Tips To Improve Your Memory

Working together, the principals of association, imagination and location can be used to generate powerful mnemonic systems. Once you have absorbed the below techniques you will understand how to design and apply these principles to your own field of work, to design your own powerful, sophisticated recall systems. So, what’s involved?

Association is the method by which you link a thing to be remembered to a method of remembering it. Although association techniques use the same principals, you should try and use what you know works best for you; thus it is suggested that you implant your own associations rather than adopting a foreign system. You can use association by doing these following things: tying or linking a thing to be placed on top of the associated object; penetrating into each other; merging together; wrapping around each other; rotating around each other or dancing together; or being attached to the same colour, smell, shape, or feeling.

Imagination in memory is used to create the links and associations needed to create effective memory techniques; imagination is the way in which you use your mind to create the links that have the most meaning for you. Images created by others will very often have less power and impact on you, because they do not carry the same potency and wealth of meaning. The more strongly you imagine and visualise a situation the more effectively it will stick in your mind for later recall. Mnemonic imagination can be as violent, vivid, or sensual as you like, as long as it helps you to remember what needs to be remembered.

Location is the third principal. Location provides you with two things: a coherent context – this means that you have a context into which information can be placed so that it hangs together – and a way of separating one mnemonic from another – for example, by setting one mnemonic on one bus seat, I can separate it from a similar mnemonic located in the back of the same bus. Location spices up your memory and provides context and texture to your mnemonics, and protects and prevents them from being confused with other similar mnemonics. Setting one mnemonic with visualisations in the stadium in Milan, Italy and another similar mnemonic with images of a stadium in Newcastle, England allows us to separate them with no danger of confusion.

So, using the three fundamentals of Association, Imagination and Location you can design images that strongly link things with other things, in a context that allows you to recall those images in a way that does not conflict with other images and associations.