Improve your Memory with Mnemonics and the Roman Room

Remembering things is difficult. If you have a creative but untidy mind, it's even harder. Important facts slip like sand through our fingers. Ridiculous movie dialogue lodges in our souls like an embarrassing venereal disease that's impossible to get rid of, but nitty-gritty details like pin numbers or topic structures for essays disappear in a drift of smoke.

Isn't it time to tweak your memory so it doesn't just collapse like a jenga tower when you most need it? This is where mnemonics come in.

The word "mnemonics" comes from the Greek mneme ("memory") and mnemon ("mindful"), and the Greek goddess of Memory was Mnemosyne (pronounced "ne-mos'-i-ni"). So mnemonics is simply being mindful of your memory - learning how to memorise things more easily. It was first invented by the Greeks for memory-training 2,500 years ago and it's still used today. Those ancient Greeks were damn clever because mnemonics are ideal for people who are more creative than organised, or for people with disabilities like dyslexia - or even ADD - who have to find their own ways of absorbing information.

Mnemonics (pronounced "ne-mon'-ics") basically uses symbolism (storytelling techniques, cute little rhymes, creative imagination in all its forms) to break information down into a story that we can picture and remember way more easily than some boring, random string of numbers or words.

Why bother improving your memory, anyway?

It's a fair question. Mobile/cell phones remember phone numbers for us. We only need to remember essays for one exam and after that? It's archived on the internet, which is just a touch away and stores more for us than our brain could ever compete with.

The thing is, it's better not to be too reliant on anything that isn't yourself. Because anything that isn't yourself is something you essentially no control over. In the face of some huge disaster, mobile phones and the internet may not work anymore, but your brain will be with you as long as you are, and you are its captain.

Technology is making us partially de-evolve by eroding our attention spans. Not so long ago as a culture we used to be able to memorise poems, essays, you name it. But films and commercials are getting faster and more brightly-coloured - they're like crack for the mind, aiming at sensory overload, so we get a speedster thrill but the information is coming at us so fast we're losing the inclination and potentially the ability to store it.

It's up to us to use the abilities we were born with and practise using our minds when we can, not just being force-fed 'super' abilities like 'remembering' 300 telephone numbers thanks to our cellphones.

Improving your memory can be fun - like taking your favourite lyric and reciting / singing it over and over until you're word-perfect. You can also use mind-tricks, called mnemonics...

Mnemonic Exercise 1 - Use mnemonic rhymes to remember rules

You can use rhymes to order information in your head. Turning life's rules into a little rhyme can really help if you want to remember them.

"Never Eat Shredded Wheat" will help you remember which way is east on points of the compass, for example.

Or "Richard Of York Gained Battles In Vain" shows what order the rainbow colours of the spectrum go in.

Some alcohol can be drunk in order to minimise hangovers (think of wine, beer and spirits as separate forms of alcohol) so this mnemonic rhyme can help anyone who has a habit of mixing their drinks:

"Wine after beer makes you feel queer
but beer after wine makes you feel fine!
"Beer on whisky? Very risky!
Whisky on beer, never fear..."

Mnemonic Exercise 2 - Remember pin numbers and telephone numbers

This mnemonic exercise is especially good for remembering telephone numbers and pin numbers. It's so much easier to remember a string of numbers once you devise system of drawing the numbers as little pictures then letting those pictures become a story that will help you remember the sequence of the numbers. Once you've invented these number-pictures you have a mnemonic system you can use again and again to remember numbers. Hurrah!

A) First, you need to turn the numbers 0-9 into a picture that suggests the shape of a number. Here's our mooky mnemonic example:

0 - tunnel/hole
1 - magic wand
2 - swan
3 - ass (that's ass-bottom not ass-donkey)
4 - boat (think of the sail)
5 - smiling fat lady
6 - cherry
7 - cliff or table
8 - spectacles/glasses/robber mask
9 - We gave up. Maybe you can think of something that looks like a 9. Balloon on a stick maybe? Pamela Anderson seen from side-on? Or just never memorise any numbers with 9 in...

B) Now, let's say your bank card has the pin number 3274. Invent a story that has, in sequence, the images of a bottom (3), a swan (2), a cliff (7) and a boat (4). If you make it funny or rudey-pudey you'll have less chance of forgetting it.

Our story would be: A cruel, horrid man bumming (having anal intercourse with - best wishes, the English Mooky Eds xxx) (3) a swan (2) on top of a cliff(7) where no-one is around to see him. The swan bravely escapes by jumping off the cliff, and fortunately lands in a boat (4) so it can make its getaway.

Exercise 3 - Remember lists of names and words with the Roman Room

Do you ever need to remember a list of items, but don't have a pen and paper on hand? Using the Roman Room trick, you can remember a great many things. Basically, you make a room in your mind. Mentally, you go to your room and look at it every day to make sure you remember everything. Whenever you want to remember a new item, you change something in your room, and when you revisit that room in your mind, you'll remember that item. Here's how to make this work for you.

1. Create and memorize a room in your head. Make it as big and beautiful as you wish. Smaller rooms are easier to remember, but big rooms work too.

2. Test yourself by making a list of 10 words to remember tomorrow. For example, consider the following list:

* a shoe
* a dog
* a desk
* the date 12/09/1990
* a cow
* your Grandpa Billy Bob
* a turkey
* $20 you owe your landlady
* computer
* eggs

3. If you want to remember all these things, just change things in your room in ways that will remind you. You can add an ugly shoe pattern to the walls, have a barking dog on your couch or table, put an elaborate desk against the wall, write the date on the frame of a famous painting on the wall, put a picture of a fat cow on the wall, have Grandpa Billy Bob eating sloppy joes on your new white carpet, have a Thanksgiving turkey on the dining room table, have your landlady standing there yelling with a bill in her hand for $20, a broken computer on the floor, and eggs smashed on the door. These are all just ideas - you can use anything you want to memorize.

4. Try to remember your whole list the next day. If you didn't remember some of it, it could be because you didn't make the change noticeable or memorable enough. If you just wrote the date on the wall, you won't remember it, but if you wrote it in big neon pink letters on the bottom of the Mona Lisa, you'll have a better chance of remembering it.

5. Review your Roman room regularly, until you know it like the back of your hand. That way, when you make a change, it'll stand out, just the way if somebody made a drastic change to your bedroom, you'd notice immediately.

# Try not to memorize a huge list all at once. Take baby steps, gradually moving up.

# Try to find someone else willing to learn this technique with you.

# This exercise may have originated as a Buddhist meditation. You can find this entire exercise in the book "Path Notes of an American Ninja Master" by Glenn Morris.