Image: Matthew Loffhagen
When it comes to writing, a good memory is a boon. You may need to remember previous events and character details for seamless storytelling, recall hard-won research, or store the entire history of a fictional world in your mind. Maybe you’re trying to effectively put aside ideas that you’ll want to use later, or perhaps you’re just memorizing the goals you want to achieve before this draft is complete. In these ways and more, it’s to your advantage to enhance your memory.
In this two-part article, we’ll be looking at how to do exactly that, learning some basic but shockingly effective memory techniques that can help you with your writing and editing. As the title promises, part 2 will end with the memory palace – a device used by many pop-culture geniuses that’s actually completely accessible to us mere mortals – but there’s plenty more useful stuff to cover in part 1 before we get there.
Since a lot of people assume they’re stuck with whatever type of memory they already have, let’s begin with a trick that shows how effective memory techniques can be.
If nothing else, this first memory device will give you a neat party trick. First, write out a list of twenty random nouns. Ideally, to get the full benefit, have someone else pick them. On this occasion, I’ll handle it for you:
The first step here is to set up a point of comparison, so spend thirty seconds reading through this list. Once your thirty seconds is up, look away from the list and try to remember as many of the words above as you can (write them down, if you’re able.) Try it now.
It’s unlikely you remembered the majority of the words. If you did, congratulations – you’ll need an even longer list to see the benefits. If you didn’t, let’s get to work.
This first technique is ‘image linking’ – creating an image which links two concepts and thus renders them more vivid and easier to call to mind. Not only does this give your brain something more concrete to grab onto, it creates links between ideas so that you’re searching for your place in a chain rather than trying to grab random data points.
For example, for ‘Fireplace’ and ‘Goat,’ you might imagine a goat stood in a fireplace. You could then imagine the goat stepping on a spoon, and then that spoon spinning out to form the hands of a clock. In this way, you create a path of images that links the words together.
That’s what you might imagine, but you still wouldn’t be using this system to its fullest. In his book Tricks of the Mind, mentalist Derren Brown suggests some further rules for the images you create. The first is that the image should be vivid; you need to take a moment to truly see it in your mind’s eye. ‘If the picture is funny,’ Brown advises, ‘find it funny. If it’s disgusting, actually find it repulsive.’ Brown’s next rule is that the two elements of the image need to interact.
It’s not enough, he says, to picture A stood next to B. Instead, if ‘A could be made of B; or if A could be forced into B,’ or if A could fight, make love to, or ‘dance with’ B, that’s when your image will effectively link two concepts.
So far, our fireplace-goat just about passes muster, but it’s Brown’s final rule that means we need to rethink our choice:
The picture should be unusual. If you have to link ‘man’ and ‘cup,’ for example, you may be able to vividly imagine those two interacting, but the picture may be too normal, such as ‘a man drinking from a cup.’ The picture will be more memorable if the man is trying to drink from a giant cup, or is sucking the cup into his face, or if there is a tiny man in a cup trying to get out before the tea gets poured in.– Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind
Suddenly, a goat stepping out of a fireplace onto a spoon isn’t quite so effective. Instead, let’s imagine that the embers in the fireplace rise and coagulate into the form of the goat. It steps forward, opens its mouth, and tens of ornate spoons tumble out, clamoring on the tile floor. That image might be disturbing, but it’s memorable, and that’s what we’re going for.
Now, let’s try our memory test again. The list is recreated exactly below, so read it through once, slowly, and imagine a series of vivid, unusual images to transition you from each concept to the next. Once you’ve done that, look away from the list again and try to recite it from memory.
If you’ve taken the time to link the above list of images, I’ll bet you made it through every item, and what’s more, I’ll bet you can also do the whole list backwards.
Like any skill, you can improve on this device with practice – using nouns simplifies things, but once you’ve gotten better at quickly thinking up a relevant image, other types of words can be memorized just as easily.
Now, this device has limited applicability, but it’s also the foundation of the more advanced memory techniques that are coming up. If you’re not yet comfortable with image linking, try it out a few more times and get a feel for what images you find memorable and what you don’t.
Brown also recommends adding markers at significant points, like at the fifth or tenth point in a list. Adding an open hand (with its five fingers) to your chain of images can give you an easy reference point if, for some reason, you later need to skip ahead to a certain point in your list. If you’re memorizing presidents, for instance, maybe you want an easy way to skip to the fortieth entry rather than starting from George Washington every time.
As an aside – and because digital security isn’t going to stop being important anytime soon – former NASA roboticist Randall Monroe’s webcomic ‘Password Strength’ suggests image linking as a way of memorizing short nonsense phrases as passwords (Monroe offers ‘correcthorsebatterystaple’ as an example.) These are easy for humans to remember and harder for computers to guess than the usual ‘swapping E for 3’ or ‘RanDOm cApS’ password choices. So, if you get nothing else from this article, we just made your passwords more effective and easier to remember.
The first way to step up your new memory powers is to bring numbers into the fold. Again, this will be necessary as we increase our powers of recollection, but there are also immediate benefits. Namely that, by combining image linking with numbers, you can make information like dates or statistics far easier to recall.
The first step here is particularly enjoyable – we need to pick some consistent images to represent numbers in our image linking. It’s difficult to ‘picture’ a number, so assigning a more versatile image means that you have more options for future image linking.
As an example, you might choose images that recreate the basic shape of a number, imagining a candle for ‘1’ or a duck for ‘2.’ In other cases, you might choose sound-alikes, such as a glass of wine for ‘9’ or a beehive for ‘5.’ There’s also the option of selecting something from pop culture that you find particularly memorable – maybe Snow White for ‘7’ or a little pig for ‘3.’ Whatever you find vivid and compelling, make it work for you.
To start with, settle on the images you’ll be using for numbers 1–9. Now, you have the perfect ingredients for image linking complex facts. Dates almost set themselves up, with the four numbers presenting you with a unique potted narrative. This may sound complex, but if your images really do link, you’ll be surprised at the facts you can remember.
Let’s say that I’m trying to commit the year of the moon landing, 1969, to memory with the following images:
1 = A candle
9 = A glass of wine
6 = A snail
I’ll start with the image of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon – an image I’ll always go to when remembering this event – and then imagine him stumbling across a huge, ancient candle, eons of wax dripping down its sides (1.) With huge moon-jumps, Armstrong leaps to the top of the candle and douses its flame with a classy glass of Merlot (9.) For a moment, smoke rises, and then the ground rumbles. Why? Because the candle was part of an ancient ritual intended to keep the eldritch Moon Snail asleep (6.) Now, it rises from beneath the moon’s surface, hurling Armstrong to the ground and smashing his wine glass on the rocks. Thinking quickly, Armstrong grabs the shattered stem of the wine glass (9) and plunges it into one of the snail’s vast eyes. The monster recedes beneath the surface, but it will return…
Now, yes, that may sound like a lot of effort to put into remembering a date, but the thing is, I’ll never forget that date. This is a huge advantage if you’re writing historical fiction, setting up a fictional world, or writing many types of non-fiction. There’s also the fact that I’m not going to have to recite that whole story every time I want to remember ‘1969’ – I don’t just have an easier way of storing that information, I’ve transformed the type of information I’m trying to retrieve. ‘1969’ will now spring to mind immediately, perhaps accompanied by a chuckle at the association with a monstrous snail. The story is there if I ever struggle, but its true purpose was to persuade my brain to store ‘1969’ as a narrative rather than a random number.
To get an idea of the scope of this kind of image linking, especially in terms of improving your research abilities, it’s a technique that students have used to remember hundreds of dates when studying subjects like law and psychology. In these subjects, there are a lot of ‘cases’ made up of names, key information, and dates.
When you have to look this kind of information up, you’re detached from the creative act that you want the information to support. But when the information’s at your fingertips, you don’t have to mentally deviate, meaning there are fewer occasions where you have to break the flow of writing (you’ll also be a lot more confident in your factual assertions.) What works for academic purposes is just as effective for creative research; whether you’re writing an essay or a story, knowing information is different to looking it up as required.
Later, you might want to go higher and create unique visuals up to 100. This is easier than it might sound if you use the units column as a unique quality and the tens as a unique object. For example, anything in the 20s could be a duck and anything in the 30s a pig, with the units then implying qualities: ‘28’ could be an obese duck, ‘29’ a drunk duck, ‘38’ an obese pig, ‘39’ a drunk pig, etc. You can use similar techniques for months and other recurring concepts – if Neil Armstrong only puts out the giant candle to impress actress Julie Walters, we’ll also never forget that the moon landing took place in July.
To be continued…
If you’re not too busy memorizing pi to thirty digits, check out part 2 of this article (available here,) where I cover the final form of these memory techniques – the memory palace – and learn how to activate a form of massive, long-term memory storage that’s almost scary in its potential.
You can also try Psychology 101: Knowledge That Will Improve Your Writing and Learn How To Research Your Book With This Beginner’s Guide for more advice on this subject.