Memorization tires most of us. Admit it, we’d rather glance on our palm tops or organizers once in a while for convenience. Memorization is something we don’t want to deal with for the rest of our lives although we deal with it in school because it’s something we need to do.
Now that’s just odd. When we need to do something, we tend to give our best shot at it. Why can’t we do the same thing with our simple everyday activities?
One effective and interesting way of familiarization and memorization of objects at a particular time or event is to associate them with a journey. The place or location where the journey happens can be stationary but not you, the traveler. You should come across the entire set of objects which are available on the setting you have chosen.
We can set the movie house as an example for this memory improvement approach. Before you enter the movie house lobby, you purchase tickets for you and your friend. You know it’s the ticket booth because you see people falling in line to buy their own tickets. Now, associate the elements you see with what you need to remember. Let’s pretend that you need to buy grocery items after seeing a movie. Seeing the long line of moviegoers to the ticket booth is a start. You can make the line of moviegoers going to the ticket booth, purchase chunks of meat instead of tickets. After getting your own meat chunk from the ticket booth, you then proceed to the lobby where you can buy popcorn and drinks served by two food counter clerks. The first clerk is named Ms. Tomato while the other one is named Mr. Lettuce. One has a head like a tomato and the others head looks like lettuce. After ordering, you are then served by Ms. Tomato a bucket of cheese bars instead of pop corn and butter for drinks.
After you’re satisfied with what you bought, you and your friend proceed to the movie theater and find yourselves a seat. Imagine the seats as giant apples. As you sit back and wait for the movie to start, picture the widescreen in front operated by four grocery clerks pulling the scenes with giant sausages stringed together from the projection screen to make the image move from one picture to another. Now that’s one wild imagination to keep you on your toes to remember the grocery items you need. The funnier the story is, the higher chances of remembering each item clearly.
From that scenario alone, important objects on the location are observed. You associate the things you see with the location easily since it involves vision, sound, smell, taste, touch and Kinesthesia (or the awareness of body position). All of the strategic points mentioned make Journey System, another memory technique, an easier method in remembering things you need to remember and placing them in a known place for easier memorization – without any pressure.
Try other memory techniques and discover the natural memorization ability you never knew you had all along
There are so many factors in life which could easily affect a person's memorization ability. We may not know all of it consciously but with the fast-paced life that everyone is living now, we could be doing something already that silently harms our memory.
As many of you are already aware, keeping your brain active by playing puzzles and word games everyday helps battle memorization decline. It even enriches your vocabulary and the way you think. Other mind-enriching exercises are I.Q tests, use of flash cards, memory tests, eating good food and of course mnemonics. As described, mnemonics is simply a tool, an aid to helping a person enhance his memory capabilities.
Using mnemonics doesn't limit you. It gives you various methods to choose from. The best part in using mnemonics as well is that it doesn't forcibly use a type of mnemonic method just because you prefer to learn this way or that way; you can choose which one you'd like most or you can use them all.
An example is the Snapshot technique. It's a mnemonic that lets you ork on visual images you could create. This is an easy method to se especially if you're the type that imagines most of the time. Let's say we want to remember a hose, dog, tortoise and pool.
The goal here is to associate all four items in one scene; just like in a movie. Imagine a hose spraying water on a dog for crossing over the lawn, the dog is startled and as it runs, it stumbles on a tortoise. The tortoise wants to give the dog a lesson for the disturbance it caused, so the tortoise jumps in the pool tugging the dog along.
Since you have all the items in one scenario, it isn't too difficult to take it all in.
Click below to learn more about memorizing using the SnapShot method and other memory improvement techniques:
