The hardest thing about remembering something is remembering it long enough to remember it.

Okay, that sentence is a little convoluted, but that doesn’t affect it’s accuracy. 🙂 The hardest part about remembering something is keeping it in your head for more than a few seconds in the first place — once you can do that, you can get better and faster at remembering it by constructing new memory paths to it from all the places you need them. The more you use something, the easier it is to remember it.

I’ve had several nights in the last few weeks where I just couldn’t get to sleep, or woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep immediately. To usefully pass the time, I’ve stayed in bed and practiced memory techniques.

I started learning these as a child, when I got ahold of a library copy of The Memory Book. I’ve always found the brain and how it works (or more often, fails to work) to be fascinating, so it stuck in my head, even though I was unable to master most of the techniques at that point — I found the exercises in it quite difficult then, mostly due to an inability to concentrate on anything that wasn’t seriously and immediately interesting, caused by an unrealized medical problem.

GoddessJ has an awesome natural talent for card games that lets her remember pretty much every card that is played in a game, and when. She also really enjoys card games, so after I met her, I started playing them again too, as a way to spend time with her. It didn’t take long to figure out that I was seriously outclassed due to her memory for cards, but I recalled that The Memory Book had described a technique for doing the same thing.

I’d identified the above-mentioned medical problem at about the same time, and started getting treatment for it, so I picked up my own copy of the book and started trying to work with it again. It was much easier at that point, and I got good enough that I could hold my own against her in most games. (I seem to have a mental block when it comes to games with trump suits.) The same memory methods allowed me to do some other parlor tricks too, though not quickly enough to be really entertaining.

But back to the main story: I’ve discovered that these memory techniques let you get over that initial problem, allowing you to keep information in your head long enough to start recalling it naturally. Lists of related or unrelated things — the wetware equivalent of linked lists — are easy, with only an hour or two of practice. Things like cards or numbers, which don’t have a memorable and distinct smell, taste, color, or personality of their own (unless you have a condition called synesthesia), are harder; for those, you need to learn and practice the system that the book describes, which will allow you to make them distinct and memorable, then apply the list-making methods to them.

There’s also the wetware equivalent of the vector. As any software developer knows, a plain old linked list can only be traversed in order: if you’re at the third item in the list, and you want the 34th item, you have to step through each of the 31 items in between. And unless the list is linked in both directions, you can only traverse it forward: if you’re on item number 34, and you realize you need item 30 as well, you have to start over from the beginning of the list. A vector, on the other hand, can be accessed in any order, by index: if you know that the item you want is the 34th one, you can use these “peg words” to jump to it instantly. That’s what I’ve been practicing lately, going over the peg-word lists in my head so that I can recall them more quickly and easily.

These tricks are extremely useful, in all sorts of situations. If I’d been able to master a few of them while I was in school, I could have strolled through it with straight As, since 90% of schoolwork is really just memorizing and regurgitating facts. (Why? Because it’s easy to test — thinking ability is a lot more important, but it’s also a lot harder to teach and to test, so they mostly ignore it and hope that kids pick up enough of it to make it through on their own.)

In real life, i.e. everything after you graduate, it lets you pick up information a lot faster and easier. Tired of looking up the same phone numbers all the time? Want to learn some basic Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, or another language before you go on that exotic foreign vacation? How about just being able to use different and secure passwords everywhere you need one, and not have to write them down or worry about not being able to recall them? Want to be able to go shopping without writing down a list, and still remember everything the Significant Other asked you to get? How about just being able to remember where you put your car keys every time?

Want to keep your full mental acuity into old age? Use it or lose it, bud — these techniques are one way to use it.

And as described above, they really help with many kinds of games too, most especially card games. Cards are designed to be hard for most people to remember — beat that, and you’ve got a major advantage over practically everyone in those kinds of games, and you can pick up new ones far more easily. 🙂

Once you start using some of these memory techniques, you’ll find it rare that you forget anything you want to remember. It takes some mental effort to learn them, and a little more to apply them every time you need to, but that effort pays for itself hundreds of times over every year — in time and effort saved, and perhaps in sparing you the embarrassment of forgetting something important, like your wife’s birthday or your new boss’s name.

To sum up this rather rambling entry: work on your memory. Most of the techniques aren’t difficult or time-consuming, and they have immediate benefits in nearly every area of your life.