Souad didn’t think that using association was going to work for her when I suggested this technique to help her remember her neighbour’s name. She was so pleased when she reported back to me that she had worked out that her neighbour’s name ‘Sofia’ was the same as the name of the street that a good friend lives in, and that this association had given her success with recalling the name!
Anne
A friend told me that she remembered the name of a man she met called Grant, by thinking of Government Grant, because he worked for the public service.
Serge, 60
Another way to associate information is to connect something you want to remember to do with something that happens regularly around the same time. For example, you might associate taking your medication with mealtimes, or with cleaning your teeth at night. Thus, something that you already do on a regular basis will trigger your memory for something else that you have to do.
Association is also useful to increase our knowledge in a certain area. The more you know about a particular thing or issue, the easier it is to learn more about it. This is because you have more memory files on which that knowledge is based, and thus it is easier to make new associations.
I’m very good at remembering the names of trees since I’ve got a background in forestry—but things that don’t interest me, like fish for example, I simply don’t recall.
Ross, 72
In this way, getting new information into our files can be easier because we have a good range of knowledge stored in the past to link new ideas to. Filing is easier. We don’t have to create a new folder each time, because we can put new files into already well-established folders.
The more I learn about plant names, the easier it is for me to remember new ones. The other day I saw a plant that I wanted to buy, so I looked up its botanical name. It was a Wattle, and I already knew that ‘acacia’ was the term for Wattle. It had purple growth tips, and I knew the word for that is ‘purpurea’. The only new part that I had to remember was ‘Baileyana’. This was easy because I have a friend named ‘Anna Bailey’. If I hadn’t known the terms for ‘wattle’ and ‘purple’, then I would have needed to remember three words, instead of just one!
Dianne, 41
As mentioned in Chapter 2, older people can draw on their life skills and developed wisdom to ensure effective learning. Experts in particular fields can use association to their advantage so that they can perform as well as, if not better than, younger novices who may be motivated and able to think fast.
Using associations can also help us get information out of our storage files; we can use them as cues. One type of cueing strategy that we often use is called a ‘logical search’. This can be useful for those frustrating ‘tip of the tongue’ experiences, when we know that we have a word or name somewhere in our storage files, but cannot get it out when we want it! Especially difficult are proper names—like names of authors, actors, or hotels that you have visited. In this situation, a logical search would involve running through the letters of the alphabet, and thinking of possible names or words that begin with each letter.
People may also use sounds or smells to cue for information from a storage file. As outlined in Chapter 1, the use of ‘filing tabs’ in our memory filing cabinet can assist us in locating a particular file when we want it. Who you were with, where you were standing and the time of the day when you were told the name of a particular rose may help you to recall it when someone admires it in your garden next spring!
Contextual cues are also useful for ‘tip of the tongue’ experiences. Many people find that it helps to think of the situation where they first remembered the name or word. For remembering a name, you could think about where you last saw the person and any details about your conversation. Some say it is also helpful to think about the mood you were in. Recreating the context in your mind can make it easier to re-establish some connections, and get the word or name out of your storage files.
I had been trying for a long time to remember the family name of a girl I went to school with, over 50 years ago. Usually I take great pride in my ability to remember names, but this one was getting to me. It was funny how I did eventually come to remember the name. I visualised the area where I grew up, and where my school was. All of a sudden it came to me: the name that I had been searching for jumped back into my mind all of its own.
Brian, 74
The use of action or location cues has also been suggested to help remember the location of something that is lost (e.g. your wallet). You can mentally retrace your steps: go through step by step what you did, where you were after that, and where you last saw the thing. For instance, ‘Where did I put the mail?—I collected it from the letter box, I came inside, I put my keys on the sideboard, I went into the kitchen to put the milk in the fridge … Aaaah! I left the mail on top of the fridge.’ It can also help to actually return to the last place that you were in.
Sometimes I walk into a room and forget what I was going to say. If I go back to where I came from, voilà!—the words that I was going to say miraculously appear.
Graham, 91
If you can’t remember where you have put something, you could pretend that you are putting the thing away for the first time and think of the likely places you would put it. How many of us go into a room to get something and forget what we’ve gone in to get! If you find yourself in this situation, you could think back, or actually go back, to the place where you first had that thought.
Visualising
Another way to process information at a ‘deeper’ level and add meaning to it is to visualise it—to picture something in your mind, or create an image of the thing to be remembered. Some people say that the more unusual or funny the image, the more they will remember it. For some people, visualisation is a strong tool that can provide a very quick way of remembering. The power of visualisation is reflected in the old Chinese proverb, ‘One seeing is worth ten thousand tellings’—or the modern saying, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’
I remember my friend Vee Lyn by imagining her playing the violin!
Valerie, 67
Whenever I park my car in a multi-storey car park, I look around for landmarks that I can visualise to help me remember where it is. There is usually a number or a letter, or even a colour that stands out. On a recent holiday in Darwin, the supermarket car park had paintings of animals to mark different sections. It was so easy to remember that my car was parked in the crocodile aisle!
Winston, 77
I have one memory trick that I was taught in primary school, yet whenever I tell anyone they look at me as if I’m crazy. I was told that an easy way to remember how to spell accommodation was to imagine booking two double rooms—hence the double ‘c’ and the double ‘m’. Silly? It works for me!
Clare, 53
Audrey was having difficulty recalling the names of her new neighbour’s two little girls, Ruby and Charley. When I suggested that she think of a visual image to help her remember the names, she came up with a vision from the film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where the chocolate lake was filled with a new variety of chocolate, called ‘Ruby’ chocolate. Next time she saw the girls, she visualised the ruby red chocolate lake, and proudly came up with both girls’ names!
Anne
Spaced recall
Once you have added meaning to a name by using association or visualisation, you can then practise recall of the name to help get the name into memory storage, and make it more readily accessible when you need it next. This process is sometimes called ‘spaced recall’. Think of what you do when you learn a new PIN (personal identification number) for banking. You rehearse the number a few times, you use the PIN on the same day, and then again a few days later. By the time you have recalled the number regularly for a few months, it comes automatically to you. This is how spaced recall works. This technique works well for learning names, passwords and numbers, especially when combined with added meaning from association and/or
visualisation. For example, you can choose a PIN or password that relates to well-stored knowledge from your past, such as an old phone number, address or car registration number. It is a process that takes some time, but sometimes it is worth taking the time to learn something successfully, especially information that you need to know, but have been unable to master.
Why don’t you challenge yourself to learn a name—one that always eludes you. Write the name down and decide on a way to make the name more meaningful. Put some effort in and process the name as deeply as you can. Now cover the name with your hand and say the name out loud. Recall the name again in a few minutes and then a few hours. Recall the name the next day as well. The more that you recall the name from your memory storage, the more likely that it will come out when you see the person next. After you have successfully remembered this name that has been escaping you for so long, you will feel much more positive about your memory for names.
I kept having difficulty recalling the dog breed name Rottweiler. So I decided I would work on this. First I came up with a visual association for the word. I imagined a big black Rottweiler with wheels instead of feet! I typed a prompt question into the reminders section of my phone (‘What is the name of the big black dog?’) and I programmed my reminder to come up once a month. Now my phone comes up with my prompt question once a month and I practise recalling the word. I think I’ve finally ironed out this glitch in my recall system!
Saskia, 59
Rhymes
Many of us can remember nursery rhymes from our childhood days. Making a rhyme about information to be remembered is another internal strategy which involves adding meaning to the information to be remembered.
One common early learned rhyme is: ‘Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have 31, except February alone, which has 28 days clear, and 29 days each leap year’—and the not-so-well-known version: ‘Thirty days hath September, all the rest I don’t remember’! Some people use another version of this. If you say the months of the year with the aid of your trusty knuckle-bones, you will always know how many days each month has. Put your closed fists together, to make a row of knuckles. Start with January, by touching the knuckle furthest to the left. February is the space between the knuckles. March is the next knuckle, and so on. July and August both fall on knuckles—there is no space between them. All the months that fall on a knuckle have 31 days.
‘I before e except after c’ is another rhyme in common use by English speakers, although this one is not 100 per cent reliable!
Acrostics
Acrostics are sometimes used to add meaning to information that we want to remember. To do this, the first letter of each word on a list is used to make up a sentence.
Anyone who has learned music is probably familiar with the following acrostics: ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit’ (the lines of the treble staff: E, G, B, D, F), and ‘All Cows Eat Grass’ (the notes on the spaces of the bass staff: A, C, E, G).
Do you know what this acrostic is used to remember: ‘Richard Of York Gains Battles In Vain’?
Yes—it’s the colours of the rainbow: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
Of course, ‘My dear Aunt Sally’ helps us to remember the mathematical order of operations—multiply or divide before you add or subtract.
Reducing the amount of information to be remembered
Earlier we mentioned that internal strategies can assist us by reducing the amount of information we have to get into our storage files. There are many ways of doing this—for instance grouping and acronyms.
Grouping
This involves grouping or ‘chunking’ bits of information together. Many of us do this when we learn new phone numbers. We might split the phone number into two or three parts. Association can also be used to add further meaning.
Our local Seniors Information phone number is 1300 135090. I remember it in chunks, 1300 13 50 90. The 50 and 90 at the end is easy to remember. I think of seniors ranging in age from 50 to 90. Then I just need to remember 1300 and to repeat the first two digits of 1300 again before the seniors’ age range.
Sonia, 77
You might like to use grouping, association and spaced recall to learn a family member or close friend’s mobile phone number. How proud will you feel when you can recall this number at a time of need, perhaps when your phone is out of battery and you can’t rely on your phone’s memory, but instead can rely on your own memory!
Some people remember a list of things to buy at the shops by grouping similar items together. Then they can use the categories of items to help remember each item. Think back to the shopping list that you recalled in Chapter 1:
Milk
Soap
Apples
Bananas
Yoghurt
Shampoo
Lemons
Cheese
Toothpaste
Did you recall the items by grouping them? If you were not able to write down a list to take with you, then it might help if you group items into categories. How would you group these items? When you get to the supermarket, you then have to recall the categories, and what was in each of them.
‘What fruit do I need to buy? Of course, it was apples, bananas and lemons. And what about the dairy produce? Yes, it was milk, yoghurt and cheese. Now the last thing, bathroom products—what were they? Um, soap, shampoo and toothpaste.’
Acronyms
Acronyms are another way of reducing the amount of information to be remembered. You take the first letter of each word in a list and use these initial letters to make up a new word.
Many of you will be familiar with ‘ROY G BIV’ as a way to remember the colours of the rainbow in order. All you have to do is run through each letter, and recall what each letter stands for—Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.
‘DRS ABCD’ helps us to recall ‘Danger, Response, Send for help, Airway, Breathing, Compression, Defibrillation’ in times of emergency. ‘RICE’ helps us to remember that ‘Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation’ are important after any injury.
Maybe this prompts you to think of some acronyms that you have found useful. People are able to be creative with acronyms in using a well-known word to remember something new. For instance, my name is Anne and I am learning the routine for answering telephone calls at my new office; I remember A for ‘answer’, N for ‘number’, N for ‘name’ and E for ‘extension’.
Mnemonics
The word ‘mnemonic’ comes to us from Greek mythology. The goddess of memory was called Mnemosyne. Books or training courses for ‘improving your memory’ often describe mnemonic (pronounced nee-mon-ick, with the stress on ‘mon’) techniques. While mnemonic strategies can be fun, many are quite complex and take time to learn. These more elaborate techniques are often difficult to apply in everyday situations. Here are a few examples to test out.
Method of loci
This mnemonic strategy uses visual association of objects with a predetermined set of locations. Let’s say you want to impress your friends by remembering that nine-item list of shopping items in a particular order. To do this you could imagine walking through your house, and visually associate the nine items on the list with nine locations in your house.
So you might associate the first item, milk, with the front door. You could imagine opening the front door to collect the milk after it has been delivered. The second item was soap, and you might imagine the soap on your hall table. You then continue to imagine walking through your house, associating each item with particular locations, in the order that you would see these locations as you walk through your house. When you need to recall the list of items, you take a mental trip through your house. You imagine each item sitting in its location and reel off the list. Wow—how clever!
This technique is fine for lists of words. But it is not very often that many of us need to remember a list of words in a particular order. When you try the technique with everyday remembering, such
as lists of names of people, it can be more difficult to visualise, which can make this mnemonic technique even more complex.
Peg-word method
Another mnemonic technique to test out is also a ‘seeing in your mind’s eye’, or visualisation method, called the peg-word method. The idea here is to visually associate the objects on your shopping list with another list of words, which are remembered using a rhyme.
You will first need to learn the following rhyme:
1 is a bun
2 is a shoe
3 is a tree
4 is a door
5 is a hive
6 is sticks
7 is heaven
8 is a gate
9 is a vine
10 is a hen
You can see that each number is associated with a rhyming word that can be transformed into a mental picture or image. For this technique, you will associate the first word from the list, that is milk, with a bun. You might visualise a bun going soggy because it has milk spilt all over it. You continue on. The second word soap is associated with shoe. What image could you create to link these two? When you want to recall the list, you recite each line of the rhyme one by one, and remember the vivid image that you have created to link the two objects.
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