Joshua Foer

Nature vs. Nurture

Inspired by Joshua Foer’s TED talk, I became interested in learning memory techniques. Here are my main takeaways from his talk.

1. Great memory is learnt.
2. The memory champions use the spacial memory and navigation parts of their brain to remember, while untrained people don’t.
3. The trick to remember is to engage as many senses and meanings as you can.

The Mnemonic Peg System

I came across the Mnemonic Peg System while reading about how to remember dreams better.

It is a challenge to reliably carry information between the dream land and the waking land. You may want to remember your dreams of creative ideas. (Dreams are often forgotten within minutes after waking up). Or if you can lucid dream, you may want to remember what you wanted to do in your dreams. Since you can’t carry any physical notes between dreams and reality, it requires a great memory technique.

In the book Are You Dreaming by Daniel Love, the author offered a solution to this problem, which himself and others found reliable. It is called the Mnemonic Peg System.

The Mnemonic Peg System takes about 15 minutes to setup and learn, and once you’ve learnt it, you have a mental note pad for the rest of your life. 

The idea is you create a list of 10 metal pegs, and whenever you want to remember something, you hang them on a peg. Things will stay on the pegs until you replace them with something new.

Creating Your Own Pegs

Here’s how to create the pegs list.

Take a piece of paper and write down the numerals from 1 to 10. For each number, find what it reminds you of by looking at the shape of the number. Pick the most obvious one and write it next to the number. It may help to draw a picture next to it too.  Once you are done creating the list, try to re-create this list on a blank sheet of paper. You may find stronger visual associations the second time around. 

Here’s an example list if it helps, but everyone has different associations. It only works if you find the associations yourself. As a side note, it’s totally fine to use inappropriate mental images here, if they are the best visual associations. They often help to create memorable stories.
1-carrot. 2-duck, 3-heart, 4-sailboat, 5-fishing hook, 6-cherry, 7-pistol, 8-BB8, 9-pin, 10-a thin man next to a fat man

How To Use It

Now you are all set. You don’t have to use all the pegs each time. To use a peg, you create a visualisation or story that involves both your peg and the item to remember. To create most memorable visualisations, try to make it absurd and engage as many senses as you can. When you need to recall your list, you go through the pegs list, and think about what the pegs were doing.

For example, my first item to remember is a boat. I visualise a carrot growing bigger and bigger until it’s the size of a canoe. Then it got carved into a boat. The boat was purely orange. The surface looks fresh and hard, as if the carrot just got cut. It smells like carrots.
At first, it may help to create visualisations with a lot of details.

As you get more familiar with it, you get better at creating memorable snapshots. For example, an image of a pistol shooting out boxing gloves is both quick to create and memorable.

Effectiveness

You can test it out by picking 10 random objects around the house and remembering them with the pegs. You will find that you can remember these random items for days!

From personal experience, this technique works very well for remembering dreams and grocery lists. I can see it being effective for remembering speeches too.

Conclusion

While you can use your smartphones for grocery lists, the point of exploring memory techniques goes beyond usefulness. It’s a chance for us to discover how our minds work. As Joshua Foer pointed out, we remember when we are deeply engaged in the information and experience. In a way, improving your memory is about learning how to be more engaged in life. 

• memory techniques
• mnemonic peg system