How to Memorize Anything

Because of my recent geography craze, and for other reasons too, I’m focusing a lot these days on memorization. And frankly, memorization is something I’m pretty damn good at. (I’m allowed to say that here – it’s my blog!)

Here are the best strategies I’ve found.

Memorizing Lists

A few years ago, for no particular very good reason, I memorized the first 500 digits of pi. Really. I could sit down and rattle them off, “3.14159265358979…” without looking at anything.

When you say “I memorized the first 500 digits of pi,” it sounds hard, and also insane. On the other hand, saying “I know the phone numbers of 50 friends” sounds a lot more reasonable (or at least it did, back before cell phones remembered it all for you). Yet it’s the same total number of digits, if you include area codes. Why are the phone numbers so much easier?

First, because you break it up into groups. Each phone number is a group of ten digits, and is  broken into three more subgroups in the format (nnn) nnn-nnnn.

The grouping helps. A lot. I split up the 500 digits into blocks of 100, and split those blocks into 10 lines of 10 digits each, and for each line, I broke it down into three or four little groups.

But grouping alone isn’t enough. I also created mental pictures and stories, which are a lot easier to handle than raw digits. For instance, if two lines in a row both began with 8, I’d imagine that the 8’s were round-bodied, big-headed people, and I’d call those two lines the Land of the Big-Heads. (Some people claim I live in that land myself.)

Then if one of the subgroups in those lines is “543,” I imagine it’s someone counting down to a bomb exploding, and now I’ve got a Big-Headed Terrorist. Another subgroup is “727,” which I imagine is like a smaller version of a 747 (I know nothing about planes), and…well, okay, terrorists and planes is turning into a sensitive subject – which I didn’t try for on purpose – but you know what? It’ll stick in your brain.

Anyway, you can see how this goes. Break into groups, create stories or pictures to tie it all together, repeat.

Memorizing Unfamiliar Terms

I made it all the way to the National Spelling Bee in seventh and eighth grade. The latter year, I placed ninth in the country. I was on ESPN and everything, in all my awkward geeky glory.

They give you a book for the spelling bee, a list of about 3,000 words. Almost all the words for the school, county, and regional bees come straight from that book. So to get to nationals, the strategy’s simple: memorize 3,000 words.

Some of the words were easy, but many (syzygy, teledu) were so obscure they might as well have been a foreign language. (The Firefox spellchecker doesn’t recognize them either, but trust me – they’re English!) How do you deal with gibberish like that?

To learn something unfamiliar, first, make it familiar.

There’s a lake in Russia called Lake Baikal. It’s the oldest and deepest lake in the world. I remember the name by thinking of it as Lake “Bi-Call,” that is, two calls: one call to tell someone it’s the oldest lake, another call to say it’s the deepest. Bam: I not only remember the name, I get some information too.

The capital of Kazakhstan is Astana. The biggest lake in Kazakhstan is Lake Balkash. So if I go to Kazakhstan, I’ll use my American baseball skills (HA!) to do a “ball-catch” (Balkash) and the locals will be “astonished” (Astana).

You can do this with pretty much any weird-sounding word.

Memorizing Anything

The theme in my examples above is that rote repetition is not enough. If you try to memorize hundreds of digits by just saying them again and again, you’ve got a long, hard road ahead of you.

The brain remembers things best when you use them in multiple ways. If you think about stuff from several angles (not just an 8 but a person, not just Balkash but ball-catch) the brain automatically decides it’s more important and remembers it better.

This works even if you don’t use any of the little games I mentioned above. For instance: the capital of Suriname is Paramaribo. I don’t have a trick for that one. But I went on Wikipedia and read about Paramaribo, and I learned it’s one of the most diverse cities in the world. It was formerly an English colony and a Dutch colony. From the pictures, it looks like a cool place to visit. Just those extra few minutes, turning Paramaribo from a nonsense word into a real place, makes it much easier to recall.

I should add that, although repetition alone isn’t enough, repetition is still crucial. Use the data in different ways, but also, use it a lot. Each iteration makes its hold on your brain a little firmer.

So, that’s me. What about you? What techniques have you found for memorizing things?