BBC Focus Magazine

[Thinker]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/jan/14/how-to-train-your-brain-to-remember

A visit to any bookshop will reveal myriad self-help books promoting the use of mnemonics as a means of improving your memory. The Method of Loci, perhaps the most well-known mnemonic technique, involves thinking of images that link the information you are trying to learn with familiar locations. So, when trying to remember a list of words, you might imagine walking between the various rooms in your home and in each one commit a word to memory by forming an image that combines the word with a distinguishing feature of the room. For example, if trying to remember the word "apple", you might imagine an apple bouncing on the sofa in your living room. Retrieving the list of words is achieved by mentally walking through the rooms of your house again. One study found that people using the Loci method could recall more than 90% of a list of 50 words after studying them just once.

This reminded me of an extract of Derren Brown's Tricks of the mind, where he asks you to remember the following list:

1. Telephone
2. Sausage
3. Monkey
4. Button
5. Book
6. Cabbage
7. Glass
8. Mouse
9. Stomach
10. Cardboard
11. Ferry
12. Christmas
13. Athlete
14. Key
15. Wigwam
16. Baby
17. Kiwi
18. Bed
19. Paintbrush
20. Walnut

My first attempt was useless, but trying the loci method, it really did work!

[Shadowwolf]

Have that myself and as the man is not given to making stuff up there is likely something to it, works for him at any rate.

[...]

that was really amazing, i took a couple of minutes imagining a walk through my house and remembering the things in all the rooms walking around each room anticlockwise then up the stairs etc etc, then i walked around the house, in my head again putting the objects from the list on all the stuff like the telephone on the freezer in the hall, the sausage in the downstairs toilet a monkey in the fridge etc and i swear after doing it just once i remembered every single item no probs

[Shadowwolf]

You should read the lads book, plenty of intriguing stuff in there.

[Jamie]

I never got this. So instead of remembering a word, you need to remember a bunch of other stuff that will make you remember the word? I tried it, but it seemed like four times as many things to remember. Which was a fail.

Perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

On the other hand, I can remember phone numbers of old friends that I haven;t rung for 20 years (even if I only called once!) and names and locations of programs that I haven't even thought about for 10 years. Weird.

[Thinker]

It depends on how you link the two objects in your head. If you make it a silly picture in your head. Like it said in the book, think of a really horrible slimy sausage and using it to turn the dial on the old type phones and as you do it the sausage is falling to pieces in your hand, etc. You need to vividly picture these things in your head and it honestly works.

I tried it with the word memory game on Brain Training on the DS and it work on there. But I kept running out of time, so I'd get about half-way through and the time would run out.