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 need to memorize information in a sequence for school or work? Do you always forget which US president came after James Buchanan?
Your brain has a natural affinity for associations. The Memory Book shows you how to use this skill to connect sequential pieces of information. This enables you to remember a full list of words in their original order.
Read more to learn how to memorize lists and use this skill in real life.
How to Memorize Lists
A fundamental memorization technique involves remembering sequences of information using image-based association. According to authors Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas, we always use association to commit things to memory, often subconsciously. In other words, we remember things in relation to each other, meaning we can recall anything if we link it to another piece of information we already know.
Lorayne and Lucas’s advice for how to memorize lists entails four steps. Let’s take a look at each, with several examples to help you grasp the techniques and put them to work.
(Shortform note: The associative nature of our memories starts at the cellular level—according to Foer in Moonwalking With Einstein, our brains are made up of a web of interconnected neurons. Physiologically, memories are arrangements of connections between these neurons, so no memories exist in isolation. To retrieve memories, we must search for pieces of information by thinking about other things that are connected to them in this neural web of associations.)
Step 1: Start With a List of Words
To practice this technique, you’ll first need a list of words. These can be anything, but Lorayne and Lucas suggest that nouns and verbs work best because they’re the easiest to picture. Your list can be as long or as short as you want it to be. For example, we’ll start with five words: moon, pencil, coffee, running, and cloud.
(Shortform note: If you have trouble thinking of a list of words or you want an extra challenge, consider using a random word generator to create your list. Many websites have settings that allow you to choose the word type, so you can limit it to verbs and nouns as the authors suggest. You can also choose the number of words you want the tool to generate.)
Step 2: Create a Strange Mental Image Connecting the First Two Words
Once you have your list, Lorayne and Lucas instruct you to begin memorizing the list by connecting the first two words. Do this by creating a mental image that associates the two words, specifically an image that’s illogical, strange, or silly.
(Shortform note: If you want your mental pictures to be memorable, there’s one element of them that you perhaps shouldn’t imagine in an unusual or illogical way: color. In one study, psychologists showed participants images of nature in black and white and in color. Later, they also showed images with natural colors and some with unnatural colors. Participants were able to remember the naturally-colored images the best, suggesting that there’s a link between our memory system and the world’s natural color makeup. If colors are too strange, our brain classifies them as unimportant and won’t retain the information we visualize with those colors.)
This association technique takes advantage of your brain’s visual-based memory and its tendency to remember unusual things. Coming up with a silly, illogical image also prompts you to consider the information closely, creating your foundational memory of it. The clearer you imagine your strange or silly association image, the more strongly you’ll commit it to memory.
Furthermore, Lorayne and Lucas suggest incorporating action into your mental image, as actions are easier to remember than static pictures. For instance, to create your association for the first two words on our example list from Step 1—moon and pencil—you might imagine that the moon has grown arms and is waving around a giant pencil.
(Shortform note: In Brain Rules, John Medina explains that visual aids for learning (like our unusual, active mental pictures) often involve action and motion because of how we evolved. Many predators that threatened the survival of early humans moved quickly, so our brains became highly adept at detecting motion. Thus, we pay close attention to moving images and are more likely to remember them.)
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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
