Presented here with thanks to the New York Times for their support of education
(you can also see the story on their website HERE):
Train Your Brain Like a Memory Champion
If you have trouble remembering names, faces or phone numbers, these tips from memory champions and neuroscientists can help.
Image
By
You
slide the key into the door and hear a clunk as the tumblers engage.
You rotate the key, twist the doorknob and walk inside. The house is
familiar, but the contents foreign. At your left, there’s a map of
Minnesota, dangling precariously from the wall. You’re certain it wasn’t
there this morning. Below it, you find a plush M&M candy. To the
right, a dog, a shiba inu you’ve never seen before. In its mouth, a pair
of your expensive socks.
And then it comes to you, 323-3607, a phone number.
If
none of this makes sense, stick with us; by the end of this piece
you’ll be using the same techniques to memorize just about anything
you’ve ever wanted to remember.
The
“memory athlete” Munkhshur Narmandakh once employed a similar
combination of mnemonics to commit more than 6,000 binary digits to
memory in just 30 minutes. Alex Mullen, a three-time World Memory
Champion, used them to memorize the order of a deck of cards in just 15
seconds, a record at the time. It was later broken by Shijir-Erdene
Bat-Enkh, who did it in 12.
We’re
going to aim lower, applying these strategies to real-world scenarios,
like remembering the things we often forget at dinner parties or
work-related mixers.
The Power of Mnemonics
At
the start of this piece, we employed two mnemonic strategies to
remember the seven digits of a phone number. The first, called the “Major System,” was developed in 1648 by historian Johann Winkelmann.
In
his book “Moonwalking With Einstein,” the author Joshua Foer described
this system as a simple cipher that transforms numbers to letters or
phonetic sounds. From there we can craft words and, ultimately, images.
Some will, no doubt, be crude or enigmatic. Others may contain
misspellings and factual errors. It doesn’t matter. This system is
designed to create rich imagery, not accurate representations.
The
number 19, for example, is TP, TB, DP, or DB. From those two letter
combinations, there are a host of visuals we can come up with to match
words like toilet paper, tuberculosis, Dr Pepper, or dubstep. Our visuals followed the same logic. MN/Minnesota (32), MM/M&M (33), SH/shiba inu (6), SK/socks (07).
One
could argue that, on its own, the Major System is as complicated as
just remembering the seven digit phone number, or perhaps more than.
That’s why you’ll often see memory athletes combine the system with
another mnemonic, like the “method of loci,” or MoL.
The
method was first developed in ancient Greece, but popularized in “The
Art of Memory,” by Frances A. Yates, in 1966. Also called a “memory
palace,” MoL involves placing items throughout a familiar place. In this
case, your home. Mr. Foer in his book suggested walking through the
front door and then letting your eyes gaze from left to right, top to
bottom. In our example, we started with a map, placed a plush figure
below it, and then a dog with a pair of socks in its mouth.
Seven digits, though, is child’s play. Gary Shang once used MoL to memorize pi to 65,536 digits.
How Mnemonics Work
In
an evolutionary sense, our memory hasn’t quite become a powerhouse for
nonvisual information. Early hominids had little need to remember dates
or phone numbers. They did, however, require an acute sense of what
times of the year were best to plant crops, what flora were edible, and
when they might need to pack up and move to keep pace with nomadic food
sources.
“From an evolutionary
prioritization perspective, I think most of this comes down to gating
mechanisms we have in place for denoting and ‘tagging’ incoming stimuli
as important for the continuation of our existence,” Nicco Reggente,
Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, said.
Even
today, sensory representations drive memory in ways mere memorization
can’t touch. Dr. Reggente explained that this is best seen in the
hippocampus, a part of the brain that originally evolved to support
movement. “In order for this movement to be purposeful, it must be
guided via prediction,” he said. “It is the same region that is now, in
our modern age, repurposed for non-spatial (non-movement based) memories
as well.”
It’s why visual mnemonics,
like MoL, are so effective; we’re piggybacking on a cognitive system
that was fine-tuned over millions of years to work best with visual and
spatial representation.
“Visualization is typically beneficial due to
its translation of the abstract form of the object (or concept) into a
spatial medium,” Dr. Reggente said.
How to Remember Names
Names
are actually best remembered by focusing on the text as it’s spoken and
then using it immediately. “The most useful trick isn’t a trick at
all,” Mr. Mullen, the memory champion, noted. “It’s focus.”
As
mnemonics go, all the experts we spoke with suggested the same
technique for remembering names. It involves singling out a particular
trait of the person you’re speaking with. For Mr. Mullen, in a made-up
example, that was hair color. The trait most noticeable about “Karen”
was her orange hair, about the same shade as a carrot. He’d then imagine
Karen with carrots for hair, perhaps munching on them as they spoke.
In
the psychology world, there’s a strange example of how these tricks
work, called the “Baker/baker paradox.” After showing subjects the same
photograph of a man’s face, the researchers tell half the participants
his surname, Baker, and the other half his occupation, a baker. Days
later, the subjects were more likely to remember the man’s occupation
than his name. This plays to the sensory nature of memory. Upon hearing
the man was a baker, the brain immediately springs into action, creating
or recalling vast neural networks of what we’ve associated with the
title: fresh bread, a white hat and apron, or perhaps someone standing
in front of a patisserie, greeting children with delicious sweets.
When
incomplete, this sensation is also responsible for the tip of your
tongue feeling where you can’t quite recall a memory. According to Mr.
Foer: “It’s likely because we’re accessing only part of the neural
network that ‘contains’ the idea, but not all of it.”
How to Remember Numbers
For
competitors, the Major System, often in conjunction with the memory
palace, is the most common way to remember hundreds, or even thousands,
of numbers.
In our example, a phone
number, it may have been overkill. A more useful trick is a simple one,
called chunking, you’ve been using for years without even realizing.
Phone
numbers, for example, come pre-chunked. We don’t write, or recite,
phone numbers as a single digit. 3419108550 is more manageable when
written, or recited, as 341-910-8550. Credit card numbers are also
chunked, as is your Social Security number.
Mr.
Foer detailed an acquaintance that had never formally been taught to
chunk information, but used the technique to remember numbers by
associating them with his hobby, running. “For example, 3,492 was turned
into ‘3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, [a] near world-record mile
time.’” For most of us, this is probably no easier than remembering the
number itself. But for a runner, it’s a different story.
Or,
it’s possible to use the Major System to remember smaller number
combinations, even without placing visual representations inside a
memory palace, as we did above. The phone number 341-910-8550, for
example, becomes “MRT PTS FLLS” after consulting the chart. For me, the
oddest, most memorable phrase, as Mr. Foer suggested using, is “Mr. T
pities fools.” Granted, it’s misspelled, but the image is highly
memorable.
In
training like a memory champion, it’s really the visual that’s most
important. Each technique we covered capitalizes on the ability to
visualize memories rather than simply attempting to recall them. This,
as our team of experts notes, is an exercise in futility.
There’s
nothing, physiologically speaking, separating memory athletes from
people who forget where their keys are or can’t remember what they had
for breakfast this morning. The difference is in the training methods,
and the time spent in mastering them.
“Overall,
I’d say you definitely don’t need to be a savant to have a great
memory,” Mr. Mullen said. “If you’re sincerely engaged with a few tricks
up your sleeve, you might surprise yourself.”
Bryan
Clark is a journalist from San Diego who lives at the intersection
between technology and culture. You can follow him on Twitter here: @bryanclark
A version of this article appears in print on , Section B, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Train Your Brain Like a Memory Champion.
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