How to remember anything: lessons from a memory champion

Joshua Foer keeps a Post-it note above his computer that says "Don't forget to remember." The
author of the new book "Mookwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering
Everything" went from a man with an average memory to the official U.S. Memory Champ in
2006 by immersing himself in the world of professional memorizing. After studying the skills to
learn entire dictionaries, he became convinced that anyone could have an exceptional memory.
You just need to know certain memory techniques. Here are six secrets from his book to
becoming a savant.

Build a "memory palace": "Housing" a list of things you need to memorize is essential.

"The idea is to create a space in the mind's eye, a place that you know well and can easily
visualize and then populate that imagined place with images representing whatever you want to
remember," writes Foer. It's a method used all the way back in Ancient Rome, when orators
needed to commit their speeches to memory and when books hadn't yet become the main method
of storytelling. The memory palace should be a place you know inherently, like the home you
grew up in, or the route you take to work every day. Then take the ten things you need to
remember, like a grocery list, and plant each item in a different place in your memory palace.

For example, put "paper towels" in your parent's old mailbox, then walk inside your old home
and put "garlic cloves" on the kitchen counter. When you need to recall those items at the
grocery store, instead of remembering the words, walk through your childhood home and find
each item where you mentally placed it. It may seem like a lot of effort, but it's a process of
embedding one kind of memory into another memory. Foer explains: "Humans are good at using
spatial memory to structure and store information whose order comes less naturally." So a list of
numbers or words may be hard to remember but if you embed them in a memory that naturally
unfolds, like the blueprint of your old apartment, they'll live longer and be easier to retrieve.

Get creative: When you're "dropping off" those grocery list items in your "memory palace" it
helps to engage all of your senses. Remembering what the garlic smells like, or how the garlic
skin crumbles in your hand before you place it on your mentally rendered kitchen counter, will
help solidify where you put it. It makes sense in literal life. You're less likely to forget where you
put your keys when you focus on their texture in your hand as you're laying them down on a
table. When you need to remember where you put them, you'll remember how your hand felt as
you put them down and the image of the table will simultaneously appear. As Foer found,
engaging a sense in your memory helps solidify it.

Get colorful: "Things that grab our attention are more memorable," explains Foer. "The funnier,
lewder, and more bizarre, the better." When he was memorizing a grocery list by placing each
item in his "memory palace", Foer was advised to get surreal in his thinking. "Paint the mind a
scene unlike any that has been seen before so that it cannot be forgotten," Foer's memory coach
advised. As he memorized his first grocery list by using the "memory palace" technique" he
committed "salmon" to memory by imagining it flopping under the strings of a piano. "The
general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted
into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting and so different from anything
you've seen before that you can't possibly forget it," he writes.

Try "chunking": "Chunking is a way to decrease the number of items you have to remember by
increasing the size of each item," explains Foer. It's the reason phone numbers are broken up into
three sections or why remembering a sentence is easier than remembering each letter in the
sentence. If you are given a series of digits to remember, just break them up into parts. It also
helps to assign meaning to them. Separating them into three sections as if they were a date and
then remembering that specific date (take 021411 and rethink it as 02/14/11 or Valentine's Day),
will help solidify the memory.

Practice makes perfect: Foer made it to the memory championships not simply by learning
these techniques but by replacing them with web surfing or even reading. He'd memorize
numbers up to four hours a day before the big championship. But for the rest of us, all it takes is
about an hour a day of practicing memory techniques to get our brains working like humming
hard drives.

Wear earmuffs: We live in a world of distraction, now more than ever. In some ways those
distractions serve as our exterior memory banks. Writes Foer: “With our blogs and tweets, digital
cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means
creating a trail of always present, ever-searchable, unforgetting external memories that only
grows as one ages.”

But those same blogs, tweets and instant messages with their pinging noises and flashing colors,
make it impossible to focus on one task at hand, like memorizing a poem.  "No matter how
crude, colorful and explicit the images one paints in one's memory palaces, one can only look at
pages of random numbers for so long before beginning to wonder if there isn't something more
interesting going on in another room."  Foer found that an oversize pair of earmuffs worked to
block out exterior noise and helped his brain zoom in on one task, like memorizing a series of
numbers. But more subtle ear plugs would work just as well.
18 memory tricks
Can't remember where you put your glasses? Blanked on your new colleague's name?
"Forgetting these types of things is a sign of how busy we are," says Zaldy S. Tan, MD, director
of the Memory Disorders Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. "When
we're not paying good attention, the memories we form aren't very robust, and we have a
problem retrieving the information later."

The key, says Harry Lorayne, author of Ageless Memory: Simple Secrets for Keeping Your Brain
Young, is to get your brain in shape. "We exercise our bodies, but what good is that great body if
you don't have the mental capabilities to go with it?" Sure, you could write everything down,
keep organized lists and leave electronic notes on your BlackBerry, cell phone or PDA. But
when you don't have access to those aids, or if you want to strengthen your brain, try these
expert-recommended strategies to help you remember.

PLUS: Top 10 Tips for a Healthy Brain

Brain Freeze: "What the heck is his name?"

1. Pay attention. When you're introduced to someone, really listen to the person's name. Then,
to get a better grasp, picture the spelling. Ask, "Is that Kathy with a K or a C?" Make a remark
about the name to help lock it in ("Oh, Carpenter -- that was my childhood best friend's last
name"), and use the name a few times during the conversation and when you say goodbye.

2. Visualize the name. For hard-to-remember monikers (Bentavegna, Wobbekind), make the
name meaningful. For Bentavegna, maybe you think of a bent weather vane. Picture it. Then
look at the person, choose an outstanding feature (bushy eyebrows, green eyes) and tie the name
to the face. If Mr. Bentavegna has a big nose, picture a bent weather vane instead of his nose.
The sillier the image, the better.

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3. Create memorable associations. Picture Joe Everett standing atop Mount Everest. If you
want to remember that Erin Curtis is the CEO of an architectural firm, imagine her curtsying in
front of a large building, suggests Gini Graham Scott, PhD, author of 30 Days to a More
Powerful Memory.
4. Cheat a little. Supplement these tips with some more concrete actions. When you get a
business card, after the meeting, jot down a few notes on the back of the card ("red glasses, lives
in Springfield, went to my alma mater") to help you out when you need a reminder.

Download our Life IQ trivia game for your iPhone.

Brain Freeze: "Where in the world did I leave my glasses?"

5. Give a play-by-play. Pay attention to what you're doing as you place your glasses on the end
table. Remind yourself, "I'm putting my keys in my coat pocket," so you have a clear memory of
doing it, says Scott.

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7. Make it a habit. Put a small basket on a side table. Train yourself to put your keys, glasses,
cell phone or any other object you frequently use (or misplace) in the basket -- every time.

Brain Freeze: "What else was I supposed to do today?"

8. Start a ritual. To remind yourself of a chore (write a thank-you note, go to the dry cleaner),
give yourself an unusual physical reminder. You expect to see your bills on your desk, so leaving
them there won't necessarily remind you to pay them. But place a shoe or a piece of fruit on the
stack of bills, and later, when you spot the out-of-place object, you'll remember to take care of
them, says Carol Vorderman, author of Super Brain: 101 Easy Ways to a More Agile Mind.

9. Sing it. To remember a small group of items (a grocery list, phone number, list of names, to-
do list), adapt it to a well-known song, says Vorderman. Try "peanut butter, milk and eggs" to
the tune of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," "Happy Birthday" or even nursery rhymes.

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10. Try mnemonic devices. Many of us learned "ROY G BIV" to remember the colors of the
rainbow, or "Every Good Boy Deserves Favors" to learn musical notes. Make up your own
device to memorize names (Suzanne's kids are Adam, Patrick and Elizabeth, or "APE"), lists
(milk, eggs, tomatoes, soda, or "METS") or computer commands (to shut down your PC, hit
Control+Alt+Delete, or "CAD").

11. Use your body. When you have no pen or paper and are making a mental grocery or to-do
list, remember it according to major body parts, says Scott. Start at your feet and work your way
up. So if you have to buy glue, cat food, broccoli, chicken, grapes and toothpaste, you might
picture your foot stuck in glue, a cat on your knee looking for food, a stalk of broccoli sticking
out of your pants pocket, a chicken pecking at your belly button, a bunch of grapes hanging from
your chest and a toothbrush in your mouth.

Enhance your IQ with our new Word Power game!

12. Go Roman. With the Roman room technique, you associate your grocery, to-do or party-
invite list with the rooms of your house or the layout of your office, garden or route to work.
Again, the zanier the association, the more likely you'll remember it, says Scott. Imagine apples
hanging from the chandelier in your foyer, spilled cereal all over the living room couch,
shampoo bubbles overflowing in the kitchen sink and cheese on your bedspread.

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Brain Freeze: "What's my password for this website?"

13. Shape your numbers. Assign a shape to each number: 0 looks like a ball or ring; 1 is a pen;
2 is a swan; 3 looks like handcuffs; 4 is a sailboat; 5, a pregnant woman; 6, a pipe; 7, a
boomerang; 8, a snowman; and 9, a tennis racket. To remember your ATM PIN (4298, say),
imagine yourself on a sailboat (4), when a swan (2) tries to attack you. You hit it with a tennis
racket (9), and it turns into a snowman (8). Try forgetting that image!

14. Rhyme it. Think of words that rhyme with the numbers 1 through 9 (knee for 3, wine for 9,
etc.). Then create a story using the rhyming words: A nun (1) in heaven (7) banged her knee (3),
and it became sore (4).

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Brain Freeze: "The word is on the tip of my tongue."

15. Practice your ABCs. Say you just can't remember the name of that movie. Recite the
alphabet (aloud or in your head). When you get to the letter R, it should trigger the name that's
escaping you: Ratatouille. This trick works when taking tests too.

Brain Freeze: "I just can't memorize anything anymore!"

16. Read it, type it, say it, hear it. To memorize a speech, toast or test material, read your notes,
then type them into the computer. Next, read them aloud and tape-record them. Listen to the
recording several times. As you work on memorizing, remember to turn off the TV, unplug your
iPod and shut down your computer; you'll retain more.

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17. Use color. Give your notes some color with bolded headings and bulleted sections (it's easier
to remember a red bullet than running text).
18. Make a map. Imagine an intersection and mentally place a word, fact or number on each
street corner

The number one way to improve your memory

(Image by Think Stock Photo)

Memory loss is the single biggest fear for Americans over the age of 55. And it’s
understandable: over 4 million currently suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, and those numbers are
expected to quadruple by 2050, according to the Alzheimer's Foundation. That may be why
products promising to improve your brain function are flooding the market. Sudoku and
crossword puzzles are said to improve memory association skills, though critics believe only
when put to task by those puzzles. Ginkgo infused soft drinks line the grocery aisle, ever since
the root was suggested to combat dementia (it doesn't). Even celery has been loosely linked to
mental acuity. But the truth is there’s not enough hard evidence that any of these things really
work.

In fact, there’s only one practice that’s been proven, without question, to preserve your memory:
exercise. "Aerobic activities tend to show larger effects than non-aerobic activities," University
of Pittsburgh psychologist Kirk Erickson tells Yahoo.

Working up a sweat helps your mind stay fit better than any crossword puzzle--unless you're
doing that crossword on a treadmill.
[Related: 18 memory tricks you need to know]

[Photos: First photographs of 'ghosts']

The good news is that you don’t need to run a marathon. Just walking six miles a week can ward
off memory disorders caused by aging, according to Erickson's research published this month in
the medical journal Neurology. "It appears that if people start exercising their memory may
improve and if you continue to exercise, that might delay, or offset, the age-related decline in
memory," he explains.

And you don't need to lift any heavy barbells either. Erickson and his team monitored 300 senior
adults over a period of 13 years, and found that those who walked between 6 and 9 miles a week
—whether to work or with the dog--had half the brain deterioration of those who didn’t.
"Exercise seems to enhance some of the more fundamental properties of our brain," Erickson
explains. "It increases the growth of new cells and improves cellular processes associated with
learning and memory." To put it simply, walking keeps your gray matter from shrinking. And the
more matter, the more mind.

Another study published earlier this year suggests exercise can actually help your brain grow. A
moderate workout may generate new brain cells. And not just any brain cells, but cells that
specifically help to distinguish between memories, so each recollection stands out. It’s the kind
of function you rely on every day, says Tim Bussey, one of the authors of the Cambridge
University study. "[These cells help with] remembering which car parking space you have used
on two different days in the previous week." 

But exercise isn't the only way to keep tabs on your parking spot. There are some supplemental
practices that doctors recommend in addition to a regular walk-a-thon. Diets rich in Omega fatty
acids are instrumental in keeping your brain from aging. Two servings of salmon a week,
provides ingredients that support brain tissue and enhance nerve cell function. Balancing fish
with the other elements of a Mediterranean diet, like fruits and vegetables, has been found to
lower the chances of cognitive decline. When it comes to memory retrieval, self-testing can be
beneficial. In other words, pausing between paragraphs of an article and asking yourself to
paraphrase the information, or repeat a fact. It can't hurt if that article is written in another
language. Bilingualism, says one new study, helps ward off Alzheimer’s for up to four years. But
it doesn't prevent the disease altogether. Your best bet: Walk it off. 

9 foods that may help save your memory

Getty Images

Healthy eating lowers your risk of diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, but it's not yet clear
if that's true for Alzheimer’s disease as well.

“I can’t write a prescription for broccoli and say this will help—yet,” says Sam Gandy MD, PhD,
the associate director of the Mount Sinai Medical Center Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center,
in New York City.

(The National Institutes of Health recently said there is insufficient evidence that food, diet, or
lifestyle will prevent Alzheimer’s disease.)

It’s not a lost cause though. Here are 9 foods that researchers think will keep your whole body—
including your brain—healthy.

Oil-based salad dressings

“The data support eating foods that are high in vitamin E and this includes healthy vegetable oil-
based salad dressings, seeds and nuts, peanut butter, and whole grains,” says Martha Clare
Morris, ScD, director of the section on nutrition and nutritional epidemiology in the Department
of Internal Medicine at Rush University, in Chicago.

The benefit has been seen with vitamin-E rich foods, but not supplements, she says.

A potent antioxidant, vitamin E may help protect neurons or nerve cells. In Alzheimer’s disease,
neurons in certain parts of the brain start to die, which jump-starts the cascade of events leading
to cognitive deterioration.

Fish
Salmon, mackerel, tuna, and other fish are rich in heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids, including
docosahexaenoic acid (DHA).

“In the brain, DHA seems to be very important for the normal functioning of neurons,” Morris
says.
Another plus: Eating more fish often means eating less red meat and other forms of protein that
are high in artery-clogging saturated fats.

Health.com: 20 healthy salmon recipes

Dark green leafy vegetables

Kale, collard greens, spinach, and broccoli are good sources of vitamin E and folate, Morris says.

For example, one cup of raw spinach has 15% of your daily intake of vitamin E, and 1/2 a cup of
cooked spinach has 25% of your daily intake.

Exactly how folate may protect the brain is unclear, but it may be by lowering levels of an amino
acid known as homocysteine in the blood. High levels of homocysteine may trigger the death of
nerve cells in the brain, but folic acid helps break down homocysteine levels.

High homocysteine levels have also been linked to an increased risk for heart disease.

Avocado

This creamy treat is also a rich source of the antioxidant vitamin E.

Research by Morris and her colleague suggests that foods rich in vitamin E—including avocado,
which is also high in the antioxidant powerhouse vitamin C—are associated with a lower risk of
developing Alzheimer’s.

Health.com: 8 avocado recipes (besides guacamole)

Sunflower seeds
Seeds, including sunflower seeds, are also good sources of vitamin E.

One ounce of dry-roasted sunflower seeds contains 30% of your recommended daily intake.
Sprinkle them on top of your salad to give your brain a boost.

Peanuts and peanut butter

Although both are high in fat, peanuts and peanut butter tend to be a source of healthy fats. And
they are also packed with vitamin E.

Both foods may help keep the heart and brain healthy and functioning properly. Other good
choices are almonds and hazelnuts.

“There has been some very good research that diets that are high in healthy fats, low in saturated
fat and trans fats, and rich in whole grains, green leafy vegetables, and nuts are good for the
brain and the heart,” says Maria C. Carrillo, PhD, senior director of medical and scientific
relations at the Chicago-based Alzheimer’s Association.

Health.com: What can you make with peanut butter?

Red wine
Studies have shown that people who consume moderate amounts of red wine and other types of
alcohol may be at reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease, but it may be that there is something else
that tipplers do or don’t do that affects their risk of developing Alzheimer’s, Carrillo says.

“People who drink alcohol or eat healthy may be healthier in other aspects of their life, so it is
difficult to disentangle whether it’s the healthy diet that protects them versus other healthy
behaviors.”

Berries
The latest research presented at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in
Boston found that blueberries, strawberries, and acai berries may help put the brakes on age-
related cognitive decline by preserving the brain’s natural “housekeeper” mechanism, which
wanes with age.

This mechanism helps get rid of toxic proteins associated with age-related memory loss.

Whole grains
Fiber-rich whole grains are an integral part of the Mediterranean diet, which is also loaded with
fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, olive oil, and wine.

Research out of Columbia University Medical Center in New York City shows that this diet may
be linked to lower risk of the mild cognitive impairment that can progress to Alzheimer’s
disease.

“We don’t eat foods or nutrients in isolation, we eat in combination with other foods so there is
value in dietary patterns,” says Nikolaos Scarmeas, MD, an associate professor of neurology at
Columbia University, who conducted the studies.

This type of diet may reduce inflammation, oxidative stress, and other vascular risk factors such
as high blood pressure—all of which may have a role in increasing risk for brain and heart
diseases.

Health.com: How many carbohydrates am I eating?  

Exercise

Okay you can’t eat it, but research suggests that regular exercise is as important, if not more so,
as what you eat when it comes to memory-saving lifestyle changes.

Experts all stress that getting regular exercise is also an important part of the equation when it
comes to staving off many diseases, including Alzheimer’s.

The bottom line?

“We can‘t go out and say, ‘Eat these things and you are protected from Alzheimer’s,' but there is
almost no downside to increasing your physical activity and consuming a diet rich in whole
grains, vegetables, fish, healthy oils, nuts, and seeds,” Morris says.