In this chapter:

• How you can make the most of your memory by understanding the role of graphical ideas and techniques.

Memory uses all five senses, especially vision. If you think back to a friend or teacher at school you may say something like ‘I can see her now’. Our language, as is often the case, accurately reflects what is happening in the brain as we ‘see’ past events with our internal senses. We call this remembering. When ‘seeing’ a future situation we might call it imagination, daydreaming, visualisation or whatever.

It figures that pictures play a big part in memory, and indeed we know this from research carried out over many years. For instance, most people can remember peoples’ faces better than their names. This is a special kind of visual skill that seems to be hardwired into our brain. For example, we can pick out someone we know in a crowd from the scantiest of visual clues. So if you have to remember things – say for an examination or when learning new tasks at work – you can make the job quicker and easier by deliberately employing visual techniques wherever you can. You can enhance your memory power generally using graphical techniques, using the sorts of shapes and pictures you have met through the book

Memory systems

Most popular memory systems have a strong visual element. This usually involves symbols, such as numbers or letters, but images or pictures play a special part. Pictures in this sense include well-established visual memories that are part of your life experience. You can associate these with new sensory inputs (including things you want to remember) to help you to remember them better. Pictures on paper, rather than just in the mind, play a far smaller but still significant part in popular memory systems. However, as we have seen, they can be applied to note-taking, giving a presentation etc, the purpose of which, in each case, is to aid memory.

As used in memory systems, a letter, number or any symbol is just a shape. In some cases such as O, T, U and X, letters are very common shapes that we come across every day in such things as road signs. Although they figure in words and language, these are just simple shapes or graphics. Until letters become a word, they don’t have the disadvantages of words and language over simple pictures when it comes to remembering.

For instance what comes into your mind (other than the first letter of a word such as a person’s name) when you see the following symbols? That is, if these were not alphabetical letters, what might each bring to mind?

                                                                                                   C H I J L O S V X

The mind pictures that these symbols conjure in your mind are useful in various memory techniques. So-called ‘peg’ systems are a case in point. Numbers, for instance, can be associated with picturable ‘things’. For example:

♦ One – bun	♦   Six – sticks
♦ Two – shoe	♦   Seven – heaven
♦ Three – tree	♦   Eight – gate
♦ Four – door	♦   Nine – wine
♦ Five – hive	♦   Ten – hen.

These use rhyme as the association, and it is unlikely that you or I would choose all the same associations, even when aiming for a rhyme. In fact any ‘picturable association’ can be used to help memory. As a rule the first that comes to your mind is usually the best. Put another way, the first thing you ‘remember’ is easiest to remember. In a technical, brain sense, it means making best use of existing, dense networks of synaptic, electro-chemical connections and the lifetime of multi-sensory images they contain.

Numbers are harder than words, or even letters, to remember for many people. However, if you associate the number 1 with a bun, 6 with sticks etc, you can link numbers, or the numerical order of events (first, second, third), with things that are far easier than numbers to remember – things you can see or picture in your mind.

Let’s say you need to remember a list of ten things. This is like remembering prizes in a game show (cuddly toy ...) or remembering the shopping without a list.

Choose your own random list to test the system. Here are ten things that came to my mind at random:

1. moth	6. Cadillac
2. tree	7. wallpaper
3. potato	8. coffee
4. mountain	9. cardboard box
5. pullover	10. dictionary.

How would you remember this list by using the above bun, shoe, etc peg system?

First, everything in your list is picturable, because it is a thing. (For the moment you don’t have to remember nominal, abstract things like discretion, favour, or desire – words or names that you can’t see, feel or hear, or put in a wheelbarrow.)

Second, your peg list is also picturable: you can visualise a bun, a shoe, a gate and so on. All that remains is to put two little pictures together so that you associate each with the other. In this example you would associate a bun with a moth (item number 1), sticks with a Cadillac (item number 6) and so on.

Go down the list of things to remember and associate them in some way with the peg word. For instance you might see a bun filled with moths, a moth delivering buns to the baker, a moth eating cream buns and so on. The secret is to make die visual association, or imagery, as vivid, bizarre or unusual as possible. In other words, as memorable as possible. Once you’ve thought of a bun full of moths it is hard not to associate a moth with a bun or a bun with a moth. That means you cannot help but remember – which is the way it should be. Memory is something we do experdy all the time with never a conscious thought. It’s only in specific, ‘conscious’ memory situations, such as revising for an exam, preparing for a speech or remembering the names of a group of people that we need to adopt the sort of visual systems that we use unconsciously so well.

It is important to really see your image internally. It is hard to think of an association in a conceptual or abstract way and implant it in your visual cortex. So it will be hard to remember. A visual image needs to be strong if you are to remember it.

Fortunately you can make an image strong and memorable by noticing its colour, size, movement, clarity or fuzziness and any visible details. If any of these characteristics don’t grab you, you can intensify them, by exaggerating the colour, size, movement and so on. For example, you will probably remember a half-ton mouse with a green tartan waistcoat better than a standard little grey-brown rodent. Details also help. For example you can notice little antennae on your mental moth and sesame seed on the bun in your brain, and so on.

In practice most people can visualise strong, graphic images in a couple of seconds, and this innate skill lends itself to high-speed memory work.

Proceed down the list and make an association in each case. As with other techniques you have already met for getting creative ideas, the first idea that comes into your mind has special value, however silly or inappropriate it may seem.

It is your first association. It is literally the first thing that comes to your mind. It follows that your mind will easily make the same association in the future when you need it without doing anything more. The association was, in a sense, already there.

You do it quicker.

It’s faster than waiting for a second or third choice. Having said that, once you have the basic association, or mental link, you can embellish using memory principles, such as making it more bizarre and memorable. That makes it even easier and quicker to remember. Thus, if you instinctively imagine a Cadillac with sticks (item number 6) rather than wheels, you can make the sticks six feet long, see the car walking on its sticks and so on.

The association, rather than the things themselves, makes the memory link. The unforgettable element makes it unforgettable. You can make a mind picture as bizarre as you like.

So far so easy. How then do you remember the random list of ten items? First, you can easily memorise your peg list in minutes. The fact that there is rhyme makes it even easier, but your visual powers are more than enough to remember the list for life. For instance, you might simply associate two with two shoes and three with three trees. Then your door might have a house number 4 on it, your hive could be pentagonal – five sided – and so on. With a few minutes’ time and effort you will memorise the list, which you can then use repeatedly, for life, for any memory feat. In no time it becomes impossible not to associate a number with its peg image. Try it. Make whatever association you like and try to forget it by tomorrow.

You can immediately check out your memory power. Just go down your peg list. As soon as you think of bun (1), you will think of a moth. The instant you think of a shoe (2), you will think of a tree, and so on. Pictures are powerful memory aids whether in your mind or, as we have already seen, when transferred to paper.

Remembering numbers

You can also use a peg system to remember numbers. Let’s say you want to remember your new cash card Pin which is 3688. The equivalent peg pictures are:

♦ tree (3) ♦ sticks (6) ♦ gate (8) ♦ gate (8)

Check back to the peg list earlier if you need to remind yourself where these words have come from. To establish a memory all you need to do now is link these together in a sort of story or chain of events. For instance, a tree chopped into sticks to make two gates. To make the initial connection when you need to draw cash, your tree can be a cash tree sprouting ten pound notes.

Stories are even easier than individual images to remember as they take on special meaning. We each experience sequences of events or ‘stories’ each minute and hour of our lives so we get good at it.

The secret is meaning. Something that has meaning to you is easy to remember. The meaning, however, does not have to be logical or rational. Rather, it has to be picturable or imaginable or, more specifically, amenable to sensory – all five senses – representation.

The idea of meaning or sense is fundamental. Even the most bizarre dreams have meaning, or significance, in the context of our unconscious mind where they take place. The physiological changes that accompany them, like sweating and calling out, as well as REMs (rapid eye movements) confirm that part of our mind doesn’t treat them lightly. So the most stupid story lines are fine for memory purposes. Indeed, were it not for the fact that dreams happen outside of waking consciousness our conscious minds might be overwhelmed by thousands of literally unforgettable experiences. You can only recall those that slip into your conscious mind (on wakening – and perhaps just for fleeting moments). You in effect reregister them in your conscious mind. The bottom line on remembering is:

This applies to remembering anything, including numbers. I have illustrated this technique with a four-digit number. In fact you can memorise a number of any length just as easily. Simply create a longer story line. An individual digit can repeat itself in a longer number. You simply give the standard number association a different role in the storyline. That’s easy. You can imagine a tree or a gate, for instance, in a hundred situations, any one of which could form part of your memory story line.

Even the most sceptical ‘memory like a sieve’ people are amazed at their ability to use mind pictures in this way. And you get both quicker and more efficient with practice.

Other memory techniques

The bun-shoe-peg system is just one example. Other systems apply different objects/things to each number. If you wish you can create your own. The associations do not need to rhyme. The chances are that there are things you already associate with each of the numbers from your own lifetime experience so, provided you can count from one to ten, you have nothing, or precious little, new to actually remember.

You can use pictures in other important ways to help your memory. We have already seen how useful shapes such as a wheel and spokes, or a tree-type hierarchy can be. These apply in note-taking, preparing a training session or other presentation, revising for exams – any situation where you need to use your memory to the full. You can also incorporate shapes, icons and simple pictures within these spatial formats to make remembering even easier. The trick is to choose little pictures that already have strong associations for you personally. In other words, you have nothing to remember.

As we saw, you can also label files – or anything – with simple pictures or icons. They are used extensively in computer software, and can speed up recognition in the same way as a company logo.

Some memory experts visualise a familiar room or building and use the various objects in them as memory pegs on which to hang whatever they want to remember. Once you have associated each item you want to remember with a familiar object (a settee, picture, fireplace, table, cat basket or whatever) in a familiar position, you just need to do a mental circumnavigation (clockwise or anticlockwise) to trigger the association and hence the items to remember. The same rules of silliness and humour apply to associations. Each location becomes the bun, shoe or tree of the earlier peg system.

Organising to remember

Your brain organises or pigeon-holes information into subjects or categories so that you can quickly allocate any new sensory input to a familiar slot. Things have meaning to you once you incorporate them into your personal, mental filing system.

By forming otherwise unmemorable words into a simple shape that has meaning – such as a tree with branches – you can immediately make them easier to remember.

Here are two sets of words. Which would you find it easier to remember?

Set 1

Pine elm pansy garden wild banyan plants delphinium conifers dandelion redwood palm ash violet daisy tropical chestnut flower spruce lupin buttercup trees deciduous mango willow rose

Set 2

Most people would choose the second set. You might not remember them all but you would probably score quite well. That’s because the words form a structure or shape that reflects a special meaning. Most importantly a simple pattern, such as a hierarchy or tree shape, can be pictured more easily.

The first set of words can form an equivalent hierarchy of meaning (have a go), but until you can picture them in that way they will be hard to remember without a special technique such as the peg system you have just met.

Pictures add a dimension of meaning that words alone cannot achieve in communication. We saw this earlier in the way a well-designed flip chart or OHP can communicate even complex concepts when pages of words would only confuse. The same advantages apply to remembering. In fact the power of pictures is a feature of the way we think. A gripping novel can communicate effectively and at the same time is memorable. But in this case you remember the inner pictures and feelings you create as you experience the story yourself, rather than a hundred thousand words comprising hundreds of thousands of character-symbols that have no meaning other than as words and symbols.

Unfortunately we don’t get as excited about most of the sorts of information we need to remember, as we do by a gripping novel. That’s when pictures help in bridging the gap between none-too-exciting words and your brain’s memory system, based as it is on sensory – especially visual – representations. When it comes to flying, we learn from birds. When it comes to swimming or sailing, we learn from fish. When it comes to remembering, we learn from what little we know about human memory, mind-pictures and all.

As you become more confident at drawing and using pictures you will realise new ways in which you can communicate better, enhance your memory and be more productive and fulfilled as a person.