Do they work, or do you find yourself going back to your old ways by February?

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Whether or not I consciously think of them as New Year’s Resolutions, every year in December I find myself reflecting on the year gone by and what I’d like to change about my life in the coming year.

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At the onset, we talked about the keys to creating successful memories. Keeping those keys in mind, we realized that your ability to remember something is largely dependent on how successful you were in creating a strong association in the first place. Then we looked at one of the most powerful concepts in memory training: linking. By visually associating one image to another we can remember the second image once we know the first. We can then form links of long lists of objects in that manner.

I taught you one of my favorite tools for creating images that are easily linked: the phonetic alphabet. This system enables you to convert numbers into words which are more easily visualized and associated. Using the phonetic alphabet code, we created pegs which can be used to associate anything you want to remember in order or by number.

And along the way I presented several applications of the techniques including learning languages, remembering names and faces, playing cards, and PI.

Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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• Memory Month, Day 5: The Boy With the Incredible Brain (0)

Here is an interview with Ben in which he gives his thoughts on memory training and demonstrates memorizing a deck of cards.

“I think mobile phones are gradually replacing our brain as time goes on.”

~ Ben Pridmore

Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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Using the phonetic alphabet and linking your images together, you can easily memorize PI to 100 digits.

3.141592653
 5897932384
 6264338327
 9502884197
 1693993751
 0582097494
 4592307816
 4062862089
 9862803482
 5342117067

Linkwords I Used

matter, tall-ape, hinge, lime, love-bug, bombin’ mover, chain, jar, mummy, foamin’ cables, knife, fart, booked ship, mob, bomb-killed, sail, fans, poker, beer, rail, piano, moose, gift, shares, chain, fishin’, save pipe, fishin’, vase, marvin, lemur, window, dogs, check

Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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First I want to recommend a truly great radio podcast on this subject:

Memory and Forgetting

Radiolab has a lot of very interesting shows and what they talk about is worth remembering.

Then my questions:
Has anyone studied why different people remember things easiest in different ways. I learn fastest by just looking and reading, my sister learns best when she writes things down, and one of my friends learns best when someone is reading or telling him what he has to remember.

Also, I wonder about when it comes to remembering how to go between places, men usually use “dead reckoning” and women use visual markings as guides. Or to make the question more general; Do men and women form memories differently?

Thanks for an interesting blog!
/C.M - Who once new Pi to 300 decimals too

I suspect that the answer to your questions are heavily related to the 5 keys I wrote about on Day 2. In particular, interest plays a huge role in determining what we focus on and what we filter out as we go about our lives. Your personality and style of learning may be more visual than your friend and that’s why seeing the words and reading them works best for you. Writing things down may reinforce that visual learning process for your sister and also increase concentration and attention on the subject matter where she might otherwise be distracted or disinterested while reading. Your friend could be a more auditory learner.

As far as gender differences go, Research suggests that women perform better than men at certain episodic memory tasks. The sense I get from reading the articles is that women generally have better developed interpersonal skills which allows them to better classify and remember events related to people (and what events don’t relate to people?) Women have also been found to be better at remembering appearances of people, which further supports that notion.

In fact, most of the research I’m reading seems to indicate that men are at a disadvantage to women when it comes to memory. I guess that’s why I have to use all these tricks.

Thanks for your great questions, Claes. I’m going to have to check out that podcast.

Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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• Memory Month, Day 5: The Boy With the Incredible Brain (0)

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In today’s post, I want to give you a chance to ask anything you like about the topic of memory improvement. I’m not an expert, but I’ve spent a lot of time studying memory tricks and I know where to go for answers, so throw it at me! Here are some ideas to get you started:

• What do you have trouble remembering?
• Are you looking for a specific mnemonic device to help you recall something?
• Do you have questions about any of the tips I’ve posted this month?
• Do you think it’s all a waste of time since we have computers to remember for us?
• Have a story or link you want to share?
• Want to share your own memory tricks you’ve used?

Let me know by posting a comment. If I get some good comments I’ll feature them in another article so put your URL if you want a link back to your site.

Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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The Keys to Our Digital Lives

You probably have to use passwords to access at least half a dozen systems on a regular basis. I entered a password to log into my desktop at home. Then I had to enter a password to access WordPress and enter the text of this article. I have passwords to check email, view bank account information, upload photos to flickr, manage my 401K, read RSS feeds, and on and on. When I go to work in the morning I will have to enter yet another password that I’m forced to update regularly for security purposes.

People tend to deal with this problem in one or more of the following ways:

1. Use the same password for everything. One obvious problem with this method is that it’s insecure. If your primary password is compromised and someone gets it, all of your data is compromised. This also is simply impractical for systems that force you to change your password regularly.
2. Use very weak passwords. Passwords that are very short in length and do not contain a combination of lowercase, uppercase, numbers, and symbols can be compromised much more easily. Check your password strength to see how yours measure up.
3. Store the passwords. Writing your passwords down on post-it notes or in a file on your hard drive, or even using Firefox’s built-in password manager has obvious security implications.
4. Ask for a new password. You’ve forgotten the password again so you ask the system to generate a new one for you. How annoying is that?

Jamin’s System for Remembering Passwords

There are numerous methods for remembering passwords but I’m going to give you a system I developed that will enable you to remember a secure, randomly generated password. You could use it to remember any password, but if your password is “mydogrules” you probably won’t need it.

The system is based on the QWERTY keyboard layout used in the US, but could be adapted to other keyboard layouts.

The entire system can be summarized in three parts:

1. Each of the non-alpha character keys is given a keyword representing the symbol you get when you press shift + the key. To remember the symbol on the top part of the key, you just visualize the keyword. To remember the symbol or number on the bottom part of the key, you visualize that same image only “damaged” or “degraded” in some way. Example: An * could be remembered as a star and an 8 could be remembered as an exploding star or dying star.
2. Each of the alpha characters is remembered by simply using a keyword that begins with the letter. If the letter is lowercase, again the image is “damaged” or “degraded” in some way. The keyword used must not be one of the existing keywords already used to remember a symbol or number. Example: The letter E could be remembered as an egg and the letter e could be remembered as a cracked egg or rotten egg.
3. The images are linked together in order.

Symbol Table:

Example

Randomly generated password:

47R?$exa

The 8 keywords/phrases I’ll use for these 8 characters are penny, broken amp, riff, pop-quiz, cash, rotten egg, broken xylophone, rotten apple

The numbers and symbols which are non-alpha I picked directly from the table above. For the letters, I just picked words that started with the letter that were not already keywords in the table and which were easy to visualize and link. Remember, if the letter is lowercase, you must damage or degrade the image in some way.

Let’s say this password is used to log into my PC at work. I would first start by associating my work place with the first keyword: penny. I might imagine that my paycheck is only one penny. I take the penny and go buy a broken (guitar) amp. I try to use it to play a riff. Then I give a pop-quiz on the music to a bunch of listeners. One of them pays me a pile of cash to get out of the quiz. When trying to buy me out doesn’t work, another simply throws rotten eggs at me. Dejected, I pick up a broken xylophone and try to play that but a third student hurls rotten apples at the xylophone, shattering it.

And that’s how you can remember 47R?$exa

Memory Month Introduction & Table of Contents

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