Memory Tricks to improve memory (great for studying for tests!)

ACRONYMS. You form acronyms by using each first letter from a group of words to form a new word. This is particularly useful when remembering words in a specified order. Acronyms are very common in ordinary language and in many fields. Some examples of common acronyms include NBA (National Basketball Associations), SCUBA (Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), and LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). What other common acronyms can you think of?

Let us suppose that you have to memorize the order of the color spectrum : 1) red, 2) orange, 3)yellow, 4)green, 5) blue, 6) indigo, and 7) violet. Take the first letter of each item you are trying to remember: ROYGBIV. Then, arrange the letters so that the acronym resembles a word you are familiar with: ROY G BIV

SENTENCES/ACROSTICS. Like acronyms, you use the first letter of each word you are trying to remember. Instead of making a new word, though, you use the letters to make a sentence. Here are some examples:

• My Dear Aunt Sally (mathematical order of operations: Multiply and Divide before you Add and Subtract)
• Kings Phil Came Over for the Genes Special (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Genus, Species)

Can you think of other examples? Like acronyms, acrostics can be very simple to remember and are particularly helpful when you need to remember a list in a specific order. One advantage over acronyms is that they are less limiting. If your words don't form easy-to-remember acronyms, using acrostics may be preferable.

METHOD OF LOCI. The method of loci or Ars memoriae (art of memory) is a technique for remembering which has been practiced since Classical times and it combines the use of organization, visual memory, and association. Eight time World Memory Champion Dominic O'Brien advocates this technique. To use the method of loci bring to mind a familiar building, such as your house. Take a moment to conduct a mental walk through the rooms in your house. Pay particular attention to the details , noticing any imperfections, like scratches: anything that makes your mental images more vivid. Make sure you can move easily from one room to another.

Along your route create a list of "loci" :i.e. well defined parts of the room that you can use later to memorize things.A locus can be a door, a bed, a oven, etc. Be sure that you can easily go from locus to locus as you visit the house.

Now, when you are faced with a list of words or ideas to be memorized, you must form visual images for each of the words and place them, in order, on the loci in your route. To recall the words or ideas now you take a mental walk throughout your house, asking yourself , "What is on the living-room door? What's on the sofa? What's in the oven?" And so on.

You do not have to limit this to a path. You can use the same type of technique with just about any visual image that you can divide into specific sections. The most important thing is that you use something with which you are very familiar.

CHUNKING. This is a technique generally used when remembering numbers, although the idea can be used for remembering other things as well. It is based on the idea that short-term memory is limited in the number of things that can be contained. A common rule is that a person can remember 7 (plus or minus 2) "items" in short-term memory. In other words, people can remember between 5 and 9 things at one time. You may notice that local telephone numbers have 7 digits. This is convenient because it is the average amount of numbers that a person can keep in his or her mind at one time.

When you use "chunking" to remember, you decrease the number of items you are holding in memory by increasing the size of each item. In remembering the number string 64831996, you could try to remember each number individually, or you could try thinking about the string as 64 83 19 96 (creating "chunks" of numbers). This breaks the group into a smaller number of "chunks." Instead of remembering 8 individual numbers, you are remembering four larger numbers. This is particularly helpful when you form "chunks" that are meaningful or familiar to you (in this case, the last four numbers in the series are "1996," which can easily be remembered as one chunk of information).