Mark Channon and Paul Duncan led an excellent session here at SxSW Interactive on a number of tools used to improve your memory in everyday situations. I thought I would just recap their tricks, I know I need work at remembering names so I am looking forward to putting these into practice.

Mark and Paul were both from the BBC and they demonstrated their memory prowess, Mark managed to memorize 30 random numbers on the spot and recall them back to us. They talked about how we have different types of memory, iconic memory which lasts about 100ms, short term memory lasting about 10 seconds which holds about 7 items and finally working memory which is a combination of short term memory plus experience. The trick to remember things is to be able to associate or file them with pictures or locations and put them into your long-term memory. The key was to use imagination and association! Their strategies were:

1)      The Link System – which is to take exaggerated ideas linking them to specific information. So tell yourself a crazy story and have each item be a trigger for a specific piece of information. Their example went from having Cruella DeVille riding an emu to a number of buffalos playing pool. Each trigger word was the name of a bar in Austin, not too shabby!

2)      The Mental Filing System – This is about assigning objects or words to items or places in a mental filing system. They suggested using a room you are sitting in (roaming room) by picking an item on the wall, then in the corner, then the door, etc. and assigning the information you want to remember to each item in the room.

3)      People’s Names – Their suggestion for remembering names was to, get the name and assign a picture to the name (Brian would be a brain, or Rich would be a pile of money, etc.). Then you put the picture on the person’s face assigning it to any unique feature about that person or just picturing the item or assigning it to the face.

4)      Memory Maps – The idea here is to build a memory map, see the picture, for ideas and concepts. You can assign pictures and more easily remember the map if you build with relevant words and only use one word per branch.

Let’s hear it from the readers, what additional techniques do you use to help you increase your memory and improve your ability to remember ideas?