This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Memory Book" by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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Do you have trouble remembering people’s names? How might you make abstract information easier to recall?
We always use association, often subconsciously, to commit things to memory. In other words, we remember things in relation to each other. So, we can recall anything if we link it to another piece of information we already know. This is particularly helpful for abstract information, which is harder to remember.
Read on to learn how to use memory association techniques to memorize abstract data.
Memory Association Techniques
It’s easier to remember information that has a concrete meaning than information that’s abstract and intangible. For example, names are often more difficult to remember than other words because they don’t have any specific image or meaning associated with them. You likely can’t form a picture of a name like “Schaeffer” by itself, but you can picture a word that has tangible meaning, like “horse.”
So, when it comes to remembering abstract information (information you can’t readily picture in your mind), Lorayne and Lucas say that you can use memory association techniques, specifically creating associations using silly images.
The less tangible the information is, the harder it is to recall. So, you must add a step to associate the abstract information with neighboring words in a list.
| The Baker/baker Paradox Along with being easier to picture visually, tangible information is easier for us to remember because we usually already have existing associations with it. In Moonwalking With Einstein, Foer describes a test in which researchers show two different subjects the same person. The researcher tells one subject that the person is a baker and the other subject that the person’s surname is Baker. Later, the researcher asks both subjects for the word associated with the person. The subject who was told to remember “baker” is more likely to remember her word than the subject who was given the name “Baker” because the profession of baker carries its own associations—the smell of bread baking, the tall hat bakers wear, and so on. (These associations also make “baker” more tangible.) In contrast, the surname Baker has no existing associations with it except the image of the person (making it more abstract). |
In the following steps, you’ll learn how to picture an abstract piece of information concretely using similar-sounding words as a stand-in.
Step 1: Create a Stand-In Word or Phrase
First, the authors instruct you to create a word or phrase that you can picture to act as a stand-in for abstract information. The word or phrase doesn’t have to match the original word exactly, but it should sound similar enough that it makes you automatically think of the original word.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Memory Book summary:
- How to improve your memorization skills and recall any kind of information
- Techniques for remembering sequences of information
- How to picture and remember abstract information
