How good is your memory?
A good time after leaving school I started to worry about my memory. You have guessed it.
I got a book about improving my memory. I was surprised the methods are so simple and it made me wonder why memory training is not part of the curriculum at school. I have summarised the methods into Active Recall. If you do not alter or associate what you want to remember it will just fade away. Once you have activated what you want to remember you must see it in your minds eye.
The memory works better if you make what you want to remember outrageous in some way. Size, number, in place of, or moving. Also the more times you see the item in your minds eye it will be easier to recall.
For example I want to remember a shopping list. Potato. Onions, lemon, newspaper, matches, dog food, sweets, bread, fire lighters, cherry pie, lottery ticket.
I know there are eleven items so at the end I can check I have remembered all of them.
In my minds eye I see a giant potato wearing a crown, that is a King Edward potato and his Queen is an onion with a voluminous ball gown that is peeling off to reveal a yellow crying baby lemon. The baby lemon tears turn into furled newspapers that unfold announcing the
headline massive blaze in match factory. The burning newspapers are being snuffed out by a pack of barking male dogs that are cocking there legs. They are rewarded by bowls of dog food. Now the food I can see is wrapped in sweet papers and one of the sweet paper is getting bigger and bigger to explode into slices of bread. Some of the bread becomes toasted and blackens to burst into fire. The fire lighters are gathered around a cherry tree and the tree turns into a steaming hot cherry pie. From the middle of the pie a tower of numbers stretch up and disappear in the sky.
This method is in a link form, each item connected to the previous, but another way is to associate the item to numbers to give the position.
Take the number one a visual object could be the Eiffel Tower. Or Nelson's Column.
Two could be a swan or a hook and so on for all the numbers. Then you alter
the item to fix to the visual number. An Eiffel Tower of King Edward potatoes and the number two as a giant brown skinned Swan with the shape of an onion.
I hope this is enough to give the method for Active Recall.
I got a book about improving my memory. I was surprised the methods are so simple and it made me wonder why memory training is not part of the curriculum at school. I have summarised the methods into Active Recall. If you do not alter or associate what you want to remember it will just fade away. Once you have activated what you want to remember you must see it in your minds eye.
The memory works better if you make what you want to remember outrageous in some way. Size, number, in place of, or moving. Also the more times you see the item in your minds eye it will be easier to recall.
For example I want to remember a shopping list. Potato. Onions, lemon, newspaper, matches, dog food, sweets, bread, fire lighters, cherry pie, lottery ticket.
I know there are eleven items so at the end I can check I have remembered all of them.
In my minds eye I see a giant potato wearing a crown, that is a King Edward potato and his Queen is an onion with a voluminous ball gown that is peeling off to reveal a yellow crying baby lemon. The baby lemon tears turn into furled newspapers that unfold announcing the
headline massive blaze in match factory. The burning newspapers are being snuffed out by a pack of barking male dogs that are cocking there legs. They are rewarded by bowls of dog food. Now the food I can see is wrapped in sweet papers and one of the sweet paper is getting bigger and bigger to explode into slices of bread. Some of the bread becomes toasted and blackens to burst into fire. The fire lighters are gathered around a cherry tree and the tree turns into a steaming hot cherry pie. From the middle of the pie a tower of numbers stretch up and disappear in the sky.
This method is in a link form, each item connected to the previous, but another way is to associate the item to numbers to give the position.
Take the number one a visual object could be the Eiffel Tower. Or Nelson's Column.
Two could be a swan or a hook and so on for all the numbers. Then you alter
the item to fix to the visual number. An Eiffel Tower of King Edward potatoes and the number two as a giant brown skinned Swan with the shape of an onion.
I hope this is enough to give the method for Active Recall.
No comments have been added yet.
