Easily Improve your Memory

Although there are memory systems that we can use to remember large amounts of information most people just want to remember the things that affect their day to day life such as times, peoples names, and things they need to do.

The memory works by association; items of information in the memory are associated, or linked, to other items of information. If we can improve the association between things we want to remember our memory will work more efficiently. It's commonly said that there's no such thing as a bad memory, it's just that the majority of people are never trained to use their memory in the most effective way. We can train ourselves to easily improve the power of our everyday memory with some simple strategies that affect how our mind puts together these associations that make up our memory.

Let's have a look at what makes the difference between a memory sticking in the mind or fading away before you know it. To start off, whatever you want to remember, you need to create an image or scene in your mind to represent it, then consider the following points, the purpose of which are to make our associations obvious and distinctive…

For the purpose of demonstrating, let's imagine you need to remember something to do with your dog.

- Use more than one of your senses in the representation.
Of course you've got a choice between sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. Not only would you picture the dog visually but imagine it's bark and how it feels when you touch it.

- Use exaggerations in the representation.
Make parts of the image bigger, brighter, louder, crazier, whatever you can think of. Think of a cartoon dog on TV and the ways in which they and their antics are exaggerated.

- Add lots of colour.
Use different colours, make it vivid and bold. Notice the colour of the dog, not only that but the colours around it in the scene that it's in.

- Make it humourous.
Add some fun to the image, laughter, something outrageous happening, something that makes you smile. Imagine the dog talking to you or singing a song or wearing roller skates…whatever comes to mind!

- Add some movement.
You don't just want a still image, make something happen in it, action, processes, tasks, people moving and doing something, etc. Imagine the dog bounding about, jumping up and down.

- Use a specific location for the representation.
The memory uses location, if you're creating an image to remember someone's name include the place or room where you met them.

- Put emotional experiences into the representation.
Obvious emotions like happiness, joy, anger, love, sadness, stress, can easily be put into what's happening in the image, happy dog wagging it's tail, angry dog growling and pulling on your trouser leg!

These are only simple additions to our everyday thoughts but they can become habitual. How does something become a habit? Daily use. To make regular use of these ideas just start making pictures in your mind for whatever comes along each day, even if you know you'll already remember them anyway. When having breakfast make images in your mind for your to-do items that day. Got an appointment? Think how you could create a picture for remembering the time and place. Think of your friends and their names, imagine how you'd make an image to remember them if you'd just been introduced. It'll soon become easy, just something you naturally do and will quickly have a positive impact on the workings of your memory.