Read these ten words once. Coat, car, football, laugh, ice cream, air, horse, sword, green, tomato. Now close the page and write them down in the same order.
Most people get six or seven, and then the order goes wrong. Nothing is wrong with your memory. A list of unrelated words has nothing holding it together, so your mind has nothing to hold on to. The answer is to give it something. We give it a story.
This is called the link method. It is the first technique I teach in my workshops, because anybody can learn it in one sitting, from a ten year old child to a grandfather.
Turn the list into a small film
Here is how those ten words become one story. I was going to a party. I put on my best coat and drove my car. On the way I passed a football field where a joker was making people laugh and another man was selling ice cream. One tyre of my car got punctured and there was nobody to fill the air, so I rode a horse instead. At the gate, the guard was holding a long sword. The hostess was dressed all in green and offered me a glass of tomato juice.
Now close your eyes and run the story once. Coat, car, football, laugh, ice cream, air, horse, sword, green, tomato. The whole list is there, in order. You did not repeat it ten times. You only watched a short film in your head.
Six rules for a strong picture
A weak picture fades. A strong picture stays. When you make your links, follow these rules.
- See things in action, not standing still.
- See them out of proportion, much too big or much too small.
- See them illogically. The more absurd, the better.
- See them in colour.
- See them in three dimensions, as solid objects.
- Use all your senses, not only your eyes. Add sound, smell, touch and taste.
Think of a needle one metre long. Think of a fountain pen as big as a tree. It costs you nothing to imagine, so why not go all the way? Adults find this difficult in the first few days, because our sense of logic keeps interrupting. Children find it easy. Let the child in you take over for a while.
Join each item only to the next one
This is the part people miss. You do not need one big story for everything at once. You only join each item to the one that follows it, like links in a chain.
Take four words: sun, car, paper, curtain. Sun to car: you are driving at noon and the rays come through the windshield with so much glare that you cannot see the road. Car to paper: a strong wind lifts a sheet of paper from the street and it sticks flat on your windshield. You stop and peel it off. Paper to curtain: you are in a dark bungalow in a small town and curious people are peeping in through the windows. You have no curtain, so you open a huge newspaper and it grows until it covers the whole window.
Sun, car, paper, curtain. Each picture pulls the next one into view.
When a word is hard to picture
Some words cannot be seen. For those, use a substitute, something you can see that stands in for it. Suppose you must remember a birthday cake and a book. See a rectangular cake. You try to cut it, but the knife will not go through. You look closer and find it is a book with a cover made of chocolate. Cake and book are now joined.
Use it for your studies
Every paragraph in a textbook carries one key idea. Underline that idea, or write it as one word on a piece of paper. When you have the key words for a whole page, link them with a story. Now you can walk through the entire page in your mind.
It even works for formulae. For the rule (a + b) + c = a + (b + c), I use a small story. Ajay and Bhasker are friends who share a house, and Chandan lives in another. After a few days of quarrelling, Ajay leaves, and Bhasker and Chandan become partners in the same house. The brackets are the houses. The story stays in your head, and the formula follows.
Practise today
Ask someone at home to read you twelve random words, one by one. Do not hurry. Make a silly, bright, noisy link between each pair. Then say the list back, and then say it in reverse. You will be surprised.
The more you practise, the longer the list you can hold. Students who keep at it for about a year can hold a list of a hundred names. It is like swinging a club every day. In the beginning the exercise looks meaningless, but after a few months your muscles lift four times the load.
This is one chapter from my book Train Your Brain.
