What to do
We’ll begin by sharing some general tips for more successful memorising and recall, starting with the encoding phase, then storage, and finally retrieval.
Take FOUR steps to encode more effectively
You can’t remember information that you don’t encode properly in the first place. To encode effectively, you need to do four things: Focus, Organise, Understand and Relate.
Let’s revisit that situation at the networking event when a useful contact told you their name:
- First, focus your attention on it – think about it as you hear it and repeat it to yourself. You might spell their name in your head or imagine handwriting their name on an envelope.
- Next, organise how that person and their name fit into your world. Think for a moment about who they work for, where they come from and where you might see them again. Considering this information will lead to a more detailed encoding.
- Next, make sure you understand how to pronounce the name and that you can picture how it’s spelled. If you can’t, ask to hear it again or ask how it’s spelled.
- Then, relate the name to something you already know – perhaps a friend or an actor shares the name or perhaps it reminds you of something else. Note the association and your reason for it. For example, if his name is David, you might picture him with a slingshot fighting Goliath. This will further deepen and strengthen the encoding process.
This may seem like a lot of work, but that’s the point! Durable memories don’t come easily. Putting in this effort to remember the person’s name tells the brain that this content is important to commit to memory.
Like with most things, practice will help you do these steps more easily. You might find it useful to practise in a low-stakes situation, such as while watching a movie or TV show – use these steps to see how quickly you can memorise characters’ names, pausing the show after a few scenes to test your memory.
You will probably also find that you don’t have to execute these steps perfectly to see large improvements in your memory. If there is a nametag or badge, it may not be appropriate to ask how to spell someone’s name, and perhaps you really can’t think of something to relate the name to; still, if you can think about the name’s pronunciation, silently repeating the name to yourself a few times, thinking about something it rhymes with or noting which syllables are accented, there is a good chance you will be able to bring the name to mind later.
These FOUR steps are useful for remembering all types of content. Want to remember where you left your phone? Focus on your actions as you set it down, organise your memory for its location by looking at what else is around it, understand why you chose to set it in that location, which may also include relating it to something else. Perhaps you will note that you are setting your phone on the table near the couch because that is where you’ll be sitting when you use your phone in a few minutes to call your friend. Or perhaps you will note that you are putting your phone in your bag rather than your pocket because you are about to go outside in the rain and you think it will stay drier in your bag.
Test yourself
One of the best ways to create a durable memory is to refresh that memory every so often, and one of the best ways to refresh the memory is to quiz yourself, making yourself rebuild your memory structure. This principle applies to any information you wish to retain in your memory, but let’s take the networking event as an example. After leaving the event where you met many people, quiz yourself on the names as you drive home, and then quiz yourself again the next morning. Quiz yourself again in a day or two; once the names are coming to mind easily, you can reduce the frequency of the quizzes, but still refresh them at least every couple of months. Put in calendar reminders for these quizzes, and be sure to follow through with them. By doing so, you’ll greatly increase the chances that you can remember all those names when you see people the next year.
Adopt a lifestyle that benefits long-term memory
Once you have successfully encoded information into memory, the best way to optimise your storage of that information is to adopt a healthy lifestyle. Top of the list: get a good night’s sleep! Sleep is a critical time for memory storage: when the brain isn’t being bombarded with daily events, it has the opportunity to get those blueprints clearly written, ensuring that the important moments from today can be remembered tomorrow.
Getting a good night’s sleep is especially important soon after you’ve learned important information – so try not to stay up very late right after that networking event, or after a long day spent studying for an exam, as the sleep deprivation will make it harder for you to remember all the information. If you know that you will be experiencing sleep deprivation – perhaps you have to catch a late-night flight after the networking event – be sure to rehearse the learned information again the next day, and then get a good night’s sleep after you’ve rehearsed it.
Keeping your brain and body healthy is also critical for long-term memory storage. Aim to engage in regular aerobic exercise to benefit your cardiovascular health. This is any kind of exercise that increases your heart rate, such as walking, running or swimming. This will improve blood flow to your brain, benefiting memory storage. Exercise also stimulates growth hormones, including one (brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF) that is important for growing new brain cells. One of the parts of the brain most sensitive to the effects of this growth hormone is the hippocampus, the part of the brain most important for episodic memories! Also, aim to eat a Mediterranean menu of whole foods. You can read more about recommendations for good brain health in this earlier Psyche Guide.
Relax to increase your chances of remembering
If you’ve followed our advice up to this point, then most likely the information you wish to remember is encoded and stored in your brain. Those blueprints exist, and now you just need to bring them to mind at the right moment. For instance, as you see the person from yesterday’s networking event walking toward you, you need to be able recall their name.
Unfortunately, there are two things many people do that can make this seemingly easy task become much harder. First, when the information doesn’t immediately come to mind, people often get anxious. You might find your palms grow sweaty as stress hormones flood your body and brain. This stress response is an evolutionary survival strategy, which makes your mental resources laser-focused on right now. This focus on the here and now makes it easier to encode the stress-relevant parts of what’s going on (which is helpful if you’re in danger), but unfortunately it’s harmful to memory retrieval – which is not great when you’re trying to recall a person’s name or some other piece of information.
So, when you’re trying to remember something, try to relax. Easier said than done, we know. But, over time, you can learn strategies that work for you to dial down your stress response so that it won’t interfere with your ability to retrieve desired content from memory. As a first step, you could try some deep breathing, a brief mindfulness exercise or imagining a calm scene.
If you get stuck, use retrieval cues
The second common but unhelpful strategy people use is to try to generate every possibility. In the tricky name-retrieval situation, you think it started with a C, or an S, so you start generating every name you can think of that fits those criteria. We recommend you avoid doing this because it can actually block the information you’re looking for and make the retrieval process harder. It’s as if you’ve put a magnifying glass over some blueprints, enlarging their representations in the brain. But if you haven’t chosen the right one, you’ve simply made it harder to find the actual blueprint you’re looking for. This process also explains why the name or other information you’re seeking so often springs to mind once you’re no longer trying to generate it. Once you stop putting the magnifying glass over the incorrect blueprints, your brain is able to do its job and pull up the blueprint with the correct information.
To help your brain, instead of generating all the possibilities, give yourself general retrieval cues – these are contextual details that can help home in on the correct blueprint. For instance, in the case of remembering a person’s name, think about where you were when you last saw that person, what you talked about, what outfit they were wearing, or whatever general details come to mind. These details are all contained within the memory blueprint that you’re searching for and so, by bringing them to mind, you make it easier for the brain to find the right blueprint. Once you’re pointing your magnifying glass on the correct blueprint, it increases the likelihood that you find the information you’re looking for.
Remember faces by making them distinctive
While the strategies we’ve discussed so far will help you with many situations, they may not always be sufficient. Perhaps you’re attending an event where you will be meeting many new people. Or perhaps you’re a student attempting to memorise a large quantity of information before an upcoming examination. Fortunately, there are more specific strategies that can help in these situations.
With these strategies, practice is key. The more you use these strategies, the easier and more automatic they become. You may not find them helpful the first few times you use them but, as you get more comfortable with them, we bet you’ll appreciate their utility more.
Faces are especially difficult to remember because they are distinguished by relatively subtle differences in features. So, if you’re meeting a number of people at once, it can be quite important to make each face as distinctive in memory as you can. Without that distinctiveness, your memory for each person will blur, making it difficult for you to remember who is who the next time you see them.
An effective way to enhance the distinctiveness of a face in memory is to find a facial feature that is likely to be stable over time (so don’t focus on someone’s glasses or hairstyle). Make a mental note of the feature, and connect it to something else about the person. If you can connect it to their name, that’s great! But it’s also OK to connect the feature to their profession, hobby, child’s name or any other information that you already know about the person. It doesn’t matter if these associations are silly or bizarre and make sense only to you (in fact, that could help). What matters most is that they’re memorable, so that the next time you see the person, you’ll notice the facial feature and it will bring back the other information you’ve associated with it.
For example, one of us (Elizabeth) has a set of moles on one side of her face that are arranged in a way that kind of looks like a constellation of stars. To connect her face to her name, one of her students imagined a Ken doll as a singer, standing on a stage with a big star. The student was quickly able to recognise Professor Kensinger outside the classroom and to recall her name.
Use a memory palace to remember lists of information
The tips we’ve outlined so far will work well to ward off many everyday memory failures. But if you’re encountering information in large quantities, you may need to use other strategies. One of the strategies that has stood the test of time is referred to as the ‘memory palace’ (or method of loci). It involves imagining a place you’re highly familiar with – such as your home or office building – and then planning a route around that location, anchoring information you want to remember along the route.
When you want to recall the content, take a mental walk along your planned route, seeing the route and the associated items in your mind’s eye. While recalling your route may take some effort the first times you use this method, with practice, it will become fairly effortless, allowing you to put all your energy into placing the objects along the route and rediscovering them as you later take your mental walk along your familiar route.
You can do this to remember many different types of content. For example, for a shopping list, you could imagine tripping over onions as you enter your front door, seeing spilled milk as you enter your living room, and so on, with the rest of your journey continuing past all the items on your list.
Or for items to remember when leaving for school in the morning, you could envision your daughter’s soccer cleats sitting on a bench outside your office building and her uniform hanging on the light post by the garage, and so on.
This strategy can be especially helpful if the order of information matters. Let’s say you needed to remember to pick up a book from the library before taking your grandson to karate practice, you could picture the book in the first location you’ll pass on your mental journey and your grandson’s yellow karate belt in the second location.
With practice, you can expand the number of locations you use along your route – you might begin with multiple rooms and a couple of hallways along a familiar interior route; once that route is effortless to navigate, you can add routes within each room, stopping at multiple pieces of furniture in each one, and extend the route to outdoor spaces as well. The more you use this strategy, and the more you rehearse your routes, the easier it will become to hang more and more information along each route.
