Make It Silly

You can improve your memory by attaching additional associations, creating acronyms, and making up mini stories, and the sillier you can make them the better. The more silly, outrageous, absurd or bizarre, the easier it is to remember.

For example, when you were in elementary school and you learned the names of the Great Lakes in North America, you might have been taught the acronym HOMES, for Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. It works, but it is a little mundane. If you wanted to crank up the memorability of it, you might imagine you and your friends' homes floating above the Great Lakes. It makes a strong imprint on your mind. Or perhaps you would prefer something even more ridiculous, such as picturing a Hysterical Ostrich Munching Electric Spiders over the lakes.

If you want your story to more closely resemble the names of the lakes, you could change your mini story to something like 'a Heron playing baseball at the Great Lakes expected to hit a home run all the way to Ontario, but Missed again! It was Erie the way it looked at me, as if it were Superior.' This is an odd little story, but easy to remember and will bring you very close to the actual names of the lakes.

Another variation of this is to link ideas to the furniture of a room in your home. Let's say you want to remember a series of ideas for a presentation, and you have seven main points you want to cover. Create a logical pathway to move through the room, noting the main pieces of furniture or objects of interest.

You can link your introduction to entering the room. Then link each of your topics to those pieces of furniture or objects of interest, and remember that the more silly, outrageous, absurd or bizarre, the easier it is to remember. Link one idea to the sofa. Link one idea to the coffee table. Link one idea to the lamp, and so on until walking through your room brings up the outline of your speech. At this point you can just imagine walking through this room in your home and as you imagine each piece of furniture you also remember the topic you linked to it. This is a great way to improve your memory, and it makes use of your kinesthetic abilities, a skill often overlooked when using more traditional methods of study.

Hopefully you are sensing how much fun you can have with this. I encourage you to play with this technique and see how silly you can make the additional associations, acronyms, and mini stories. The more fun you have with it the more you will see your memory improve.

Here's to your success!

Copyright 2005-2006 by Teresa Bolen. All rights reserved.