Memory is something I’ve always struggled with. My noggin seems to have a way of pushing aside the useful and intricate in favor of a Jeopardy-like assortment of random trivia facts and a pile of $64 words of which William F Buckley, Jr. could be proud. When it comes to remembering important things, like task lists or that critical e-mail you need to send when you get back from lunch, my brain functions pretty effectively as my own worst enemy. So when I was perusing the various and sundry panel offerings at SXSWi, I was delighted to see the “Memory Matters: How Do Elephants Do It?” event hosted by Mark Channon and Paul Duncan from the BBC.

Mark and Paul are both very animated individuals, so it helped to really move the panel and make it exciting and dynamic. The pair used demonstration, interaction, and audience participation to introduce a series of mental techniques that we could take with us and start putting to use immediately. My co-blogger David Stein did a good job of describing the various techniques in his blog about this panel here, so I won’t go into them specifically, but I would like to talk about some of the basics and how they affected me.

I’m a very visual person. I am pretty effective at constructing an image in my head and holding it and rotating it and seeing it from all sides. I use this technique a lot with maps, because I have absolutely no sense of direction. So instead of knowing that I’m going north, I’m constantly rotating a map in my head to understand where I am and where I need to go. Suffice to say, this can be a bit amusing (I’m sure my wife would use “annoying”) when I get distracted and can’t get the image back.  I was delighted when most of the techniques Mark and Paul introduced incorporated heavy visualization elements, turning information into picture stories that could easily be recalled later.

The basics of a lot of the techniques were fairly simple. It involved a lot of creating pictures and assigning them to specific things, building a “picture vocabulary” in your mind. The trick to this, however, is that the pictures aren’t actually supposed to be random. Using these techniques is like learning a new language, but you’re making up the language as you go. That means that images you use in your memory language are supposed to be consistent, and then you build upon that consistent image to make each memory unique. When you look at any instance of a thing, a word, a number, or a person, the base image is supposed to be the same. Obviously, building this kind of vocabulary is time consuming, but like a language, you eventually establish a level of fluency that makes it instinctual and natural, but instead of a person, you’re communicating with your long-term memory.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you have some friends named Jessica. In your mind, you choose to associate the name “Jessica” with a porcelain doll. Every Jessica you meet, when they introduce themselves, will bring to mind that same porcelain doll image. However, one of your Jessica’s might be the party type, and so when you see that Jessica, you imagine that doll with a party hat, mardi gras beads, stiletto heels, or holding a whiskey sour. Your other friend Jessica might be more serious, so you imagine that doll in a business suit, or a nun’s habit, or anything else you associate with this Jessica. You might also exaggerate the dolls features to help remember faces, or change hair colors or styles on it, but the image of a doll would remain the same for every new Jessica you meet.

Putting it into practice after the panel, I have to say that I did see some immediate benefit, and have been able to remember more about the panel, names, and faces of individuals than I would have otherwise. Building the visual vocabulary is a long process, but in the end, the ability to absorb and recall more real data than I ever imagined will be worth the effort.

And for those of you who were there:

ball point pen, lightbulb, christmas tree, book, gorilla, beer, flux capacitor, trumpet, Tardis, and marbles…GOOD DAY SIR.