By learning the language your mind uses, you’ll be able to tap into your mind’s full potential and develop a remarkable memory. It’s easier than you think - and you’ll actually have fun doing it.
Your Mind Thinks in Pictures
Along its evolution, the brain has become amazingly effective in dealing with sensory data. It is by correctly interpreting the five senses that the mind understands the environment and takes decisions.
Among the human senses, sight has become the most sophisticated and developed of all. For that reason, our brains have become extremely effective in storing and processing images; especially of concrete, real-world objects. Trying to memorize abstract symbols, such as words printed on a page, is very unnatural and inefficient. Words are useful units of communication created by us, but they’re not how our brains are best used to process information.
Imagery is the real language of the mind. Images are your mind’s vocabulary, the building blocks of its language.
If I ask you to think about a horse, what comes to your mind? Is it the letters H-O-R-S-E in sequence? Of course not: it is the picture of a horse – you can even tell me its color. Don’t dreams always come as images? Pictures are how your mind communicates with us, and we should take full advantage of that.
Visual Thinking and Memory
To fully illustrate the astonishing effect that images have on your memory, let’s walk through a basic memorization technique called memory pegging. If you still don’t know it, I guarantee it’s going to be fun. Just like most memorization techniques, it’s based on the concept of thinking in pictures, or visual thinking.
Before getting to the technique, let me give you a simple challenge: memorize a groceries list of ten items. Allow yourself two minutes examining the list, then don’t look at it.
- bacon
- eggs
- wine
- batteries
- bubble gum
- milk
- envelopes
- spinach
- coffee
- tomato
Learning Your Mind’s Basic Vocabulary
Just like when learning any new language, we’ll need to get some basic vocabulary to get started. Let’s begin with some very useful words: the numbers from one to ten. By bringing the numbers to our visual language, we’ll be able to use them to memorize our groceries list or any other list we come across.
There are many ways to convert a number to a picture. My favorite one is to use images that resemble the numbers’ shapes. By getting rid of abstract symbols and replacing them with images that are vivid, animated and colorful, we’ll have much better mental pictures for our minds to play with. Here are some suggestions:
- candle
- swan
- heart
- sail boat
- hook
- golf club
- cliff
- snowman
- balloon with string
- dinner plate and fork
Here’s a graphical version of the list to help you visualize the similarities:
Feel free to use different images that appeal more to you. Once you’re done creating your list, please take your time to familiarize yourself with it. These images will be our pegs and, once learned, you’ll be able to reuse them over and over again, to memorize just about anything you want.
Connecting Images
Now that we have established an initial vocabulary of images, we can memorize new ones by building associations between them. All we need is to combine both images and form a new one. Now is the time to use your imagination, because there’s only one requirement for your new image: it must be absolutely outrageous!
Make it crazy, ridiculous, offensive, unusual, extraordinary, animated, nonsensical – after all, these are the things that get remembered, aren’t they? Make the scene so unique that it could never happen in real life. The only rule is: if it’s boring, it’s wrong.
Let’s go back to our groceries list example. How do we connect the number ‘1′ (candle) with our first grocery item (bacon)?
We could start by picturing a really big and powerful candle being used to fry bacon in a fast-food restaurant. Make an effort to enrich the scene in your mind: focus on the bacon strips and take a second or two to make them as vivid as possible. If you engage the other senses, even better: smell the bacon and hear it being fried. Add some movement and wackiness: couldn’t the bacon strips be jumping in the frying pan, crying for help? Did I mention you should make it zany?
Let’s try this exercise once more, now connecting the number ‘2′ (swan) and ‘egg’.
A swan laying an egg is too obvious - it won’t work by itself. Let’s imagine the mother swan laying the egg just like a woman giving birth: in a surgery room, with other swans dressed as doctors around her. Put the father swan in the room, proudly taping the whole thing. In the end, everybody is astonished – it’s actually three eggs: triplets!!
Ridiculous? No doubt about that. Effective? You bet.
At this point, you already get the idea. At first, doing this for each item may seem like a lot of work, but really it’s not. This mental play quickly becomes completely automatic – and fun!
When the time to recall the list comes, there’s not much more to do: the recalling process is completely automatic. It goes somewhat like this: You ask yourself what’s the first item: ‘#1?’ and the image of the candle immediately pops in your mind. One split second later, sure enough, there they are: jumping bacon strips!
How Does It Compare to Traditional Memorization?
It’s time to check how well you did in our memory test. Without looking back at the original list, try to write down all the items in order. Award yourself one point for each correct word and one additional point if the word is in its correct position.
How well did you do? Most people score an average of 12 out of the possible 20. If you ask them one week later (without telling them you would), the results drop to a disappointing average of 5.
Using the pegging method, the results are mind-blowing: the usual score is a flawless 20 - even when people are asked one week later. And that is after using the technique just for the first time.
The pegging memorization technique is just a small demonstration of how powerful visual thinking is. In fact, visual thinking is behind many mind-enhancing techniques such as mind mapping and is the core component of most other more advanced memorization techniques.
Well, seems that I´m going to abandon my Pocket PC when going to supermarket. I´ve never seen this kind of technique and you bet I´ll try to use it. I wonder how this could be helpful in my college teachings. Specially now, that I´m trying to not look at my power point presentations when teaching, which is one of my worsts habits.
Thank you, my friend, for providing us such a nice technique.
The idea is good, but does not compare to my previous method, which is to make a story with the words. Or, with your idea slightly revised, paint a single picture incorporating all the items. May not be the best way, but for me, I found these quicker, and more effective.
Thanks for your comment, BT.
Telling stories is indeed great for memorization. The main difference I see between pegging each item individually from telling a story is that in the former you’re able to recall any item in random order, whereas in the latter you have to build the whole story from the beginning. If you forget part of the story, you tend to break the link and forget all the subsequent items.
But, as you say, creating a story is quicker indeed – and I know many people that have tremendous success doing it – so maybe it’s just a matter of personal preference after all.
i was having a breakfast.
it was bacon and eggs
with a teeny bit of chewing gum in a Duracell packaging
with two drinks..one was milk in a wine glass
& the other was coffee with a slice of tomato for garnishing
lo n behold..
bunch o letters arrived containing spinach..
Have you ever tried the Memory Palace technique and it’s variations? How do you compare it with the Peg & story systems?
Hi, Luciano.
Memory Palace is indeed a very powerful technique. It’s probably the most effective among the three, but I found it requires much more training to be applied successfully. That’s why it’s the most used among the memory champions.
It combines the advantages of both peg and story systems:
* You can recall items in random order (a peg system feature) and
* You can make put all items in the same context (a story system feature).
the idea behind this is very important: speak your mind’s language. however, we need to remember that not everyone thinks visually. for some people, a tactile, sound, conceptual of moving anchor might work better.
mnemonics are endlessly fascinating, aren’t they?
This is a nice introduction to using mnemonics. It’s very important to correlate the item to be memorized to some other well known item. Apparently, according to research that I have read, the mind cannot properly memorize anything without relating it to something else. That’s why the memory palace can work so well. We take something that we know very well and then relate items within that room to things that we want to remember in bizarre and fantastic ways.
That probably also accounts for why I find it so hard to do memorization for language learning. I don’t relate them to other things sufficiently well.
Hi Nick,
The memory palace is a great technique (the best, in my opinion). I will definitely explore it here in the blog.
Thanks for your comment!
The system reminds me of a book I read by Harry Lorayne.
He used a phonetic numbering system.
Though it takes a few minutes to get used to the basics it is incredibly versatile.
0 s, z, soft c “z” is the first letter of zero. The others have a similar sound
1 d, t d, t have one downstroke and sound similar(some variants include th)
2 n n has two downstrokes
3 m three downstrokes , also “m” looks like a “3″ on its side
4 r last letter of four
5 l L is the Roman Numeral for 50
6 j, sh, soft ch, dg, zh, soft g a script j has a lower loop / g is almost a 6 flipped over
7 k, hard c, hard g, q, qu capital K contains two sevens
8 f, v script f resembles a figure-8. V sounds similar. (some variants include th)
9 b, p p is a mirror-image 9. b sounds similar and resembles a 9 rolled around
Unassigned Vowel sounds, w,h,y These can be used anywhere without changing a word’s number value
1-tie
2-Noah
3-ma
4-Rye
5-Law
6-jail
7-cow
8-Ivy
9-Bee
10-toes
The versatility of the phonetic system is once you get longer sequences of numbers it is easier to create images to remember them.
For example a phone number.
613-894-7894 can become Madam- viper - cough - pair
The visualization becomes a madam dressed in a gown of vipers that are coughing out pairs.
The added benefit is that you are often creating new images, which in it self is a great mental exercise.
Great Topic.
Hi Rob,
Thank you so much for the detailed comment — I really appreciate your time in crafting it.
Using a phonetic system is indeed great for memorization, especially for big numbers as you say. You can even go further and link different images in a story. That way, you can, for example, memorize many phone numbers using the same “visual context”.
Great phonetic vocabulary, by the way! Thanks!
I have used the pegging method for years but used the system of rhyme/numbers to set up the memory process. Again you use a crazy story attached to each number/rhyme word. Also try to invoke the use of other senses besides sight. Here is the list of the first 5 numbers and their stories.
1. run- picture a horse running around a race track with the item you want to remember on it’s back, imagine the sound of hooves hitting the track, people screaming
2, zoo- Monkeys in a cage at the zoo chattering and throwing the item you want to remember through the bars at you.
3. tree- Item you want to remember hanging on Christmas pine tree, smell the pine
4. door- Wreath on a door containing your item to remember
5. dive- diving into an ocean of the item you want to remember don’t forget the sound it would make.
You can see how this goes.
Annie: Thanks for outlining your system.
Many people in comments (both here and in the ‘Memory Palace’ post) have asked for a memory technique that works better with people that are ‘less visual’. Although the rhyming system also ends up in images, the triggers are based on hearing the sound of the word — and that certainly works better for more auditory people.