Reddit reviews Memo: The Easiest Way to Improve Your Memory

The technique all the professionals use at memory contests is called "placing" (my translation). You place a new piece of information (memory) in an already existing one.

It works by utilising the fact that you already have a lot of strong memories ready to be used to store more information in them. These strong memories are of all the places you have ever been. Think about the house you grew up in. You can vividly remember how the rooms look and how they are connected.

If you want to see how this can help you remember stuff then do the following (it will take a couple of minutes but you will learn a lot...):

Pick 5 rooms, or separate places in the house you grew up in (or other house of your choice). Start at the entrance to the house and make a route so that room 1 = entrance, room 2 = storage, room 3 = living room etc. You can move through walls and ceilings in order to finish your route. Write down your route from 1 to 5 on a piece of paper and play through the route a few times in your mind.

OK, so now you have your route, that was easy right? You now have the map in which to place new information. Proceed to the next steps (it will make sense in the end):

You are now going to imagine a Fire Hydrant sitting in room 1. Visualize it so that it makes an impact on your brain cells. Make it a bright color. Have water gushing out.

In room 2 you see a Helicopter. Make it almost hit you with its rotors to make it stick in your mind.

In room 3 you see a Lion. Does it look friendly or is it attacking you?

In room 4 you see Beyonce. Is she naked? Is she smiling? Is she singing? Make a strong image.

In room 5 you see a Boat. What is a boat doing here? What kind of boat is it? The more absurd the images are the more they will stick...

To summarize:

Room1 = Fire Hydrant

Room2 = Helicopter

Room 3 = Lion

Room 4 = Beyonce

Room 5 = Boat

Play through the route a couple of times with the different objects in place. It should only take a minute. Proceed when you are finished visualizing.

So what is the point of all this? Well, what you have actually memorized are the first 5 elements of the periodic table in the correct order! All those weird objects (and Beyonce) are representations of the elements:

HYdrant is HYdrogen

HElicopter is HElium

LIon is LIthium

BEyonce is BEryllium

BOat is BOron

It might seem like a lot of work going through all these steps but the technique works incredibly well. If you re-play the route the next day it will make it stick even better and so on. I bet you will remember this route very well a week from now. I strongly recommend the book Memo where this technique and many others are described in detail.

Here it is:

https://www.amazon.com/Memo-Easiest-Improve-Your-Memory/dp/0980326907

If you make a keyword for each point of knowledge from the notes, you can easily remember ALL of them, without much effort. I've read several books on memory, and It's actually much easier than you think to remember a long list of things, in the correct order etc. with simple technics used by the ancient greeks among others. This really saved me on some of my final exams!

Edit: For anyone interested, this book is really easy to read and WILL make you a master of memory.