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 for school or work? Or, do you just wish you could remember people’s names and what’s on your shopping list?
The Memory Book by Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas is a collection of strategies intended to teach anyone how to improve their memorization skills and recall nearly any kind of information. They provide three effective memorization techniques you can use to remember lists, abstract information, and more.
Keep reading to learn three of the book’s techniques that you can put to work for you.
Effective Memorization Techniques
We’ll explore three of Lorayne and Lucas’s effective memorization techniques in detail: how to remember sequences of items using image-based association, how to create stand-in words to make abstract items easier to remember, and how to apply those techniques to remember full ideas in sequence.
(Shortform note: Lorayne and Lucas’s instructions for memorization techniques follow a mostly linear progression: Each technique builds upon the last. We’ve broken each technique into specific steps to add additional clarity and logical flow.)
Technique #1: Remembering Sequences Through Image-Based Association
The first fundamental memorization technique involves remembering sequences of information using image-based association. According to Lorayne and 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.
The following steps will show you how to use your brain’s natural affinity for associations to connect sequential pieces of information, enabling you to remember a full list of words in their original order.
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.
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.
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.
Step 3: Form Connections Between All of the Words
After creating your association image between the first two words in the list, repeat Step 2 with the rest of the words. The authors state that the second word must be associated with the third, the third with the fourth, and so on.
For example, returning to our example list of words, your next task would be to create a silly mental image associating pencil with coffee. You might picture brewing a cup of coffee with pencil shavings instead of coffee grounds. Then, you’d associate coffee with running. Maybe you’d imagine a cup of coffee with legs running away from you when you try to drink it. Finally, you’d imagine something that connects running with cloud. This could be a runner who’s made out of clouds or someone running in the sky on a path of clouds.
You can repeat this step for a list of any length, as long as you take the time to form a clear, strange, and dynamic mental image between each pair of items on the list.
Step 4: Practice Frequently
Use the above steps to remember items in any list in their correct order by simply following your image associations down the list. According to Lorayne and Lucas, the best way to become better at this technique is to practice it frequently.
Try creating your own list of words and developing original associations between them. Practice recalling the list in the correct order. As you exercise your imagination over time, it’ll become easier to create silly mental pictures, and your recall will require less effort.
Technique #2: Using Stand-In Words to Remember Abstract Information
Lorayne and Lucas assert that you can also apply the skill of creating associations using silly images to remember abstract information: information you can’t readily picture in your mind. However, as we mentioned previously, the less tangible information is, the harder it is to recall. Therefore, you must add a step to associate the abstract information with neighboring words in a list.
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.
For example, say you’re trying to remember these street names in sequential order: Brosius Street, Courtney Street, and Durango Street. You’ll likely have trouble picturing anything specific for Brosius, Courtney, and Durango on their own, but you can use the sounds in the street names to come up with alternatives that are easier to visualize.
For Brosius Street, your stand-in phrase might be, “Bro, see us!” Picture a group of young men yelling the phrase while trying to get the attention of their friend. For Courtney Street, picture someone falling on a tennis court and hitting their knee. For Durango Street, imagine someone looking up at the sky and asking, “Where’d the rain go?”
Step 2: Connect the Stand-In Words or Phrases Through Silly Image Associations
Once you have a stand-in word or phrase for each item in the sequence you wish to remember, create associations between the list items as you did with Lorayne and Lucas’s first memorization technique. Associate each pair of list items by developing silly mental images that connect their stand-in words or phrases.
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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
