Viraj's Weblog

I saw a BBC documentary about the brain and they were talking with one person who had incredible memory skills. They would shuffle 20 decks of cards, have him look through the decks, and then ask him to recite every card in each deck in order. Of course he was able to do it, but how?

It turns out his method involved first some preparation. He took a walking trip around the city and got into his mind certain locations and monuments. Then he associated each card with some object, say a queen of spades being a dog. He then created a story that described him walking around the city and seeing strange happenings with his cast of characters. The wierder the scenario is, the easier it is to remember. The location aspect makes a big difference, because his storyline proceeds as he walks through the city.

Another person had to memorize a list of unrelated words, and imagined themselves walking through their house seeing all of these strange object that were or were related to the words he needed to remember.

There are all sorts of memorizing tricks, but the storyline and location method was new to me. I decided to try it for my first Biodiversity exam. It works, and I'm pretty sure I got a 100% on the exam. This class is pretty much rote memorization of phylums, species, and what not. For some of the sections I just created a very wierd scene in my head. Others I created a ridiculous story. Either method would have images that would 'hint' at what needs to be remembered. Let's go through an example.

First here is a small section of notes that I needed to remember:

Phylum Pyrrophyta - Also called dinoflagellates

- Chlorophyll A+C
- 2 flagella
- cellulose cell wall
- Pfiesteria is an example genus
- These organisms cause red tides
- zooxanthellae are the organisms in corals
- some exhibit bioluminescence

Here is the 'story' that I used to remember this:

A pyromaniac with 2 whips was very fiesty and was walled up in a zoo. He drew blood from zoo animals to supply energy to his glowing coral necklace. He was cadaverized by a dinosaur.

This is absolute rubbish. The main point is to not so much memorizing the wording, but the imagery. Once you get the crazy images in your head, the words will come. Then these words are hints towards what is really needed to be remembered. The word pyromaniac is linked to pyrrophyta. The fact that he was killed by a dinosaur gives rise to 'dinoflagellates.' His 2 whips mean 2 flagella. The term 'cadaverized' is used to remember chlorophyll C (A is common to all of the plant-like phylums on this test, so there was no need to incorporate this extra info in the story). The mention of 'zoo' relates to zooxanthellae, and the 'glowing' to bioluminescence. 'Blood' refers to red tides. 'Fiesty' to pfiesteria, and so on.

Obviously there is a language that needs to be applied here, and it is nonsensical. The crazier it is, the easier it is to remember. I of course need to know something about the topic, and be able to induce 'zooxanthellae' from 'zoo', but that's just vocabulary you will already have from reading. There is no silver bullet to memorizing, but different techniques can be applied at different places, depending on what makes sense (or nonsense) to you.

This is just one example, I also used much more complicated storylines that incorporated many pages of notes to remember. In the end the stories were much shorter than my actual notes, so there is a condensing effect. The stories were so wild and were easy to remember the imagery. Things like Smurfette from The Smurfs swimming in slime (representing a fungus-like slime mold organism). On the test, when I saw keywords in the question, they reminded me of the different parts in my story, and from there I was able to get the answer. It takes alot of work though, but I find coming up with the wierd stories kinda fun. I will need to work at it more to sharpen my storymaking skills.