Then arrange your images on a route around a familiar space. If you wish to remember that 90% of women are at a disadvantage in the workplace, you might imagine a 90-year-old woman carrying a heavy weight. To remember that the pound is losing ground on the dollar, you could imagine George Bush beating up Gordon Brown with a wad of dollar bills. Now find an image that captures each point. Each should be detailed enough to remind you naturally of what you'd like to say, but not so detailed that you are remembering more than the bare minimum. There is a very simple technique that you can use to give presentations of almost any length, without any worries about missing things out, being stuck for words, or being unable to recover after a nasty or surprising question.īegin by reducing your talk to, let's say, 20 bullet-points. To remember them, you need to transform them into unforgettable form with energetic imagination. The problem with day-to-day memory is that so much information lacks meaning: numbers, dates, names and definitions. We all remember things we are interested in, whether it's football or gossip. Memory techniques do just one thing: they make information more meaningful to the mind, making the things we try to learn unforgettably bright and amusing. I teach these techniques to normal kids in normal schools around the country - and time and time again, I see them do things such as recite the first 50 digits of pi after just a half an hour of instruction. This isn't because I happen to have an enormous brain. Now, I can remember 16 decks of shuffled cards in an hour. Soon, I found I could learn a list of 40 objects in a few minutes. Investigating the ancient arts of memory led me to a very different, more colourful, picture of what memory is - and a fabulous transformation of my ability to remember. That was how I thought about memory until, as an 18-year-old with nothing much to do during a spell in hospital, I decided to have a go at improving my powers of recollection. We think of our memories as something we're stuck with - that our memories are mere information storage. We respect people who seem to be good at remembering things, while at the same time treating memory as a largely unconscious process - something lacking in personality and humour.
We are by turns frustrated and amazed by our powers of recollection.Īnd yet our concept of memory is confused. Our identities and skills are, in many ways, just our memories.