Anyone can be taught anything if they are inspired enough to pay attention – the key to remembering it is firing up the imagination

I first encountered memory techniques just after leaving secondary school. I’d been struck down by an illness, and had to spend a few months in hospital. Needing a project to escape the boredom of the ward, I was unable to resist diving into memory techniques when a friend brought me a book called Learn to Remember by Dominic O’Brien (the “eight-time world memory champion”, I was reassured to learn).

I still recall the delight at realising how simple and intuitive the ideas within it were. Enhancing your memory is first of all enhancing your imagination, O’Brien explained. You remember better by making things more memorable. Your memory – your capacity to learn, in other words – is, according to O’Brien, personal, improvable and much more interesting and colourful than education or traditional concepts of memory (such as it being akin to a warehouse or computer) might lead you to believe.

Within weeks of beginning the book, my skills had reached a level sufficient to attract a small crowd of nurses to my bedside for demonstrations of minor memory feats. Perhaps inspired by such attention, by the time I emerged from the ward a couple of months later, I had become a great remembering enthusiast. I continued practising and experimenting with the techniques through the studies that followed, and within a couple of years I would meet and compete against my inspiration, O’Brien, at the World Memory Championships.

At the same time, I wasn’t just using the techniques for their own sake, for piping pointless mountains of data into my brain, such as the 1,000-digit numbers beloved of memory championships. I was quite clear how useful they were for the studies I was then undertaking. Even the obtuse, conceptually knotty depths of Ludwig Wittgenstein. And I wondered why I hadn’t been taught them earlier. So did my housemates, who keenly adopted lessons for their history and classics studies.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Traditional concepts of memory see the brain as a computer or warehouse of information. Photograph: Jetta Productions/Getty Images/Blend Images

How do such techniques work? In many ways, they are a collection of very simple and quite common-sense rules of thumb for making what you have to learn more memorable. This bears repeating: the idea is not to improve memory in the sense of the raw capacity to remember, as might happen if we were to grow new neurones across every area of the brain. Instead, we are looking to go about the act of learning in a creative way that does everything to make the thing being learned more memorable, more meaningful, more approachable, more personal.

So, we break what is to be learned into many small, manageable chunks, since small things fit into the brain much more easily than large ones, and bodies of knowledge no matter how great can be divided into trivially learnable chunks.

Then we connect the new knowledge actively with what we already know, since memories are connections and new info needs to find its place in the web of the mind.

We repeat what has be learned often and unpredictably, to interactively quiz the knowledge so that we don’t just “have” it, we have it at our mental fingertips.

And as a theme cutting through all of this, memory techniques encourage us to think of learning as emotional, as fundamentally connected to our curiosity and interest, as essentially personal, so the learning process is continuously fuelled with emotion and excitement around what is being learned: the core of it all.

It was clear to me that this set of ways of learning should be much more widely applied across educational contexts. And it seemed to me a no-brainer to try to spread them accordingly. They’re fun, they work, you learn much faster, you have much more control and personal engagement in how you do your learning. What’s not to love?

I was promoting the techniques in schools, running workshops and giving talks in more than 200 secondary schools across the country. I still return annually to Brighton Hill school in Hampshire, whose headteacher, Chris Edwards, has driven quite amazing results in a formerly struggling school.

Even a decade ago, however, the objection frequently came up that maybe this whole knowledge thing was out-dated, what with Google, and what we really needed in this world was “thinking skills”, so skipping the whole information-absorption stage. If kids could just look the stuff up on the internet, why bother their valuable brain tissues with actually knowing anything?

This picture of learning is quite appealing if you think of the brain as a computer, and memory as a mere database set apart from the more interesting forms of cogitation such as language, and I’d love schools to excite the philosophical imagination in their charges as much as the next person. But the mind doesn’t separate knowing and thinking, perceiving and memory: it’s all intermixed. It’s not possible to think without knowledge, it’s not possible to speak without vocabulary. We can substitute human brainpower for tech, as when we use an automatic translation device between us and, say, a Greek speaker we meet on our travels, but this simply turns the Greek world English – it doesn’t allow us to perceive and experience Greek. That requires our brains to be involved.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Why remember things when you can Google them? Photograph: Alamy

In schools, I find memory techniques helpful for getting youthful brains around subjects as diverse as biology, history, mathematics and English literature.

It was seeing the success of such techniques on language learning, however, that led to my founding with friends in 2010 a service called Memrise, which now counts almost 40 million users learning languages across the world.

And while the expression of memory techniques in language looks quite different to how they work with facts, the underlying principles are the same: to make the most of the human nervous system, and deliver learning experiences that resonate with the learning mind, making the language more memorable and meaningful, and so enjoyable to learn.

All of this comes back to the old quote by Samuel Johnson: “The true art of memory is the art of attention.” Anybody can learn anything if they’re inspired to pay attention to it. And so our interest and curiosity is the first step to learning, and there are techniques for making that easier. Give them a go!

Memory techniques

Mnemonics

With mnemonics, we use our imagination to build bridges between what we know and what we don’t know with wordplay. So, let’s say we want to learn the French word déguster, which means to taste or savour. Déguster sounds a bit like disgusting. Imagine someone tasting something disgusting, such as the faeces of a colleague. “Ewww, dégusting!”

Try making similarly memorable links between these words:

Chatouiller (shat-wee-eh) – to tickle.

Lécher (lesh-ey) – to lick.

Vider (vee-day) – to empty.

Tirer (tee-ray) – to shoot.

Manquer (mon-kay) – to miss.

Narratives

Facebook Twitter Pinterest So here it is ... Slade had a Christmas No 1 in 1973. Photograph: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

The mind loves nothing more than a good story. To learn any collection of items that exceeds five or six, it often helps tremendously to arrange them into a mind-friendly narrative. So much of our cognition is premised on our storytelling prowess, it’s almost shocking.

So, for this exercise, have a go at linking the names of the Christmas No 1s from the 1970s into a story. Beware of taking yourself too seriously, as the story is unlikely to make much sense, but it’ll nonetheless, with a bit of luck, be fairly memorable:

Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)

Long Haired Lover from Liverpool

Merry Xmas Everybody

Lonely This Christmas

Bohemian Rhapsody

When a Child Is Born (Soleado)

Mull of Kintyre / Girls’ School (double A-side)

Mary’s Boy Child – Oh My Lord

Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)

Chunking

Try breaking this intimidatingly long word into chunks, and build from one to the next, from one syllable all the way up to the whole collection, saying the words out loud to exhibit the benefits of repetition and active recall: Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

It’s the longest word in any English language dictionary and is a lung condition association with inhaling volcanic ash. Pneu-mono-ultra-microscopic-silico-volcano-coniosis looks amazingly smaller and approachable. The magic of chunking!

Association

Let’s combine these techniques and try to remember this set of 20 numbers: 26, 93, 27, 07, 22, 85, 18, 11, 36, 63.

Find a link with each number: 26 might be the age of a footballer you know; 93 that of your grandma; 27 the age of famous musicians, such as Amy Winehouse, when they died. Find one image per person, then link them into a narrative. Push yourself to find an image, repeat and practise – and hopefully you can learn the sequence in just a couple of minutes.

• Ed Cooke is the co-founder of Memrise and the author of Remember, Remember: Learn The Stuff You Never Thought You Could, published by Penguin

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