A tiny bird in Siberia is a master of memory. During the autumn months, the Siberian tit, as it is known, hides about half a million bits of food in unique storage locations.
With a brain not much larger than half a walnut, this bird that can fit inside the palm of our hand retrieves hidden stores throughout the cold, harsh winter.
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Half a million bits of food. Today, many of us have walked into a room only to forget why we did. Some of us may have misplaced a wallet or forgotten items on our to-do lists. Then again, none of these things threaten our survival — at least not usually.
For the little bird, a good memory is a must. For the rest of us, getting better at remembering can remove a bit of stress from our daily lives. Here’s a short list of five easy-to-apply neuroscience-based methods to be more of a memory master in your own life.
1: Repeat it aloud and write it down.
If you learn someone’s name or have to remember a short grocery list, a sure-fire way to make the information stick is to use repetition. That reinforces the importance of the information within the brain so the neural pathways themselves are strengthened.
By speaking and writing the information down, you force the brain to tie the information to multiple sensory modalities: motor through speaking and writing it, auditory because you hear yourself speaking, and visual because you see the words you write on a page.
You are indexing, in effect, whatever you’re trying to remember in more than one way, or giving it more than one tag in your mental card catalog. This cross-sensory processing not only means your brain has more ways to access the information at a later time, but that you’ve also forced your brain to mark it as something important.
If you need to remember the word “orange,” visualizing the taste, smell and look of oranges will make you more likely to remember the word.
Berit Brogaard, a professor of philosophy and author of “The Superhuman Mind,” told LifeZette, “You can use multiple sensory inputs to remember something. For instance, if you need to remember the word ‘orange,’ visualizing the taste, smell and look of oranges will make you more likely to remember the word.”
People with synesthesia, a condition in which the senses or sensory channels are crossed in unusual ways, have been shown to have some memory advantages. For those who see letters or numbers printed in black as having unique colors, the number 3 may be seen as green and the letter Y may be seen as purple. People with this condition often remember phone numbers and names because of their unique colors.
Although most synesthetes are born with the condition, recent studies suggest that it is possible for ordinary people to reap the benefits of synesthesia by practicing remembering sounds or letters and numbers in colors.
2: Use your nondominant hand.
Our brains are built for efficiency. We develop habits and routines so that our brains don’t have to work too hard, or necessarily pay constant attention to all the details of our lives. Over time, certain neural pathways are strengthened more than others so that attention can be conserved for important moments. We always order coffee the same way. We take the same route to work in the morning. We use our dominant hand for reaching, grasping, manipulating objects.
To force your brain out of its routine and get it to pay attention, try mixing things up by writing a list with the hand you don’t usually use, or using your nondominant hand to pick up the phone for an important call.
Breaking your “handedness habit” works to help your memory for two reasons. First, your brain has to concentrate on the task at hand more than normal. You have moved out of autonomous mode into attentional, which is necessary for memory formation. Second, handedness is the result of activation of the motor cortex in the hemisphere of your brain opposite the hand being used.
By switching hands, you are physically “switching on” the other half of your brain and creating new neural networks. At the least, this brain exercise will keep you mentally sharp.
3: Limit your lists to seven items.
Research has shown that our brains are good at remembering up to about seven things (this is why local phone numbers are seven digits long) and optimal at remembering three to four. So if you don’t want to max out your memory for all the things you need to buy at the store or that you need to do in a day, consider keeping your list to less than seven items.
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You might be thinking, “I can remember more than seven things. What about a phone number with an area code, or a credit card number!” Yes, you probably can — and you likely do it through a process called chunking.
By switching hands, you are physically “switching on” the other half of your brain.
The process is as simple as it sounds: Break your list into smaller chunks of information. Extending the phone number example, the dash breaks the longer number into two chunks of three and four digits, and the area code is an additional chunk. It’s much easier to remember (321) 654-9870, for example, than 3216549870.
In her book, Brogaard explains how we can use chunking in combination with cross sensory processing by creating mental associations for each chunk of information, then using the associations to construct a narrative. “Imagine you need to memorize a series of digits: 3142591118,” she writes. “We might divide it up as follows: 314-25-911-18… you might imagine sitting in a math class in college learning about pi (314) just before Christmas (25) when you hear about a new terrorist attack (911), this time committed by a minor, who is under 18.”
4: Use novelty to your benefit.
Novelty stimulates our brains to pay attention. In an evolutionary sense, our brains are wired to perceive new details within the environment. If something turns out to be really important, your brain wants to remember it so that you can use the information to your advantage in the future.
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The reason it is so hard to remember a specific instance of something we do every day, like breakfast last Thursday, is that it happens predictably every day. Your brain lumps these events together.
“If we can relate something to ourselves, this will aid memory.”
However, certain breakfasts might stand apart from the movie in your memory because of their differences, which at the time were quite novel and important to your brain. For instance, you might remember all the details of a particular breakfast three years ago because of a life-altering phone call that came while you sat down to eat.
Make information more memorable by focusing on the things about it that make it different, or simply make stuff up to make it unique.
“Three factors are known to enhance memory: The first is elaboration. We tend to remember things better when they are embedded in a context,” Brogaard said. “The second is distinctiveness. And the third is self-reference. If we can relate something to ourselves, this will aid memory.
“Associate (something) with a mental image that provokes a strong emotional feeling. For example, if you have to remember to buy milk, you might think of the milk as falling down from the ceiling in the kitchen, forming a huge waterfall,” she said. “Its absurdity and distinctiveness will aid memory. Or if you have to remember to buy red wine, you might think of yourself walking into your living room, where you see a blood-colored fluid and pieces of glass on the floor from a dropped wine bottle. This may generate a feeling of uneasiness, which together with the self-reference will aid recall.”
She added, “My own form of synesthesia is fear to color-shape-rotation synesthesia. I see a particular image in front of my eyes when I experience fear, even when I am not yet conscious of being afraid. I do think my synesthesia helps my memory but mostly indirectly. Having the condition means that my visual imagery is particularly vivid. So, when I use visual imagery to help my memory, I have fairly good recall because of the intensity of the visual images.”
Associating scent also helps. “I also have rather vivid olfactory and gustatory mental images (imaginations of smells and tastes) and auditory mental images (imaginations of sounds). When I associate these types of images with items I need to remember, it’s much easier for me to recognize them or recall them.”
5: Take advantage of technology.
For as long as we have been thinking humans, we have found ways to store information outside of our brains. Libraries, and now the Internet, house infinite amounts of information that we can access at our whims. Before the advent of written language, we used speech to transfer stories from one person to another.
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Anyone in a committed relationship can attest to the fact that they are “better at” remembering certain kinds of information than their partner. I am the social calendar for my marriage, for example, while my husband deals with the more technical aspects of our lives.
Now we have pocket-sized devices that can be filled with ingenious applications that can be used for remembering and reminders. A camera, voice-recorder, and calendar up in the cloud can be enough to help you remember all the things you think about, tasks you need to complete, and the people you meet in a day. You don’t need to remember everything anymore. You just need to devise a system that works for you.
Brogaard is convinced virtually anyone can become good at remembering things. “It just takes practice.”
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