents of every kind. But one other
useful application for your creative memory skills is learning
quotations, which can raise your writing to the next level and
gain valuable marks in literacy exams.

The trick is to create memorable images that make the key ideas
and exact words in a quotation vivid and precise.

‘A pair of star-crossed lovers’ (Romeo and Juliet)

Why not play around with the sounds and meanings of these
words to give you a pear imprinted with the faces of Romeo and
Juliet – covered in crossed-out stars? This new image could be a
useful reminder in itself, added to a list of other key quotations
or dropped into a memory journey about this particular play, the
tragedies, or Shakespeare in general.

‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below’ (Hamlet)

Picture Hamlet himself. As he performs one of his famous solilo-

quies, cartoon speech bubbles sprout wings and fly upwards,
while thought bubbles remain below on the ground – where
R.E.M. are bellowing out one of their greatest hits.

Here are three more famous lines from Shakespeare. Practise

turning them into images that tell you everything you need to
re-create them from memory.

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‘All the infections that the sun sucks up’ (The Tempest)

‘Journeys end in lovers meeting’ (Twelfth Night)

‘Cry “Havoc!” and let slip the dogs of war’ (Julius Caesar)

brilliant impact
Designing memory images about the work of a famous writer helps
you to see how they use images: how their word-pictures form patterns;
which ideas are repeated or subtly changed; where the big themes
intersect and overlap. And this highlights one of the major benefits of
this exam approach as a whole. By exploring information with logic and
imagination you don’t just learn it, you understand it better, engaging
with it on a much deeper level. By the time you take the exam, you
know your subject matter inside out but you can also remember all your
personal responses to it – and that’s an important ingredient of top-level
success.

Speaking from memory

Some tests and exams involve speaking as well as writing about
what you know. For many people, any kind of speaking from
memory is daunting, to say the least; but your memory training
has already equipped you to do it brilliantly, however great the
pressure to perform.

Did you know?

Actors learn their lines best when they focus on motivation. By
understanding the ups and downs of a character’s emotions and
the ‘shape’ their experiences take throughout the play, they can
learn their lines with remarkable speed and accuracy. Knowing

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 Under pressure 201

what a character is feeling triggers memories for what they’re

going to say next, but many actors also find it helpful when
they can match words to physical movements, and when they’re
standing in particular parts of the stage. In other words, it’s all
about emotional connection, active involvement, associations
with places . . . exactly the same things that make your memory
brilliant.

Whether your speech is to an examination committee, a

meeting at work or a roomful of wedding guests, you prepare
for it in essentially the same way as you’d revise for a written
exam. It’s about turning your material into memorable images
that you can fix firmly into your brain and rediscover whenever
you want.

You memorise the information in just as much detail as you

need. Some of it can be general ideas to discuss. Other parts
might need to be precise facts and figures or perfectly worded
quotations or jokes. But each element is stored securely, and all
of it is instantly accessible, even under pressure.

When the time comes to speak, you can wander around the
loci of your carefully prepared memory journey, like those great
orators of old, and find all your key points in perfect order –
along with plenty of extra details to bring your performance to
life.

If you can speak from memory, rather than using a script,

prompts or computer slides, there are many benefits:

Confidence
Even if you lose your notes, drop your cue-cards or have
technical problems with your laptop, you know you’ll be fine.
Everything you want to say has been set up securely in your

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brain. You know exactly what every vivid image represents and
how all the ideas flow together. You can even choose loca-
tions for your memory journeys that give you extra confidence
because they’re places where you feel happy and calm.

Performance
When you feel confident, you look confident – and your audience
can have confidence in what you’ve got to say. Speaking from
memory lets you maintain eye contact. You can now use your
hands to emphasise your words rather than hold your notes or
operate the computer, and your whole demeanour is different:
relaxed and engaged with the audience, rather than focused on
scripts and supports or distracted by technology.

Flexibility
You’re no longer bound to your written notes or pile of prompt-
cards, so you can speak for longer or shorter than necessary,
change the order of your ideas and respond flexibly to any ques-
tions or feedback you get. The information has been set up in
your brain to be easily accessible from any point. You’ll probably
hold back some of the details so that you have extra information
for your responses at the end – and you’ll know exactly where to
go in your brain to get it.

Impact
Having the confidence to speak from memory immediately
makes you more memorable. In fact your whole approach to
learning helps your audience, because you give them informa-
tion that’s been organised into key points and arranged in a
logical way: designed to suit your memory, and theirs. On top
of that, many other aspects of your training will help you to
communicate in ways that make your material stick in people’s
minds.

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 Under pressure 203

brilliant tip
To make your messages memorable:

●● Make the most of the primacy and recency effects. The start
and end of your talk are the bits your audience will remember
most easily, so use those times to present the most important
ideas. You’ll have to work harder to make the rest of your
material memorable. Including images, anecdotes and stories
will help to keep people interested – and learning – all the way
through.
●● Engage your audience’s attention as early as possible. They
need to know that you’re an entertaining and interesting
speaker and that the things you have to say are going to be
important. Get them asking questions in their heads from the
start, setting themselves up to learn. The more passionate
you are and the more you focus on the benefits of what
you’re saying, the more likely they’ll be to put in the effort to
remember it.
●● Help people to connect personally with your ideas. What’s in it
for them as individuals to remember what you’re saying? Appeal
to their senses and emotions whenever you can, personalising
the material and encouraging them to imagine themselves into
the scenarios you describe. Get them using their brains: set
them puzzles, ask for their opinions, stop them just listening
and get them thinking and remembering.

Job interviews
The same techniques will also serve you well in job interviews.
They’re really just another kind of presenting from memory;
and, more than ever, you need to know your stuff securely and
flexibly, with all your prepared answers, ideas, facts and figures

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 204 improve your memory

stored in a way that lets you access them instantly. You also
need to be remembered for all the right reasons – so apply the
tips above whenever your interviewers give you the chance.
And . . .

brilliant tip
Just like the paper CV that you update from time to time, create
a memory journey to hold all the information you need at your
fingertips in an interview – and keep improving it. Your driveway
might hold images about your education: school names, exam
dates, qualifications earned. Perhaps the front door of your house
is the locus for your ‘other learning’, including reminders about
evening classes, training courses and relevant aspects of your
personal development. Other zones around the journey could
hold your well-rehearsed answers to typical questions; key selling-
points about you; even the questions you’ve written to put to
your interviewers at the end. Whenever you return to this memory
storehouse, you’ll be able to add, remove or change details,
exaggerate certain ideas (perhaps as a result of feedback from
previous interviews) and make sure it provides you with an up-to-
date, ‘artificial’ memory of these very real things that you want to
say. Even under intense pressure you’ll never again be stuck for
an answer. You’ll remember to say the right things, and the best
things.

Emergency memory
This chapter has focused mostly on times of planned memory
pressure. Your brain training so far should also have prepared
you to deal with everyday eventualities, setting you up to
make quick decisions and form instant strategies about how to
learn unexpected information. After mastering your short-term

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 Under pressure 205

memory, you’ve proved how quickly you can form memorable

images, link them into scenes and stories, and arrange them
around strong frameworks in your mind. And the more memory
buildings and journeys you design, the more confident you’ll
feel about taking control of information whenever and wherever
it comes your way.

But what about those times when the pressure comes from
forgetting: mislaying something valuable, getting lost on holiday,
losing track of a vital experience, answer, name, number,
idea . . . ? Sometimes, the more important a memory is at that
moment, the faster it seems to escape – however hard you try
to chase it down. In fact, pursuing it just pushes it further out
of reach.

When you’re panicking about a memory, you really do need to

have a clear recovery strategy. And to round off this chapter,
here’s some practical advice gained from the emergency services
themselves.

To activate the memories of eye-witnesses, often people who’ve

been involved in moments of high emotion and intense pres-
sure, the police have found four memory techniques to be
particularly powerful. Maybe they’ll help you, the next time
you’re straining your brain to deliver the goods: mid-exam,
presentation, interview – or struggling with a memory challenge
that’s come at you from nowhere. Suddenly, remembering is
essential, the pressure’s really on, but the key memory just
won’t come. So . . .

Re-create the conditions

It can help to go back to the scene of a crime (or the place
you first had that brilliant idea or last saw your purse), either
physically or in your imagination. Focus on the weather, the tem-
perature of the room, the quality of the light. What about your
emotional conditions: exactly how were you feeling at the time?

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 206 improve your memory

Pick one detail

Instead of struggling to remember everything, choose one thing
to focus on: one detail that might just make you think of another,
which could trigger a memory . . . that leads your brain on through
a series of associations . . . until eventually you get to your target.

See it sideways
If you’re going nowhere trying to picture a memory from one
direction (probably your own perspective), try imagining it from
someone else’s point of view. What would the car crash, revision
session, instant of inspiration – or the moment you put your
glasses down – have looked like from above, far away or close up,
or through a completely different pair of eyes?

Play it backwards
You’ve seen how good your memory is at following chains of
events, stories, journeys – so trust in your ability to retrace your
mental steps. Picture the robbers running out of the bank, and
think: what happened just before that? And before that? Or visu-
alise yourself getting out of your car, in the parking place that
you now can’t find again . . . and think about the moment before
that, sitting in the car, and before that, pulling into the parking
bay, and . . . see if your reverse journey will take you right back
to the missing memory.

And when all else fails, give up – at least for a while. Do some-
thing to take your mind off the memory-chase. Try a different
question in the exam. Ask your interviewer to come back to that
subject later. Stop for a coffee, get on with the washing up . . . or,
better still, go off to the place of relaxation you designed at the
start of this chapter. Often, when your mind is allowed space and
time just to do its own thing, it works its own brand of memory
magic – and the particular ‘beautiful prize’ that you feared was
lost for ever . . . comes back.

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 Under pressure 207

brilliant recap
●● To prepare for pressure, set up a zone of calm relaxation in
your imagination.
●● Learn to make all your material interesting, and start giving it
your full attention.
●● Choose an appropriate memory strategy for every exam subject
you study.
●● Performing from memory makes you more confident, impressive
and memorable.
●● Police techniques can be the key to recapturing vital memories
under pressure.

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M09_HANC3292_01_SE_C09.indd 208 28/10/14 10:38 am
 CHAPTER 10

Self-
improvement
We all have our time machines.
Some take us back, they’re called
memories. Some take us forward,
they’re called dreams.

Jeremy Irons

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M10_HANC3292_01_SE_C10.indd 210 28/10/14 10:40 am
 In this chapter you will learn:
●● the importance of adopting the right attitude to memory,
now and in the future
●● why food and drink can have such an impact on your brain
●● what to do, and not do, if your lifestyle is going to support
your memory
●● how improving your memory can improve your life – in
some surprising ways
●● strategies for putting your brilliant memory into action
today

You’ve learnt how to have a brilliant memory. Now you need

to keep it that way. This chapter is about the practical steps
that will set you up for long-term success. Some are to do with
your attitude, the way you approach getting older, coping with
change, adapting your memory skills to new challenges. Others
involve the very physical effects of things like diet, exercise and
sleep: their immediate impact, and the role they’ll play in all your
learning to come.

It’s a two-way street. Look after your memory and it will look
after you. Put it to use, do everything you can to keep it healthy,
and you’ll discover even more benefits of remembering bril-
liantly. Memory skills themselves will support your success in
all your current activities, challenging you to go further than
ever before; but they’ll also give you some very useful new

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tools, allowing you to tackle problem memories, conquer fears

and phobias, reprogram habits of thinking and behaviour, and
rehearse a whole new approach to life.

Your memory can change you on so many levels: in the past,

present and future. The way you think and feel about your
memory has a great deal to do with how you think and feel, full
stop.

Getting older
There are lots of myths around ageing and memory, most of
them variations on a theme of inevitable mental decline. Getting
older means losing your mind – at key points along life’s journey,
and in an ongoing process of deterioration; or so most people
seem to think . . .

What’s definitely true is that your memory changes throughout

your lifetime. Children learn differently from adults. A girl of
nine and an old man of ninety-nine certainly don’t experience
memory in the same way, and they don’t have the same things
happening in their heads. And there are other key times of
change along the way. Teenagers (or, more accurately, parents of
teenagers) often report a lack of attention and poor recall; and
for women, pregnancy and the menopause seem to coincide with
a drop in memory power. So we associate particular stages in life
with forgetfulness, as well as experiencing the gradual ageing of
the brain. Systems slow down, structures deteriorate; and yet . . .
somehow, the brain does amazing things. Teenagers pass their
exams. Mothers-to-be multi-task. Menopausal women carry on
with high-powered careers. Old age pensioners take degrees and
learn new skills and keep enjoying their brilliant memories.

Your memory is always changing, but your brain has been

coping with it since the womb. It has a remarkable ability to
adapt and thrive.

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 Self-improvement 213

Did you know?

Research into the impact of hormones on memory – including
a recent study into so-called ‘pregnancy brain’ – suggests that
the process may be much less clear cut than we thought. The
forgetfulness many women experience could be more to do with
shifts in emotion and attention than the fault of the hormones
themselves. Whatever stage in life you’re at, if hormones – or any
other factor – are making you distracted, tired, worried, confused . . .
is it really any surprise if your memory pays the price?

Many of the assumptions we make about older brains are also

untrue. Ageing presents all our brains with a number of challenges,
from without and within, but experiences vary, different aspects of
memory age at different rates and in different ways, and the changes
that do happen aren’t always for the worse. In fact, some types of
remembering could turn out to be better at seventy than when you
were seven. Semantic memory, for example, especially your recall
of words and their definitions, often seems to improve with age. And
remember that packed lost-property box in your primary school!

Did you know?

Although neurons are being lost all the time, the rate of decline
is minor after the age of about twenty. A more significant
change involves the connections between neurons. Scientists
have estimated that every ten years we experience a 10 per cent
reduction in the length of our axons, the tiny projections that
conduct electrical impulses from one brain cell to another. But
while ageing attacks connective thinking, recent research into the
‘plasticity’ of the brain suggests that some of its most important
mechanisms can still be strengthened if they’re used well.

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 214 improve your memory

So it’s certainly not as simple as saying that your memory gets

worse as you get older. Memory changes – and you need to learn
to change with it.

Mark Twain said: ‘Age is an issue of mind over matter. If

you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.’

Attitude
The important thing is to have the right attitude to your
changing brain. At different times of life, some aspects of
memory may well become more of a challenge, but there’s plenty
you can do to keep your brain in shape and continue to enjoy
its power. Don’t believe all the negative things you might have
read or heard. Remember: brilliant memory is something you
do, rather than something you own. Teenagers often struggle
to remember – but how much is that down to general anxiety,
changing priorities, poor diet, lack of sleep . . . ? You need to keep
doing the right things, but also adapt to circumstances as they
change. Keep an open mind, be honest about your experiences,
and take every opportunity to get more out of your memory,
whatever point in life you’re at.

The effects of age on memory are complex. If your short-term

memory is feeling weaker, but distant recollections still seem
strong, how much is that simply down to practice: getting out of
practice at quick-fire recall as the demands of life are reduced,
and spending more time rehearsing precious memories of the
past? Your overall mental and physical health has a huge impact
on your memory, so anything stopping you feeling 100 per cent
will inevitably take its toll. And remember the importance of
expectation, connection, interest, attention . . . ? If you’re less
motivated to remember and do fewer of the things that make
your learning work, is it any wonder if your memory seems to
be giving up?

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brilliant definition
Senile dementia

This term refers to mental decline that’s out of line with normal
ageing. ‘Senile’ is really just ‘old’, but the word has come to refer
to mental impairment, distracting us from the fact that ageing and
dementia are not the same thing. Many different things can cause
memory loss and mental disruption. Some can be reversed, while
for others there is, as yet, no cure; but the crucial thing to realise
is that dementia is not inevitable. Alzheimer’s disease may affect
around half a million people in the UK alone – yet many more
over-65s are simply experiencing natural changes that need to be
understood, but can definitely be coped with.

As you go through life, you need to be honest. Are you doing

everything you can to make your memory work? Are there
aspects of your lifestyle that might be having a negative impact
on your brain? Think carefully about your day-to-day life and
ask yourself:

●● How much do you have to remember these days: more or

less than before?
●● What is the impact of forgetting? Does it matter more or less
now?
●● When your memory does let you down, how do you
respond? Do you ignore it, use it to motivate you,
get depressed about it, use it as evidence of a bigger
problem . . . ?

When life changes, your experiences of memory are bound

to change too. Any problems may lie more with the demands
placed on your brain – and the ways you try to tackle them –
than with the strength of your memory itself. But if you believe

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 216 improve your memory

the myths and assume you’re going to forget, you’ll put in less
effort and notice all the mistakes you make, and failure will
become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

brilliant tip
As your memory changes and particular tasks become harder,
be strategic. Throughout this book you’ve learnt ‘artificial’ ways
of boosting your natural memory. Things you used to manage
effortlessly may now need a bit more support – but that’s the whole
point. You’ve got all the strategies you need to make any learning
challenge easier, so use them. Make the most of all the tried-and-
tested techniques to bolster particular skills, fill in any gaps, and
help yourself to stay confident about your memory for as long as
you can.

You need to stay alert to any changes, and you must talk to your
doctor if you notice particular problems. Maybe there’s another
health issue affecting your memory? Are you taking medication
that could be having side-effects on your thinking? But check
too that you’re doing the best for your brain: providing it with
high expectations and a positive approach, making the most of
all the active, engaged learning skills you’ve been trained to use,
and adapting your lifestyle – at every stage of life – to support
your brilliant memory.

Physical health
It was the Roman writer Juvenal who came up with the famous
phrase mens sana in corpore sano: a healthy mind in a healthy
body. For a very long time we’ve known that physical and
mental health are closely connected, but it’s only in recent
years that scientists have begun investigating exactly what that

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means – looking at specific parts of our diet, for example, to

see how the choices we make affect the way our brains form
and develop.

Diet
This is another of the many complex aspects of memory. What
you eat helps to build your brain, and affects how it operates
and whether it keeps working well. But your diet also contributes
to your overall wellbeing, which also has a big impact on your
ability to think and learn.

The number-one piece of advice is to eat a wide range of nutri-

tious foods in a balanced diet. It’s vital to every aspect of your
health and wellbeing, which has such a key role to play in mental
fitness; but it also means that your brain is getting all the key
nutrients it needs to operate at its very best.

Did you know?

It’s good to be a fathead. Fats play a number of crucial roles
in your brain: in energy reserves, insulation and the conductive
connections between cells. They set up the systems for making
neurotransmitters, then help to synthesise the neurotransmitters
themselves: constructing the systems that let you think and learn,
then keeping them working well in the long term.

brilliant definition
Neurotransmitters

These are chemical ‘messengers’ that let neurons communicate with

each other. They’re released from stores at the ends of brain cells,
then cross the synapses – the spaces between neurons – and attach

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to receptors on the branches of next-door nerve cells, signalling

them to fire and send out their electrical impulses to other cells.
They’re essential to the connective processes of memory that you’ve
learnt to use so well.

To maintain good brain function it’s important to keep the fats

in your diet in balance: in particular, two essential fatty acids,
Omega-3 and Omega-6. Most people in the West consume too
much Omega-6, mostly in the form of vegetable oils, and not
enough Omega-3 – for which you need to be eating coldwater
fish or flaxseed. It can be a significant deficit. Omega-3 fatty
acids have wide-ranging benefits for thinking and learning,
boosting the brain’s speed and connectivity – and also helping
to remove some of the emotional barriers to memory like anxiety
and anger. Your grandmother was right when she said fish was
‘brain food’!

Make sure your diet provides your brain with everything it needs
to be brilliant. Here’s a selection of some of the most important
substances to include, and ideas about where to get them.

Amino acids
Your body takes some specific amino acids from the food you
eat and turns them into neurotransmitters, each one with a dif-
ferent function. L-Glutamine, for example, in peas, avocado, eggs
and peaches, is made into the neurotransmitter GABA, which
helps you to stay calm – very important for remembering well.
L-Tryptophan, from almonds, milk, soybeans and turkey, helps
to make serotonin, which in turn can lift your mood and beat
depression, removing more potential barriers to memory.

Choline
Another very important neurotransmitter is acetylcholine. It
seems to play a key role in making and retrieving memories;

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 Self-improvement 219

but, as we get older, we produce less, which could be one reason

why memory starts to feel harder – and, in severe cases, when
actual dementia can set in. It’s important to get enough choline
in your diet – found in egg yolks, soybeans, eggs and fish – which
is converted into acetylcholine in the brain, with the help of . . .

Pantothenic acid
You can get this, also known as vitamin B5, from beans, fish and
whole grains. It also helps to synthesise the red blood cells that
carry oxygen to your brain.

The other B vitamins

As well as being vital for overall health, B-complex vitamins are
particularly important for the brain. For example:

●● B1, found in beans and grains, helps you to concentrate.

●● B3, also called niacin, found in liver and milk, is important
for strong nerve impulses.
●● B6, obtained readily from cauliflower, eggs, cod,
tuna, bananas, nuts . . . supports the production of key
neurotransmitters. Too little B6 and you’ll feel too irritable
and tired to learn.
●● B9 is also known as folic acid. It helps oxygen to get
to the brain and boosts the efficiency of its chemical
communications. Folic acid is present in small amounts in
many foods, including oranges, broccoli, peas, chickpeas and
brown rice, but cooking processes can reduce its effectiveness.
●● B12, in cheese, eggs, fish and meat, is involved in making
the myelin sheaths that coat your neurons, protecting them
and allowing them to conduct electrical impulses.

More vital vitamins

Foods rich in the antioxidant vitamins A, C and E have been
shown to boost the memory. These chemicals are found in richly
coloured fruits and vegetables: bananas, oranges, red peppers,

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 220 improve your memory

spinach. They help to mop up substances called free radicals

which can cause cell damage in the brain.

Vitamin A helps to shield brain cell membranes from injury. You

can get it from egg yolks, fish and green, leafy vegetables.

Vitamin C is important for making neurotransmitters, and is

found in fruit like oranges and kiwi-fruit, and vegetables like
broccoli and cauliflower.

Vitamin E protects your fatty cell membranes and keeps neurons

working well. Dietary sources include eggs, nuts, milk, olive oil
and sunflower seeds.

Memory minerals
Iron plays a key role in maintaining good concentration. It’s
found in red meat, fish, pulses and green vegetables.

Calcium, found in dairy products, leafy green vegetables and

tofu, has an important role to play in concentration and learning,
helping messages to pass between neurons.

Zinc, from meat, fish, wholegrain bread and soybeans, seems to

regulate communications between nerve cells.

Supplementing your success

All of the vitamins and minerals listed above can be found in a
balanced and varied diet, but some people like to make sure by
taking supplements.

brilliant tip
It’s always worth studying the labels to see exactly what you’re
getting and in what sort of quantities – and finding out which
nutrients need to be combined to get the most out of them: for
example, vitamin C can help your body absorb iron.

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 Self-improvement 221

Other supplements have come to be known for their possible

memory-enhancing properties.

Ginkgo biloba
For 5000 years the leaves of the ginkgo tree from China, one of
the oldest living species, have been used to boost brain function
– in particular, memory. The ginkgo is believed to contain com-
pounds that cause small blood vessels – capillaries – to dilate,
improving the circulation of blood in the brain.

Ginseng
Another Chinese herb, ginseng, is thought to give the adrenal
glands a boost, reducing stress and decreasing the damage done
by free radicals.

Brain fuel
Make sure you supply your body and brain with enough energy
– and the right sort of energy – to keep working brilliantly.

Don’t skip breakfast. The energy you consume first thing in the
morning is vital for keeping your brain fuelled throughout the
day. Tests with children have shown a significantly higher level
of mental performance by those who ate breakfast, compared to
those who started the day on empty. Slow-release carbohydrates
had the greatest effect on slowing down mental decline during
the morning.

Be careful with sugar. A chocolate bar or sugary drink can

give your brain a temporary lift, and a surge in instant energy
may feel like exactly what you need to achieve a particular
task. But the sudden rush of sugar into your blood stream and
up to your brain can destroy your concentration and disrupt
your thinking, and the high is often followed by an even more
noticeable low: a crash in mental and physical energy that can
severely hamper your abilities to do anything. The trick is to
break the cycle of peaks and troughs. In the long run, eating

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 222 improve your memory

slow-release energy foods – that bowl of porridge at breakfast,

those wholegrain sandwiches for lunch – will keep your energy
levels stable, helping you to maintain mental focus and fitness,
and keeping your brain working at its best. The lower a food’s
score on the Glycemic Index (GI), the more sustainable its
energy is.

Ones to watch
The following substances can have a negative impact on your
memory and need to be treated with caution – pleasurable
though they may be. Of course it’s important to enjoy your food
and drink, and many people’s lives would be made much worse
if they ruled these things out altogether; so the best advice is
to be vigilant about any negative effects on your memory, and
balance them accordingly.

Salt
As well as being associated with heart disease and raised blood
pressure, consuming excessive amounts of salt means that your
body depletes itself of potassium. Low potassium can increase
anxiety, and anxiety lowers your ability to concentrate – which
can cause your short-term memory to falter.

Caffeine
It may stimulate attention and promote concentration, but
caffeine can have some less helpful effects on important neuro­
transmitters. It lowers adenosine, which is there to help you
calm down and sleep, and can also increase the levels of
norepinephrine – adrenaline – ramping up your stress.

Alcohol
Alcohol changes your brain’s chemistry very quickly. Its effects –
short and long term – are complex, ranging from relaxation and
mood lifting at one end of the scale to long-term brain damage
at the other. Experience will probably tell you that alcohol can

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disable your memory in many ways: dehydrating your whole

system, increasing depression, lowering motivation, hampering
decision making, alertness, concentration . . . A few drinks may
help you relax enough to be creative and funny and confident
enough to do some good things with your memory skills, but it’s
a hard balance to strike.

Did you know?

Around three-quarters of your brain is water. Dehydration can
have a rapid and powerful effect on thinking and memory, so it
makes sense to keep your brain properly topped up. Sipping water
throughout the day will help you to avoid headaches, fend off
drowsiness and maintain your concentration.

Speeding up, slowing down

To be mentally active it helps to be physically active – as well as
to relax and rest. You’ll find it easier to use your memory bril-
liantly if you get plenty of aerobic exercise, but also know how
to wind things down – and leave yourself enough time to get a
good night’s sleep!

Exercise
Exercise improves your heart’s ability to pump oxygen to the
brain. It can also release chemicals that make you feel good:
happy, confident and motivated to do everything well. High-
energy sports may be right for you, but don’t worry if you prefer
something a bit more laid back. New research indicates that
walking six to nine miles every week can have a positive effect
on the health of your brain. And when you walk you gently
stimulate all your key organs, improve your circulation, and give
yourself a chance to relax, talk and think.

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 224 improve your memory

Did you know?

Organs other than the brain can have an impact on the way you
think and learn. If your thyroid gland isn’t working properly, for
example, the resulting anxiety and lethargy can severely hamper
memory. And problems with the pancreas can lead to imbalances of
glucose – the only fuel that the brain can use.

And after all that healthy exercise . . . make sure you know how to
rest. Mental down-time is vital to long-term brain health, but it
can be a challenge to switch off, especially now that you’re using
your memory skills so actively during the day.

Relaxation

brilliant tip
Instead of trying to relax – which can have the opposite effect,
and actually focus your mind on its worries – get into the habit
of ‘replacing’ your stressful thoughts. The trick is to use some
reverse psychology. Try not to think about your left foot. When you
set yourself a challenge like this, it’s very difficult to think about
anything other than your left foot, taking your focus away from the
thoughts that were causing you stress. And you can make the most
of your memory skills here. Since you’ve trained your imagination
to picture things in vivid detail, why not tell yourself not to think
about . . . sitting in a deckchair on a beautiful summer day . . . the
smell of your new baby’s skin . . . what it would be like to live on the
moon . . . You might be surprised at just how easy it is to tempt your
brain into rich, immersive thinking – about things that are pleasant,
moving, interesting, funny, exciting, calm . . . anything other than
the stressful ideas that were getting in the way of your memory.

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Sleep
Good sleep is essential to physical wellbeing and mental fitness,
so do everything you can to get enough. There’s some fasci-
nating research being done about the exact role of sleep in
memory making. It seems that the connections between neurons
can be remodelled during sleep, which may explain why babies
and young children – with their wealth of new connections
– need much more sleep than older people, whose mental con-
nectivity has been reduced. And experiments are showing just
how important sleep is in consolidating learning – particularly
for skills and procedures. It also seems that sleep has an impor-
tant job to do protecting new memories from being disrupted by
‘interfering’ information.

To remember well you need to feel your best – but the good news
is that your memory skills can actually help you improve your
mood. In general, using your brain actively, really engaging with
every challenge and using interesting pictures and funny stories,
should help you to feel very positive about your approach to life;
but there are also some specific strategies to get more back from
your memory. Earlier you learnt how to boost your relaxation
and sense of wellbeing by creating a wonderful zone of calm;
and now you might like to try some other techniques for letting
memory look after you.

Manipulating memories
We know that even our strongest memories are fluid and
shifting, a bit different every time we return to them, and liable
to end up quite changed from their original form. And yet . . .
certain memories, very often the ones that bring us problems
and pain, can seem stubbornly fixed. These memories tend to
be well rehearsed and clearly structured. Every time you think
about that hurtful, frightening or embarrassing moment, you see
the same mental movie playing out, and it brings back the same

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negative feelings. So, why not use your trained brain to take back
some control? You’ve proved that you can imagine weird and
wonderful things and create powerful artificial memories, so why
not use the same skills to reshape some of your real ones?

Here are some of the most important techniques:

Experiment with angles

Does it make things any easier if you see the events from a
different point of view – maybe through a more sympathetic
pair of eyes? What about watching from far away, putting your
small embarrassment into global perspective, or zooming in for
a close-up, helping you to understand and accept exactly why
something went wrong?

Try resizing key details

You may always have remembered a threatening moment as
though you were very small, so try raising yourself up above all
the dangers and making all the negative bits of a memory as
physically small as possible. On the other hand, it might help
more to reduce your role in the scene: to shrink yourself to a size
where no one can get to you – or even see you.

See what else makes a difference

You can run your film backwards to understand more about the
causes and effects involved. Play around with the speed, slowing
down the positive parts and skipping over anything you want to
forget. See what happens when you change the volume settings
on your memory, maybe giving yourself a loud, confident voice,
or decreasing the noise from others. You’ll have to see how it
works for you and the particular experiences you’ve stored, but
this can be an extremely powerful benefit of memory training:
reshaping real memories, then rehearsing the new versions until
they’re the ones that first come to mind.

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brilliant impact
You can use memory skills to start conquering your phobias. In a calm
and safe environment, let your imagination lead you to the source of your
fears. Can you pinpoint the moment a particular phobia was created?
Think about recent times when your phobia has kicked in. When you’ve
found yourself in your nightmare situation – faced by a spider, trapped in
a too-small space – have certain memories always come to mind, fuelling
your negative response now? See if the ‘memory manipulation’ technique
works even for memories as firmly fixed and well practised as these. What
happens when you change your viewpoint, resize the dangers, alter all the
physical sensations and begin imagining different emotional responses?
Can you start to make new versions of difficult memories – sufficiently well
imagined to change some of your responses and behaviours now?

Did you know?

The only fears we’re born with are falling and loud noises. Every
other kind of fear or phobia needs to be learnt, rehearsed and
remembered.

In the zone
Like the top sports stars who train in their imagination, create
memories of success before they’ve even happened. Use your
honed visualisation skills to see yourself achieving the perform-
ance you want: not just the physical details other people will see,
but also the emotional experience that only you will feel. Use
all your senses to immerse yourself in this future moment. See
yourself from different angles. Imagine the things you’ll be able
to hear, smell, touch and taste. Go through the event in your
mind, focus on the key details that will bring about your success,

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 228 improve your memory

imagine how you’ll cope with any problems, and do everything

you can to imagine the feelings of achievement you’re deter-
mined to enjoy for real.

Return to this ‘memory’ several times before the real event: the
sports meeting, the work presentation, the driving test – whatever
you’ve prepared for in your imagination. Establish it as a memory
that you can refer to, draw on it for motivation, and start to expect
success – now that you can ‘remember’ exactly what it’s like.

brilliant tip
When things go well in real life – when you do find yourself ‘in the
zone’, at the top of your game – store those memories as powerfully
as you can. As soon as possible after the event, explore all the
senses and emotions that will fix this moment in your memory.
Return to it often, celebrate your success, find motivation here when
other challenges seem hard – and use the memory to repeat this
particular moment of brilliance again and again.

Use it or lose it
With the right attitude adopted, a supportive lifestyle in place
and these new self-improvement strategies at your disposal, you
have everything you need to do the most important thing of all:
use your memory brilliantly. You’ve trained your brain to tackle
every kind of learning challenge in the most effective way, and
you’ve experimented with examples taken from many areas of
life. But now it’s about your life, and doing it all for real.

The old you

Remind yourself about how you used to think about memory.
Look back at Chapter 1 and revisit the responses you gave: about

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your attitudes to memory, the potential barriers and challenges

to making yours any better, and the aspects of it that you most
wanted to improve. You imagined what life might be like if you
could do the things you wanted to, and feel the way you wanted
to about your memory. Now it’s time to answer all those ques-
tions again – and see just how far you’ve come.

And then . . .

New targets
Spend a few minutes looking back through the second half of the
book, reminding yourself of all the practical applications for your
new memory skills – made possible by the way you feel about
your memory now. Make some decisions about the ones you’re
going to try straight away; those that you’ll come to in time; and
any that you’ll have on standby, just in case they’re needed. Why
not put your money where your mouth is and memorise your lists,
turning ideas like ‘learning names’, ‘remembering PINs’ and
‘conquering fears’ into images to weave into a story or arrange
around a route. Keep coming back to these lists, ticking off the
techniques you’ve started to use, remembering the ones you
still need to try – and being ready to activate the strategies on
standby.

Reminder rooms
To get into the habit of using your memory skills every day, and
to push yourself to ‘remember to remember’. . . build yourself
a reminder room. It will save you huge amounts of time and a
great deal of frustration – and get you using your memory bril-
liantly, helping to keep it fit and well.

Choose a real place that you pass by at least a couple of times

every day – ideally in the morning and again at night – and
create a virtual version of it in your imagination. It might be the
cupboard on the landing, a shop on the way to work or a meeting

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 230 improve your memory

room that you walk past to get to and from your office. Make
sure it’s big enough for you to stand in (and, shortly, to store
things in) but not so big that you can’t see it all at once. You need
to be able to look into this room whenever you want and see
exactly what you’ve left there. So pick somewhere you can visu-
alise clearly, and spend a few moments fixing it in your mind,
using all your senses to make this room or space vivid and real.

To remember the things you have to do, create trigger images

and position them carefully in your reminder room – doing
everything necessary to make the memories stick.

●● If you need to remember to walk the dog, imagine a

diamond-encrusted collar and lead handing from a coat-
hanger in your landing cupboard.
●● To remember to go to the florist’s, cover the counter of the
newsagent’s shop with beautiful flowers.
●● When you simply can’t forget to phone your Mum on her
birthday, picture a huge oil-painting of her hanging over the
meeting room table.

Whenever you flash back to the reminder room in your mind,

you’ll be able to find all the clues you’ve left for yourself – all
fixed there in the most memorable form imaginable: colourful,
detailed, exaggerated, funny, strange . . . Clear connections with
you, especially through your feelings (envy at the expensive
collar, enjoyment of the sweet-smelling flowers, surprise at
seeing your Mum . . .), will strengthen the memories and speed
up the recall, and you’ll soon see how easy it is to store many
different reminders in your chosen room.

Crucially, you’ll be reminded to check your memory room

every time you pass the version of it in the real world: the real
cupboard, shop, meeting room. Several times a day you’ll be
prompted to return to your private storehouse and find the
images that tell you exactly what you need to do.

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brilliant tip
You can add extra image clues for any key details that need to
be learnt. Use any other memory systems to give you powerful
pictures that will trigger your mind – like the swan that’s landed
on your Mum’s portrait, reminding you to call her at 2 o’clock, or
the gerbils crawling through piles of cornflour in the newsagent’s,
jogging your memory about the flowers you need to buy: gerbera
and cornflowers.

When a job’s done, simply imagine its picture being removed

from the room: unhooked, cleaned up, painted over . . . Your
brain is remarkably efficient, and you’ll soon get used to adding
and removing reminders whenever you want. Push yourself to
create the most memorable images, following all seven memory-
making steps and drawing from as many different memory
systems as you can. You’ll keep the strategies fresh and your
memory skills in great shape, and do your bit to maintain the
speed, agility and connective brilliance of your brain.

Good memories
It’s important to enjoy memory for memory’s sake. Make time
to revisit moments from the past that bring you joy – using
them to improve your mood and overall sense of wellbeing as
well as to keep exercising all your key memory skills.

Remember the police techniques explained in the previous

chapter? This is a great opportunity to put them to use again
and to go deeper than ever before into some of your happiest
memories.

●● Bring all your senses and emotions into play as you

re-create all the original conditions.

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 232 improve your memory

●● Pick a key detail as your starting-point and see where the

associations take you.
●● Imagine studying the scene from different points of view.
●● Go backwards through a treasured memory, observing the
chain of cause and effect in reverse and enjoying it in a new
way – from finish to start!

Even memories you’ve rehearsed regularly can be reinvigor-

ated in this way. Whether you’re actually uncovering more real
detail, or adding more through the memory process, is up to
you to decide. It’s an endlessly fascinating exercise to explore
your past in this way, and it can give a great boost to your mood
and outlook as you revisit the times when you were happiest,
re-creating the sensations and feelings in rich and realistic detail.
Maybe this amazing ability to travel in time will help you to
forgive your memory for the times when, occasionally, it lets you
down . . .

Chase your dreams

Get into the habit of grabbing on to dream memories as soon
as you wake up, then see how long you can keep hold of them.
Dreams can be elusive: you know you know what happened in
your imagination overnight, but stretching to reach the details
seems to push them further away; and the memory traces
become fainter after just a few minutes. It’s a great way to flex
your memory muscles, and it shows you how it feels to catch the
most slippery sorts of information.

brilliant tip
Use your dreams to remind yourself just how amazing your
imagination can be. Like memory, dreaming changes over your
lifetime, is affected by your health and mood, but remains a

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 Self-improvement 233

constant symbol of your incredible, two-sided brain – which is

always ready to surprise you with what it can do. So, as you recall
key images and events from your dreams, celebrate your mind’s
ability to conjure up such vivid, oddly logical and richly imaginative
ideas. You might even be able to use some of them in your next
memory story . . .

brilliant recap
●● Aspects of memory change with age, but many of the effects
can be managed.
●● Feed your brain with a balanced diet, supplementing some
things, avoiding others.
●● Healthy exercise, relaxation and sleep will support your
memory skills in the long term.
●● You can reshape difficult memories, and use memory to
rehearse future success.
●● The most important thing you can do for your memory is start
using it well, now.

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M10_HANC3292_01_SE_C10.indd 234 28/10/14 10:40 am
 Conclusion

Many people talk flippantly about having a ‘good’ or, more often,
a ‘bad’ memory – as if it’s a single thing, something very straight-
forward, a possession that you might be lucky enough to have
– or not. But when you start thinking about memory, examining
your own experiences, reading the research and experimenting
with some new ideas, you realise that memory is anything but
clear cut. It can’t be as simple as saying yours is ‘good’ or ‘bad’
because it involves a variety of systems, a complex set of skills, a
range of changing experiences. It’s anything but straightforward
– which means it can be confusing and frustrating, and we might
be keen to dismiss it as something out of our control; but, really,
this is the best news of all.

It means that you shouldn’t be expecting perfection all the

time. It means you can’t give up on it completely because one
bit is letting you down. And it means that you needn’t worry
about defining your abilities because the next challenge is
always around the corner, there are many aspects of memory
you haven’t even tried yet – and, however you feel about your
memory now, there are always things you can do to improve.

Perhaps we’ve become too reliant on all the electronic memories

at our disposal, and stopped noticing just how phenomenally
our own brains perform, every minute of every day. Far back in
history, people used to celebrate human memory and search for
ways to get the most out of it. Now, potentially, we’ve got the

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 236 improve your memory

best of both worlds. If we have the confidence, the high aspira-

tions and all the thinking skills required, the memories in our
heads can be combined with the gadgets all around us to achieve
a whole new level of brilliance.

So keep using your computer, your personal digital assistant

– and especially your mobile phone, with all its timesaving func-
tions and clever applications and the whole world of information
contained in the SIM. But don’t forget what that acronym
means – ‘Subscriber Identity Module’ – because it’s a perfect
definition of memory itself.

Memory is very much about identity: who you are, how you feel,
what you can achieve. As a subscriber you access its benefits,
but you also have to know how to use it. The memory module
is your brain, and its complexities are responsible for the chal-
lenges as well as the infinite possibilities revealed in this book.

When you understand what it means, experience its benefits and

find realistic ways to put it to use, your memory, your Subscriber
Identity Module, really can change your life.

So start using your whole brain today. Strengthen all your

thinking skills, learn the tricks and techniques that will let you
remember anything – and look after your memory, so that it will
keep looking after you.

By combining ancient techniques with the latest memory aids

and using them in your everyday life, you’ll see why Mnemosyne,
the goddess of memory, was made Mother of the Muses: why
memory really is the most important gift of all.

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 Further reading

Books
The Art of Memory (1992) by Frances A. Yates, Pimlico
The classic text on the history of memory techniques.

The Complete Guide to Memory Mastery (2002) by Harry Lorayne,

Frederick Fell
Practical tips and techniques from America’s most famous
memory man.

Help Your Child to Succeed at School (2010) by Jonathan Hancock,

Hodder Education
Getting young children into the best habits for remembering and
learning brilliantly.

How To Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week (2005) by

Dominic O’Brien, Duncan Baird Publishers
A year-long memory training programme by an eight-times
World Memory Champion.

The Human Mind (2006) by Robert Winston, Chartered Institute

of Personnel and Development
Exploring the miraculous mechanisms of the human brain, with
tips for making your own mind do more.

Learning Maps and Memory Skills (2003) by Ingemar Svantesson,

Kogan Page
Using memory principles to improve your studying, planning,
problem solving and overall creativity.

Z01_HANC3292_01_SE_EM.indd 237 28/10/14 10:42 am

 238 improve your memory

Memory (2009) by Alan Baddeley, Michael W. Eysenck and

Michael C. Anderson, Psychology Press
An accessible overview of the latest memory research.

The Memory Book (2009) by Tony Buzan, BBC Active

A guide to understanding and using the key memory strategies.

Your Memory – a User’s Guide (2004) by Alan Baddeley, Carlton

Books
How your memory works, and how to make it work for you.

Websites
www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/memory
Features, resources and links based on a BBC memory project.

www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/
memory
Explore your memory with interactive experiments and tests.

http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory
An online memory exhibition from the San Francisco Science
Museum.

http://helpguide.org/life/improving_memory.htm
A self-improvement website offering information, advice and
support.

www.learningskillsfoundation.com
The latest news about memory and learning, plus details of
projects, publications and public events.

www.memory-improvement-tips.com/exercise.html
A wide range of tools for improving your memory.

http://memoryimprovementcentral.com
Articles on many aspects of memory training.

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 Index

active reading 145–7 connections 28–9, 61, 75

Ad Herrenium 115–16 conscious creativity 73
Aeschylus 25 context 174
ageing, effects of 212–16 control of memories 225–7
aids to memory see memory aids creativity 41, 52–3, 73
alcohol 222–3
amino acids 218 decathlon disciplines 129–30
amygdala 57 deciding 79, 118, 137, 175
Aristotle 37 dehydration 223
artificial memory 25–6 diet 217–18
attitude 11–12, 18, 214–16 amino acids 218
autobiographical memory 56, 78 choline 218–19
Omega fatty acids 218
brain 55–7, 58, 91–6, 213 pantothenic acid 219
damaged 56, 91–2 substances with negative
uniqueness 6–7 impact 222–3
brain fuel 221–2 sugar 221–2
Broca, Pierre Paul 91–2 supplements 221
vitamins and minerals 219–20
caffeine 222 difference (as form of
calm, feeling 188–90 significance) 76
Camillo, Giulio 38 documents 140–4
central executive 58 dreams 232–3
cerebellum 56–7
change 47–8, 215–16 emergency situations 204–6
children’s memories 95–6 episodic buffer 58
choline 218–19 episodic memory 78
‘chunking’ 61 exaggeration 75–6, 80, 138,
Cicero 25, 26, 114 177–8
comedy see humour exams and tests
concentration 39, 48 boosting interest 190–2
confidence 201–2 revision 192–4

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 240 Index

exams and tests (continued) imagination 7, 40–1, 51–2, 90, 96

subject strategies exercises in 81–3, 97–106,
geography 196 118–19
history 194–6 imagining success 227–8
literacy 199–200 impact 202–3
maths 198–9
science 197–8 job interviews 203–4
exercise, physical 223–4 joined-up thinking 61
exercises for memory, advice for Journey System
approaching 21–2, 126–7, ancient origins 114
191–3 home journey 122–7
expectation, impact of 14, 174–5 impact of 127–8
eye movements 30 lists and sequences 121–2
loci definition 114
features and fashions 180 practical rules 115–16
flexibility 202 rooms and routes 114–15
foreign vocabulary 14, 152–6 steps to memorising 118–20
forgetting 61–2, 66, 205 visualising house 116–18
expectation of 174–5 work journey 128–30
foundation skills 19 Juvenal 216
French vocabulary 154
Fuller, Thomas 90 language learning 147–8, 152–6
Lashley, Karl 92
German vocabulary 153–4 lasting memories 67, 71
ginkgo biloba 221 left versus right side of brain
ginseng 221 91–2, 94, 96
life planning exercises 97–106,
happiness, impact of 14 173
head injuries 56 lists and sequences 58–66, 165–6
health, physical 216–33 steps to memorising 79–81,
Herigone, Pierre 168 121–2
hippocampus 56 location 180
history of memory skills 8–9, loci 114–18, 120
25–6, 37–8, 114 long-term memory 57–8
holograms 93 lookalikes 179–80
hormonal effects 213
humour 42, 53–5 Major System 168–71
matchmaking 62–4
images 31, 58 memorable information 67, 76,
bridging 156, 196 152, 203
for learning lists 121–7 memories
for learning numbers 171–3 ever-changing 72–3
for remembering names 178 good 231–2
trigger 80–1, 156, 230 lasting 67, 71

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 Index 241

memory Major System 168–71

applications of 15–16, 19 number rhymes 163–4
barriers to building 12–13, 19 passwords 173
benefits of xii–xiii, 19, 201–3 personal 174
determining attitude to 11–12, shapes 171–3
18
determining reasons for better Omega fatty acids 218
17, 20 order 90
essential steps for process organising 39–40, 48–50, 62,
79–81, 118–20 80–1, 138, 178–80
gaining control of 225–7
historical aspects 8–9, 25–6, pantothenic acid 219
37–8, 114 passwords 157, 173
short and long term 57–8 Penfield, Wilder 92
types of 77–9, 95 performance 202
memory aids 18 personalising information 35–6,
feeling your way through 34–5 80, 138, 176
following connections 28–9 perspicuity 90
going back 28 phobias 227
hearing rhythms 33–4 phonological loop 58
leaving reminders 29–30 physical health 216–33
making it personal 35–6 pictures see images
reliance on technological places 28, 113–14, 180
235–6 see also Journey System
striking a pose 30–1 posing 30–1
take a break 36–7 positive thinking 14, 188–90
telling stories 32–3 practising 72–3, 81, 138, 180–1
using pictures 31 pressure see stressful situations
using the alphabet 27 Pribram, Karl 92
minerals 220 primacy effect 60, 193–4, 203
Mnemosyne 236 procedural memory 77
‘muscle memory’ 34–5 prospective memory 77

names 161–3, 174 Quintilian 26, 113

linking with numbers 182–3
remembering 175–82 reading see active reading
negative thoughts 11, 21 recency effect 60, 193–4, 203
neurons 6, 213 regularity 90–1
neuroscience 28–9, 91–2 relaxation 224
neurotransmitters 217–18 remembering 65–6
numbers 161–3 names 175–82
learning 166–8 numbers 163–75
linking with names 182–3 reminders 29–30
for list learning 165–6 reminder rooms 229–31

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 242 Index

Renaissance 38 sugar 221–2

repetition 71–2 surprise, element of 60
rhymes and rhythms 33–4, 163–4 survival skills 74
right versus left side of brain
91–2, 94, 96 target setting 18–19, 229
taste 101–3
salt 222 tests see exams and tests
self-improvement 211–12 thinking
semantic memory 77–8 joined-up 61
senile dementia 215 positive 14, 188–90
senses, use of 97–106 split 93
sequences see lists and sequences thinking skills 38–42
short-term memory 57–8 total recall 106
sight 97–9 touch 103–4
significance 75–6
SIM (Subscriber Identity visibility 75
Module) 8, 236 visualisation 31, 40, 50–1, 80,
Simonides 8–9, 37 118, 176–7
skills, foundation 19 visuospatial sketchpad 58
sleep 225 vitamins 219–20
smell 104–6 vocabulary 151–2
sound 58, 100–1 foreign 152–6
Spanish vocabulary 155 Von Restorff effect 29, 60
speaking from memory 200–4
spelling 148–51 water 223
Sperry, Roger 93 Wernicke, Carl 91–2
split thinking 93 whole-brain memory 95
stories, use of 32–3, 64–5, 81–4 words 135–6
strategising 79, 118, 138, 175–6 active reading 145–7
stressful situations documents 140–4
emergencies 204–6 exercises in remembering
feeling calm 188–90 136–40
impact of 187–8 language learning 147–8
job interviews 203–4 passwords 157
speaking from memory 200–4 spelling 148–51
tests and exams 190–200 vocabulary 151–6

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