Action Steps:

1. Build a Memory House in Your Mind

A memory house is similar to a mental movie, in that it involves using visualization to aid memory. The idea is to pick rooms in your own home, which you presumably know like the back of your hand, and zero in on five places in each room where you can put things. For instance, you might picture your kitchen, then pick out the fridge, oven, sink, table, and pantry. Then picture your bathroom, and pick out the sink, medicine cabnet, toilet, window, and shower... and so on. Fix the details of each room, and each spot within each room in your mind. Now try memorizing a list (say, a shopping list) by placing items into each place within each room. Say you need to buy chicken, butter, almonds, salmon, and yogurt (you’re clearly a ReEvolution shopper!). Picture yourself in your kitchen. You turn to the right, and the first thing you see is your fridge. You open the fridge, and there is a live chicken inside flying around (this chicken can fly) and wearing boxing gloves. As with making mental movies, make your pictures ridiculous and animate them with lots of action. After the fridge, you come to the oven. It’s full of butter. Butter is literally boiling out through the oven door. You slip on the buttery floor as you go to look in the sink, which has an almond tree growing out of the drain… you get the idea.

The more you use your memory house, the easier it will get. In time, storing lists in your memory house will be automatic, and you’ll never need to write out a "to do" list again. You’ll just put a picture of everything you need to do that day somewhere in your house, and check through each room as you go about your day. Whenever you visit your memory house, be sure to go through each room, and each site within each room, in the same order every time. This way, you’ll always be clear on the order of the things you memorize therein.

2. Visualize Directions

Directions are notoriously hard to memorize, but not if you use the principles in this section. The first thing to do is to turn street names into pictures. Before you make these pictures into a movie, you need to create an image that signifies which way you turn on each street. Pick one image for right and another for left, and stick with it. One suggestion is to use ram for right and lance for left because rams and lances are both easy to picture.

Say you need to turn right on Mulberry street right after a bank. You picture a massive mulberry the size of a building sitting behind a bank building, then picture a huge flaming battering ram smashing into the tree, splattering mulberry juice everywhere. The juice goes flying, and the bank is coated with it. Next up is a left on Lincoln. An antique lance, like the ones knights in medieval Europe used, flies through the door of the Lincoln memorial and sticks upright just in front of the statue of honest Abe. You can memorize your whole route using this technique. Like all of visualization memory techniques, visualizing direction takes a while to get the hang of at first, but comes easily with practice.

3. Practice Visualizing Names at Parties

To do this, you’ll have to employ your skills from principle three. Names that you don’t know inevitably sound like some word that you do know, and this is the key to remembering them. When you meet that cute girl Julia, don’t stand there repeating “Julia, Julia, Julia” in your head, ignoring what she’s actually saying to you so that you won’t forget her name (every guy has been there). Think “Julia…that sounds like Jewel”. Pick out one of Julia’s personal features (say, her green eyes) and picture her left green eye with a big emerald in the middle of her iris instead of a pupil. Even better, picture her doing something with the emerald. Maybe she takes it out and gives it to you. Whenever you see her from then on, you’ll think “emerald in the eye, emerald is a jewel, oh yeah… Julia!”