Memory, and not the children's game.

Dorkman

I have a horrendous memory. Bad enough that I have had issues both in my professional life and in my current relationship, and I need some help.

Now, anytime I Google about this issue, I get overwhelmed with $19.99 self help tapes and resources that all seem incredibly sketchy. Anyone have any clue on how to actually help out someone's memory? I try to make a habit to write things down at work and always have a coiled notebook on my desk, however the issue is that half the time I either forget to write things down, or forget I wrote I did write something down and don't act on it. All in all, incredibly frustrating.

So yeah, how do I cram more stuff in that noggin of mine!

Hewn

When I was teaching high school and tennis classes, I had to memorize names pretty quick to not offend students. The best way I found to do this, and is pretty common, is to come up with some wild association in your mind.

So say you meet a guy named Jim Brown. Easy to forget, no doubt. You then might imagine something outlandish that comes to mind, like Jim riding a humongous brown bear. Suddenly Jim Brown has a very vivid image attached to him, and your likelihood of remembering him has increased tenfold. Now even this isn't foolproof if you have to meet and entire room of people at once, or studying an entire manual of text. But over time you'll find yourself being able to recall those passing acquaintances or events a little easier.

For more substantial tasks, the only real trick is repeated familiarity. The more times your eyes pass over something or you think about something, the more likely it will stick. The reason folks can list off an entire football team, but can't list 20 historical figures is that the football team passes their eyes at least once a day when they check their fantasy team. Or hear it on the radio or TV. The point is, the more you are exposed, the more likely you are to retain.

Finally, when you want to remember something, take a moment to actually think about it. Like the outlandish riding a bear Jim trick, force yourself to take a moment to remember what it is that you want to retain.

Hahnsoo1

Any time you remember something, you aren't accessing that memory like a computer accessing a hard drive, you are actually recreating it from whole cloth. The more times you "recall" it, the easier it becomes to recreate it (the more distorted it gets, too, since you are actually recreating it rather than accessing it, but I digress). Memory experts actually recommend taking notes AFTER you experience something you want to remember rather than during the experience, so it forces you to recall that information when you are writing it down. Any time you have some important information to write down, note it immediately, but don't go back to those notes (they help form the memory by engaging another sense, but it won't help you with recall). Make a brand new note after about 10-15 minutes. This is probably the most organic way of improving your ability to recall right off the bat.

When you study a particular thing, don't go for long bursts of several hours. At most, engage in an activity for 1 hour, then an hour later, come back to it and review the same material. This forces you to recall it at a distant time, making the recall easier.

Also, when learning things, try learning them in a multi-disciplinary fashion. The more variety and more methods of attacking the information you have, the easier it will be to recall it.

Get plenty of sleep. This is important. Your brain filters the information of the day during sleep. You can't form permanent memories without it.

The other memory trick is association. Most memory tricks depend on thoroughly memorizing a specific list of cues, then when you need to remember something like a number, you attach the information in question to a cue. I know folks who memorize a list of 20 vivid and descriptive objects, then any time they need to remember, say, a name to a face, they just attach the name and face somehow to the first object together, then the next name, etc.

ihmmy

How do you learn best? From people explaining things, from reading stuff, writing stuff, seeing maps, watching a video on how-to? If you can figure that out, you can use that medium (or something similar to it) to note important things. I have a pretty bad memory too, for things I'm just told in particular, so when my boss is giving me a task I pretty much always note it down. Personally, I learn best by writing something (bestest by hand, second best by typing), and reading something is a close second to the learning/remembering system for my brain, so the whole note-system works really well for my brain. If you can figure out what learning style is best for your brain, then you can adapt that to help improve your memory (or at least to a system of tracking important things more efficiently)