As you throw back another egg nog, mulled wine or other variety of sickly

Christmas cheer, save a thought for the brain cells that take a hit with each
swig. Your memory might not fare so well the morning after, but thanks to
these tips from England's eight-time World Memory Champion and author
of How to Develop a Brilliant Memory Week by Week Dominic O'Brien,
there are a few things you can do to improve it in the future -- or at least,
give the impression you remember the night's events. This man can recall
a binary list of 2,385 digits, so pay close attention.

1. The Link Method

To remember a list of words or shopping items make a link between each
of the objects. For instance, with Torch, Grapes, Ring, Sherry, imagine
shining a Torch on a bunch of Grapes. Inside one of the Grapes you see a
Ring sparkling with diamonds. As you squeeze the grape, the ring falls into
a glass of Sherry.

2. Acronyms
Use extended acronyms to remember a series of data by creating a fun
sentence. For example "My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming
Planets" gives you the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto.

3. Mental Pictures
Turn data such as facts and figures into pictures. Arctic or Antarctic? If you
think of looking up at an arch and down at an ant you'll never confuse the
two again.
4. The Journey Method
To remember a list of information, choose a familiar route or journey,
maybe around your house, to picture each item on the list.

To remember a sequence of numbers -- say, 1024337864 -- you could

also choose a route around your house, to picture each number pair. By
picturing David Cameron at my front door, an alarm clock in the hall and
two blackbirds flying up the staircase, I can remember these three pairs of
numbers easily: 10, 24, 33.

To add more pairs of numbers, just extend the journey: in my bedroom I

hear an old 78 record and in the bathroom Paul McCartney is in the
shower singing "when I'm 64".

5. Remembering to spell
correctly
Accidentally or Accidently? Turn tricky words into scenes to help you
remember correct spellings. Picture an accident in an alley... accidentally.

6. The Rule Of Five

To avoid information gradually fading from your memory banks it's
important to know when to review information. Apply the "Rule of Five":

First review : Immediately

Second review: 24 hours later

Third review: One week later

Fourth review: One month later

Fifth review: Three months later

7. PIN Numbers
If you can remember your name, you'll never forget your PIN number. Just
make up a memorable sentence and count the number of letters in each
word. For instance: "My name is Dominic": 2 4 2 7; or "This number is
secret": 4 6 2 6.

8. The Story Method

To remember a group of information, create a story which links them all
together. In chemistry the Noble gases are: Helium, Neon, Argon, Krypton,
Xenon and Radon. Imagine taking off in a Helium balloon lit up with a
Neon light. An Argon welder turns into superman who takes you to the
planet Krypton, and so on.

9. The Body System

This works by associating parts of the body with key images of whatever it
is you want to remember, like a to-do list of things.

Let's say you have to buy cheese, eggs and a bottle of milk.

Picture cheese on your head, an egg balanced on your nose and a bottle
of milk on your shoulder.

10. Healthy Body, Healthy

Memory
Exercise and diet can help to maximise the effects of memory.
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Gently raise your heart rate with daily physical exercise and include foods
rich in antioxidants as well as vitamins A, C and E.

Oily fish such as salmon contains folic acid and omega-3 oils are ideal for
maintaining a healthy brain and nervous system.

Quick Test
By using the memory tips outlined, see how many of the items in the
festive list below you can remember. First, choose a location that is
familiar to you such as your home, your place of work, your hometown or a
nearby park. The idea is to use this location as a backdrop for a short
journey consisting of a series of places or stops along the way. The places
are then used to mentally store items of the list you wish to memorise. The
route you take will preserve the natural order of the list, assuming, that is,
that you don't forget the journey or the stops along the way.

Try positioning them along a familiar route around you house and garden
or down the street:

Mistletoe

Smoked Salmon

Santa Claus

Holly

Brandy Butter

Snowman

Turkey

Stocking

Xmas Tree

Chestnuts

How many of those items can you now recall in the correct order?
You slide the key into the door and hear a clunk as the tumblers engage. You rotate
the key, twist the doorknob and walk inside. The house is familiar, but the contents
foreign. At your left, there’s a map of Minnesota, dangling precariously from the wall.
You’re certain it wasn’t there this morning. Below it, you find a plush M&M candy.
To the right, a dog, a shiba inu you’ve never seen before. In its mouth, a pair of your
expensive socks.

And then it comes to you, 323-3607, a phone number.

If none of this makes sense, stick with us; by the end of this piece you’ll be using the
same techniques to memorize just about anything you’ve ever wanted to remember.

The “memory athlete” Munkhshur Narmandakh once employed a similar

combination of mnemonics to commit more than 6,000 binary digits to memory in
just 30 minutes. Alex Mullen, a three-time World Memory Champion, used them to
memorize the order of a deck of cards in just 15 seconds, a record at the time. It was
later broken by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh, who did it in 12.

We’re going to aim lower, applying these strategies to real-world scenarios, like
remembering the things we often forget at dinner parties or work-related mixers.

The Power of Mnemonics

At the start of this piece, we employed two mnemonic strategies to remember the
seven digits of a phone number. The first, called the “Major System,” was developed
in 1648 by historian Johann Winkelmann.
In his book “Moonwalking With Einstein,” the author Joshua Foer described this
system as a simple cipher that transforms numbers to letters or phonetic sounds.
From there we can craft words and, ultimately, images. Some will, no doubt, be crude
or enigmatic. Others may contain misspellings and factual errors. It doesn’t matter.
This system is designed to create rich imagery, not accurate representations.
Image

The number 19, for example, is TP, TB, DP, or DB. From those two letter
combinations, there are a host of visuals we can come up with to match words
like toilet paper, tuberculosis, Dr Pepper, or dubstep. Our visuals followed the same
logic. MN/Minnesota (32), MM/M&M (33), SH/shiba inu (6), SK/socks (07).
One could argue that, on its own, the Major System is as complicated as just
remembering the seven digit phone number, or perhaps more than. That’s why you’ll
often see memory athletes combine the system with another mnemonic, like the
“method of loci,” or MoL.

The method was first developed in ancient Greece, but popularized

in “The Art of Memory,” by Frances A. Yates, in 1966. Also called a
“memory palace,” MoL involves placing items throughout a familiar
place. In this case, your home. Mr. Foer in his book suggested
walking through the front door and then letting your eyes gaze from
left to right, top to bottom. In our example, we started with a map,
placed a plush figure below it, and then a dog with a pair of socks in
its mouth.

Seven digits, though, is child’s play. Gary Shang once used MoL to memorize pi to
65,536 digits.

How Mnemonics Work

In an evolutionary sense, our memory hasn’t quite become a powerhouse for
nonvisual information. Early hominids had little need to remember dates or phone
numbers. They did, however, require an acute sense of what times of the year were
best to plant crops, what flora were edible, and when they might need to pack up and
move to keep pace with nomadic food sources.

“From an evolutionary prioritization perspective, I think most of this comes down to

gating mechanisms we have in place for denoting and ‘tagging’ incoming stimuli as
important for the continuation of our existence,” Nicco Reggente, Ph.D., a cognitive
neuroscientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, said.

Even today, sensory representations drive memory in ways mere memorization can’t
touch. Dr. Reggente explained that this is best seen in the hippocampus, a part of the
brain that originally evolved to support movement. “In order for this movement to be
purposeful, it must be guided via prediction,” he said. “It is the same region that is
now, in our modern age, repurposed for non-spatial (non-movement based)
memories as well.”

It’s why visual mnemonics, like MoL, are so effective; we’re piggybacking on a
cognitive system that was fine-tuned over millions of years to work best with visual
and spatial representation. “Visualization is typically beneficial due to its translation
of the abstract form of the object (or concept) into a spatial medium,” Dr. Reggente
said.

How to Remember Names

Names are actually best remembered by focusing on the text as it’s spoken and then
using it immediately. “The most useful trick isn’t a trick at all,” Mr. Mullen, the
memory champion, noted. “It’s focus.”

As mnemonics go, all the experts we spoke with suggested the same technique for
remembering names. It involves singling out a particular trait of the person you’re
speaking with. For Mr. Mullen, in a made-up example, that was hair color. The trait
most noticeable about “Karen” was her orange hair, about the same shade as a carrot.
He’d then imagine Karen with carrots for hair, perhaps munching on them as they
spoke.

In the psychology world, there’s a strange example of how these tricks work, called
the “Baker/baker paradox.” After showing subjects the same photograph of a man’s
face, the researchers tell half the participants his surname, Baker, and the other half
his occupation, a baker. Days later, the subjects were more likely to remember the
man’s occupation than his name. This plays to the sensory nature of memory. Upon
hearing the man was a baker, the brain immediately springs into action, creating or
recalling vast neural networks of what we’ve associated with the title: fresh bread, a
white hat and apron, or perhaps someone standing in front of a patisserie, greeting
children with delicious sweets.

When incomplete, this sensation is also responsible for the tip of your tongue feeling
where you can’t quite recall a memory. According to Mr. Foer: “It’s likely because
we’re accessing only part of the neural network that ‘contains’ the idea, but not all of
it.”

How to Remember Numbers

For competitors, the Major System, often in conjunction with the memory palace, is
the most common way to remember hundreds, or even thousands, of numbers.

In our example, a phone number, it may have been overkill. A more useful trick is a
simple one, called chunking, you’ve been using for years without even realizing.

Phone numbers, for example, come pre-chunked. We don’t write, or recite, phone
numbers as a single digit. 3419108550 is more manageable when written, or recited,
as 341-910-8550. Credit card numbers are also chunked, as is your Social Security
number.

Mr. Foer detailed an acquaintance that had never formally been taught to chunk
information, but used the technique to remember numbers by associating them with
his hobby, running. “For example, 3,492 was turned into ‘3 minutes and 49 point 2
seconds, [a] near world-record mile time.’” For most of us, this is probably no easier
than remembering the number itself. But for a runner, it’s a different story.

Or, it’s possible to use the Major System to remember smaller number combinations,
even without placing visual representations inside a memory palace, as we did above.
The phone number 341-910-8550, for example, becomes “MRT PTS FLLS” after
consulting the chart. For me, the oddest, most memorable phrase, as Mr. Foer
suggested using, is “Mr. T pities fools.” Granted, it’s misspelled, but the image is
highly memorable.
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