This article describes the loci technique for remembering a list.
Steps
Method 1 of 2: Store a List in Order
Step 1. Suppose the list is:
fish, Queen Elizabeth, Louisiana Purchase, a mop and Harry Potter.
Step 2. Imagine walking through the front door and entering the living room, if this is the first room you come across in your home
Alternatively, it could be a room for games or recreation.
Step 3. Imagine a giant fish in the living room (or another impressive scene like that)
Step 4. Visualize yourself walking into the adjacent room, the kitchen
Step 5. Watch Queen Elizabeth sip tea and enjoy some crumpets (she is English after all
) at your kitchen table.
Step 6. Suppose that after the kitchen is the dining room
Visualize yourself entering this room and you come across Thomas Jefferson who is buying 210,000,000 acres of land from France.
Step 7. Basically, you have to visualize yourself walking around your house by associating each word you need to remember with a certain room
Method 2 of 2: Remember the Letters to Memorize the Words
Step 1. Learning the letters by heart is another useful technique for memorizing a list
Step 2. For example, suppose you need to remember a series of names:
Davide, Andrea, Riccardo, Ivonne and Omar.
Step 3. First, read the names carefully
Familiarize yourself with their pronunciation and spelling.
Step 4. Next, consider only the first letter of each name
In the example considered, you get the new word DARIO, of which "D" stands for "David", "A" for "Andrea" and so on.
Step 5. Memorize the acronym DARIO which is actually another name, but short to remember
Step 6. At this point, whenever you need to bring the list to mind, just think of the acronym and deduce the list of names / words from it
This strategy may not work with long lists, but it is still useful
Advice
- If you live in an apartment with few rooms, you can consider the house in which you have previously lived; even if this way you don't have enough rooms for the whole list, imagine yourself walking around the neighborhood and arranging the things you need to remember along the way. Eventually you can enter your grandmother's house or another building that sticks in your mind.
- If the characters or objects you need to remember do something stupid or you imagine them in an absurd context, they are easier to remember. For example, Queen Elizabeth might jump up and down the kitchen table while singing and dancing the "Macarena"; in this way, her memory is fixed better than imagining her sipping tea with biscuits.
