Memory

A good memory is fundamental to your personal identity, your sense of who you are and to your overall mental functioning no matter who you are and what you do.

Our memory course provides you with strategies to help you with your attentive memory (things that you specifically want to remember). For example,

Facts

Names and faces

Appointments

Skills

Presentation points

Your own past

Upcoming events

In addition, this course, combined with all of the other elements we cover will help you with your non-attentive memory. That is, it will help you remember those things that you don't specifically set out to remember but it would be useful to recall. For example, "where did I leave my keys?"

Tips

Two fundamental elements to developing a good memory are visualisation and association

If you want to remember something visualise it - make a mental picture of it. But use all of your senses: what does it look like? what kind of sound does it make? how does it smell? what does it feel like? Make the image dynamic. Make it move. Make it bizarre to make it even more memorable.

To be able to recall it when you want it at will you need to associate or link it a fixed structure in your mind. For instance, if you have ten items of a shopping list to remember, you could link them to the numbers 1-10 by using a peg system for the numbers 1 to 10 by rhyming them.

one sounds like bun

two sounds like shoe

three sounds like tree

four sounds like door

five sounds like hive

six sounds like sticks

seven sounds like heaven

eight sounds like gate

nine sounds like wine

ten sounds like hen

If the first item on your shopping list is, say, meat, make a mental picture of the meat you want to buy jammed between two slices of a giant bun. Imagine what it will taste and smell like. Imagine yourself actually eating it.

Now, when you want to recall your shopping list, you will know that the first item on it is bun (bun=1), and you will automatically link it to the meat you want to buy.

Try doing the same with items from a shopping list of your own. Make sure that when you picture the items you they physically linked and interact with each other. The stronger the link, the better the recall.

For much more, please see our Memory Course, which you can access here.

Module 1 - Introduction

Module 2 - A Memory Exercise

Module 3 - The Three Essentials of Memory

Module 4 - Association

Module 5 - Visualisation

Module 6 - Association and Visualisation

Module 7 - Memory Systems

Module 8 - Psychological Factors

Module 9 - Other Factors

Module 10 - Memorisation Tasks

Module 11 - Memory Techniques for Education

Module 12 - Memory Techniques for Business

Module 13 - Ongoing Practice

Module 14 - Endword