How did they do it?

There is a lost art to memory, and today I'd like to share a few tricks that can help.

The more senses that you can engage with your memory the better of you can remember. For example, need help with your shopping list? Imagine putting on your kitchen table all of the items that you need. Put them on plates, like these items are ingredients on a cooking show. Now, visualize what these foods look like. Imagine what these foods taste like, what they feel like before you cook them or while you are eating them.

To help you remember even better, you can chunk them together. A simple method to chunk is to make categories. You need 3 vegetables, 2 meats, and 4 cereals. Or, you can chunk in other ways. For example, you can visualize cooking a dish that has several of these key ingredients together on a single plate, or imagine a tasty (or awful) sandwich with many of these items stacked one on top of the other. This can reduce the number of items that you need to remember.

Another way to make things easier to remember is to make them outrageous. For example, you can imagine your stalk of broccoli being 50 feet tall stepping on top of your house with a big mean face on it, or, you could imagine the best looking person in the world totally naked holding that stalk of broccoli, or you could imagine a snowman with broccoli hair, a carrot nose, slices of beets glued to its cheeks, etc. These unique images are easier to remember because they are surprising and unique.

When you aren't trying to remember groceries, you might have to get creative with your visuals. For example, let's say you need to remember my last name, Carniol. You could visualize a soccer player bouncing a miniature car off of their knees, with black oil dripping off the car.

Another funny memory trick for anything is what's called a "Memory Palace." This is where you use your brain's strong ability to remember places to help you remember anything you want. Imagine your house or apartment and you are standing at the front door, and right outside the door is something unique and memorable to help you remember the first topic. Across the rest of your home are other visuals to help you remember, stationed in different places.

For interview questions to ask for example, maybe it's an 8 foot clown with a big grin typing away at a computer, and this reminds you to ask interviewers about enjoying their job, then you open the door, and inside is something else that is a visual reminder of this next question, like a tiny ant trying to carry a heavy weight as a reminder for the biggest challenge, or for the same question, perhaps there's a good looking person driving the Dodge Challenger. As you continue to walk through your residence, you can create different unique visual reminders to help you remember each different item.

You can use many different locations to store different memories such as different homes you've lived in or your friends or family member's homes. Each location can store a different list or set of items for you to remember.