We talk a lot about LIEs—Limited Ideas Entertained—and how they hold you back. These are the things you tell yourself, both consciously and unconsciously, that can derail your motivation and disrupt your ability to move towards your goals.
It’s important to remember that you are always listening to your self-talk. If you tell yourself you aren’t good enough, your brain will look for all the reasons that LIE is true. This is largely thanks to a part of the brain called the reticular activating system. The RAS is a network of neurons that direct your behavior, attention, and focus—among other functions. If you’ve ever purchased a new car and suddenly noticed the same make and model more frequently than you did before, that’s the RAS at work.
When it comes to self-talk, the RAS picks up on your inner dialogue and will then direct your attention and focus on whatever you’re telling yourself. If you believe you don’t have a good memory, every time you forget something, your brain will pick up on that moment and direct your focus on it. While this is all happening faster than you could consciously control, you can redirect your focus simply by changing what you tell yourself.
One of the biggest LIEs people tell themselves is that if you’re not born with a good memory, there’s nothing you can do about it. Maybe you accept that you’re forgetful, making jokes about it to friends and colleagues. Or, maybe you try to improve your memory but every time you fail, you tell yourself it’s because your memory will never improve. Every time you see an instance of your bad memory, you’re reinforcing the LIE.
Genetics only play a role in memory but they aren’t the star of the show. Biology determines roughly one-third of your memory capabilities. This means two-thirds of your memory is entirely under your control. The first step is to redirect your self-talk so that you can start finding instances of how your memory is actually improving. But there are eight principles of recall that can help guide your attention and help you unlock your limitless memory.
1) PRIMACY
The primacy effect is a cognitive phenomenon where you’re more likely to remember information that you learn at the beginning of an event or series. Think about memorizing a list or going to a party. The items that are first on the list or the people you first meet are easier to remember.
Part of this effect has to do with repetition. As you go through the list, or recall your evening, the items and people that were first are repeated more often. It also had to do with how alert you are. You’re probably far more focused when you sit down to study or first arrive at a party. Your attention is heightened and you’re making an active effort to be engaged, which means you’re far more likely to store the information so that you can recall it later.
2) ORGANIZATION
Your brain is constantly sorting and organizing information in order to learn more effectively. When you learn something new, your brain utilizes semantic networks which work to process and store visual and linguistic information into easily accessible groups. For example, instead of learning every word individually and on its own, you would learn that chair and table are both pieces of furniture. You build your knowledge base in a way that makes it easier for your brain to store and retrieve based on what things are associated with.
You can use this process to make it easier to remember key pieces of information or even randomized words. Say you were given a list of words: duck, hotel, pineapple, garage, tiger, lemon, library, melon, owl, park. If you were able to group the words into categories—fruits, animals, and places—it would be far easier to remember the words. Any words that didn’t fit into a specific group would be organized as different, which would also help them stand out for better recall.
You can also use chunking to organize information. When you memorize a phone number, you use this cognitive trick by breaking the nine digit number into sets of numbers, typically into chunks of 3, 3, and 4. The more you can organize information into groups, whether it’s people, places, things, numbers, etc., the more likely you’ll be able to remember more than if you tried to memorize the information individually.
3) UNIQUENESS
Memory is built on the familiar. The more you do something, the more likely you are to remember it. But there are a lot of things that you want to remember, that may not be familiar to you. Rather than build a road to familiarity through repetition, you can make that memory stand out by attaching something unique to it.
If you went to a presentation and the host walked out wearing a chicken suit, you would be far more likely to remember the event as a whole. It’s unique and unexpected. And while you can’t always make the things you’re studying or striving to remember unexpected, you can make them stand out by associating them with something different or peculiar.
This requires a bit of imagination, but the effort will compound two-fold. The time you spend making the word or name or task memorable, is helping embed the importance in your memory, making it easier to recall later. And the unique variable allows you to access that memory, that much faster. In addition, figuring out how to make mundane information unique is a fun way to exercise your brain, helping your critical thinking and problem-solving skills stay flexible as you age.
4) RECENCY
In the same way you’re likely to remember the first items on a list, you’re also more likely to remember the last—or more recent—items on that same list. Part of this is due to how your short-term memory functions. It’s able to hold small amounts of information for short periods of time and studies have shown that even with distractions, subjects are able to recall the most recent pieces of information given to them.
Think about when you attend a business seminar or are in a lecture. You already know that you’re the freshest at the beginning, but you are also likely to perk up towards the end. The information presented will stay fresh in your mind and the people you meet are going to stand out longer.
One way to use this cognitive function to your advantage is by using shorter study periods or allotted work time. The more brain breaks you take while learning information creates more primacy events and more recency events. This increases the amount of information you’re likely to remember long-term.
5) EMOTIONS
Being able to remember key pieces of information was essential to our evolution. We had to remember what foods were deadly, what routes were dangerous, and what animals to watch out for. As a result, events tied with strong emotional responses encode far more vividly in the brain.
Memory is primarily associated with the hippocampus, but studies have found that the amygdala also plays a role in how memory is stored and retrieved. When your emotions spike, the amygdala releases a spike of adrenaline, which alerts your brain that something important is happening. This sharpens your attention, making it far more likely that you’ll not only remember the exact event or piece of information associated with that emotion, but also the things that happened afterward.
You can use this when studying or focusing on key items that you need to recall by tapping into your emotions. Can you exaggerate your grocery list to the point of absurdity? If remembering these items makes you chuckle, you’re going to remember them when you think back. Does someone remind you of a favorite relative? Maybe you associate a flower with a funeral, or a song reminds you of the last time you saw a good friend. The more you can link an emotional response with something you want to remember, the easier it will be to recall in the future.
6) FAMILIARITY
Memory isn’t an isolated process in your brain. As you learn, your brain builds networks of neurons that make it easier to understand and remember various pieces of information in a cohesive way. For example, as you’re learning to talk, language isn’t a series of individual words that you remember, but a plethora of context that helps you understand sentences as a whole.
When it comes to learning new pieces of information, if you can tie the information to something familiar, you’ll increase your recall abilities. For example, if you meet someone new and they have the same name as your sister, you’ll remember her name. Maybe a new procedure reminds you of a process you learned in school, or someone’s house is in a similar neighborhood to the one you grew up in.
What you’re doing is creating a cue to trigger your memory. You remember the name of the woman you met, because the cue is your sister. And the more familiar you can make it, the stronger the recall. You can practice by learning how to tie new pieces of information to people, places, and concepts that are familiar to you. Think of your favorite color, song, movie, book, and link those concepts to new ideas.
7) VISUALIZATION
Sometimes, it’s easier to remember something new if you can visualize a picture. Take the periodic table, for example. Hydrogen and helium may be strange words when you’re first introduced to them. But visualizing hydrogen as water and helium as a floating balloon can help give you a vivid picture that helps you remember not only the words, but how they’re defined.
Let’s use the periodic table again as an example. Picture a red fire hydrant with so many giant balloons tied to it, that it starts to lift it from the ground. Suddenly, batteries start flying up and popping the balloons. You look and see them coming out of an enormous barrel. And leaning on the barrel is a bright surfboard. The key elements of the story are hydrant, balloon, battery, barrel, board. And the first five elements on the periodic table are hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, and boron.
This technique is particularly effective with concepts that are abstract and difficult because it forces you to actively create a visualization for each concept as you’re learning it. The extra focus you put on creating the image, reinforces the idea in your memory, and helps lock it in.
8) ASSOCIATION
One of the oldest memory techniques uses association as a way to remember lists, speeches, passages, and more. It’s called the method of loci, or the memory palace. It works by associating an item, piece of information, or concept with a specific location that you use to associate the memory with.
It’s similar to the story method we used in visualization, but rather than create a narrative from the ideas, you use an order of places to remember the information. You use parts of your body, elements in rooms of your house, or a route you run every day as locations to trigger specific memories. Using a kitchen, for example, the microwave would be first, the oven second, the sink third, etc. You then walk through the room with a specific memory associated with each place to trigger your memory.
Association can also be used in other, more physical ways. Studying in the same place that you would take the test in helps associate learning with that specific classroom. Practicing for a recital or a play on the same stage you perform will help cement your routine in your memory that much stronger. If you aren’t able to learn in the same place, you can use chapstick, perfume, chewing gum, or a specific piece of clothing to help trigger your memory.
Conclusion
No one is born with a bad memory. There’s simply trained memory versus an untrained memory. Once you stop believing the LIE that you have a bad memory, you can start improving by using these techniques in your every day life. They can be used individually, or you can combine them for even better results. Practice visualizing while adding hilarious exaggerations, link ideas to familiar concepts, and be sure to take a lot of brain breaks. When you understand how your memory works, you can work your memory, and unlock your truly limitless potential.
