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Tips for Enhancing Memory
16 April 2019
Eden listened to "How to Remember Anything" from the TED podcast WorkLife with Adam Grant and practiced a new tool for memorization.
Tags: eden listened, eden read
Recently I’ve enjoyed listening to the TED podcast, WorkLife with Adam Grant. Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. In each episode of his podcast, Grant focuses on one aspect of work, like feedback, creativity, or networking, and showcases individuals who have made that particular element the lifeblood of their organization.
Since Grant tends to focus on organizations who, in my opinion, might overuse certain capabilities, I wouldn’t necessarily say that everything I’ve heard on the podcast is “best practice.” However, I’ve appreciated the thought exercise of considering how different individuals and organizations can look when they fully commit to developing just one capability that impacts work life. So far, my favorite episode has been “How to Remember Anything,” which discusses the importance of memory on both an organizational and individual level.
This episode was written on the premise that you can train yourself to have a better memory and features advice from journalist turned USA Memory Champion, Joshua Foer. Memory champions are people who memorize vast amounts of information in competitions. And even though most of us don’t need to memorize quite so much for our day jobs, I found that Foer’s advice for enhancing memory could easily be applied to almost any situation. Here’s the idea: if you want to remember something, don’t only focus on the words that you want to remember. Instead, imagine a detailed picture for each concept. Grant says that this technique works because, “abstract words, numbers, and ideas get stickier when you connect them to a concrete image.”
I tried this method to help me memorize a poem I learned in grade school: If by Rudyard Kipling. Instead of reading and repeating the lines over and over in mantra-like fashion (that’s how I normally memorize text), I instead read the poem slowly and imagined a detailed picture in my head for every few lines. I found that thinking about the picture the words created helped me to recall the lines pretty quickly and with fewer repetitions than I anticipated it would take to memorize a poem of that length. I also noticed that when I recited the poem from memory, the same pictures flashed in my head even when I wasn’t specifically trying to remember them.
Can you think of any situations where tying an image to a concept might help you enhance your memory? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
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