How to Memorize Anything - Time to Prepare

Memorizing anything is one of the most important skills to have in your arsenal. It has been shown that people who are more skilled at memorization tend to be more successful, and it can even improve memory later on in life. The only downside? Memorizing takes a lot of time and effort (as you might expect). Luckily, there are ways around this! These methods take practice too, but they will get you started off on the right foot by increasing fluidity between short-term and long-term memories.

Memorizing anything is a difficult task, but with the “how to memorize easily” article, you will be able to remember more than ever.

Ron White, a two-time USA Memory Champion, has written a guest article for us.

What if you could play a card game with your friends and remember every card that was dealt? You certainly can.

What if you met a customer today and saw him at a football game six months later and remembered his name, as well as his wife’s and children’s names? You certainly can.

What if you could stare at a 50-digit number for 90 seconds before memorizing it and repeating it forwards and backwards? You certainly can.

So, how do you get to this degree of memory mastery? You’ll be surprised at how much information you can retain if you use a basic mental mapping approach.

Here’s how to get started:

Pick five rooms in your house or business to work on.
Number 5 significant things in each room. These things should be numbered from 1 to 25. The first item in the first room is #1, the second room’s first item is #6, the third room’s first item is #11, and so on. Consider the following scenario: 1. desk, 2. bed, 3. television, 4. dresser, 5. computer… toilet-6. bathroom Window number seven, shower number eight, sink number nine, towel rack number ten, and so on. Keep in mind that this is only an example. You should arrange your furniture in such a manner that it flows around your space.
Repeat the forward and backward pronunciations of these pieces of furniture and their respective numbers until they become second nature. These pieces of furniture will be referred to as “files.”
Now, if you want to remember anything, make an image of it and envision it interacting with this piece of furniture.

Let’s imagine you want to remember all of the Super Bowl champions. After you’ve remembered your files (pieces of furniture), the next step is to create a picture of anything you want to remember.

As a result, you’d be looking at something like this:

Packers of Green Bay
Packers of Green Bay
Jets of New York
Chiefs of Kansas City
The Baltimore Colts are a professional football team based in Baltimore
Cowboys of Dallas
The The Miami Dolphins are a professional football team based in are a professional football team based in
Miami Dolphins
Steelers of Pittsburgh
Steelers of Pittsburgh

It must be a picture that you can visualize in order to remember anything. It could be difficult to recollect the number 593787, for example. A picture album with a coffee cup, on the other hand, would be simple to recall. That is the image I created for 593787. Let’s start with converting the football teams into images, which is a lot easier than turning 593787 into a picture.

What do you think the Green Bay Packers’ future holds? Perhaps in the form of packaging. It’s simple to come up with a logo for the Jets–imagine an aircraft jet. An Indian chief comes to mind while thinking about the Chiefs. The Cowboys would be a cowboy, while the Colts would be a horse. When working with groups, this is really rather straightforward.

This is when things start to get interesting. Take each of these photographs and mentally position them in chronological order around your 25 files. Imagine someone packing a box on your number one file since the Packers won the first Super Bowl. To apply the previous scenario, imagine someone packing a box on top of your desk. The more action/emotion you can include in this picture, the more likely you are to remember it afterwards. Packaging might be found on your second file or on your bed. On your third file, you envision a plane landing or crashing through your television. Imagine an Indian chief sitting on your dresser for your fourth file.

You’ll need at least 45 files to remember all of the Super Bowl wins, but that’s simple enough to do mentally by just picking additional rooms in your house (or other buildings and selecting 5 items in each). You should be able to recall the numbers of your files quickly since you are putting 5 files in each room.

If you have 4 files in one area, 6 in another, and 9 in another, figuring out who won the 15th Superbowl may take a minute. If there are five people in a room, though, it is extremely simple. Simply mentally move to your home’s 15th file, or the final object in your third room, and you’ll see it being looted by robbers, indicating that the Oakland Raiders won Super Bowl 15.

Now, anytime you want to recall the whole list of teams, all you have to do is mentally go through your home, looking at each piece of furniture–and its matching team–as you pass through each room.

This method may be used to remember anything, including 50-digit figures, corporate presentations, book chapters, college coursework, product information, and even sports team champions.

Good luck with your memorization!

Listen to Nelson Dellis, a memory champion, talk about how to improve your memory in this podcast:

Ron White (not the cigar-smoking, scotch-drinking comic; he does compose his own jokes) is a two-time USA Memory Champion who held the record for memorizing a deck of cards in the United States for two years (1 minute 27 seconds). Perhaps you saw him on Stan Lee’s “Superhumans” on the History Channel. Visit MEMORY TRAINING COURSE for more information about Ron White’s memory training technique.

Memorizing anything is difficult. However, there are some tricks that can help you memorize faster for exams. One of these tricks is to create a mnemonic device. Mnemonics are words or phrases that help you remember information in an easier way. Reference: how to memorize faster for exams.