5. The Name Game

This memory tip builds upon many of the tips we've learned so far. When you meet a new person, it's important to pay attention to the name and the face. As soon as you learn the name, repeat it back to the person by saying, "Nice to meet you, so-and-so." It's not a cheap trick; researchers have found that people have a 30 percent better chance of remembering a name when they repeat it as soon as they learn it.
Then it's time to put those visualization and association skills to work. Let's say you're meeting a person named Katie Lambert, who just happens to be this humble writer's editor. First, you want to repeat the name, but you also want to start looking for identifying features that will help you with the visualization and association. Check out the person's hair, nose, mouth, cheeks and eyes. Katie has chin-length blond hair, so you might take that feature and combine it with her last name, Lambert. Suddenly you're picturing little lambs with blond hair frolicking about. You name one of those lambs Katie to help you with your image, but you also take the "kat" from her first name and imagine little cats running around as well.
If you wanted another way to remember "Lambert," you could picture Katie on the "lam" with "Bert" from "Sesame Street." You could also use rhymes or a celebrity she resembles to make the association. If all else fails, you could just focus on how you would describe her later to a police sketch artist if you were to hear that a girl named Katie Lambert had committed a crime. Whatever it takes to remember her name and face together.

4. Chunking

Maybe you have no problems remembering your grocery list or names and faces but you repeatedly stumble over your PIN number, Social Security Number or license plate number. Chunking may be just the memory method for you. You've used chunking if you've ever read off a phone number as three sets of numbers as opposed to one long 10-digit number. Chunking puts a large amount of information into more manageable chunks so that you have
OK, maybe that's not the handiest way to remember our phone number. The associations made with certain numbers will be different for everyone. What's important is to look for patterns and numbers associated with memorable things for you. Then you can break a long list into more manageable chunks.
Chunking's not limited to remembering numbers, though. Anything can be reduced to smaller chunks. Say that you need to send an e-mail to George, William, Greg, Jim and Jane. If you remember to invite the 2 G's, the 2 J's and one W, then you're set. If you have a long shopping list, try grouping it according to sections of the store, so that when you get to the dairy section, you'll know you have a few items to look out for.
Do you know your way around the local grocery store by heart? You may be able to put that knowledge to use with our next tip.

3. Method of Loci

The earliest recorded mnemonic device comes from Ancient Greece. One night, a poet named Simonides was called upon to recite a poem at a banquet. By some stroke of luck, Simonides briefly left the banquet hall, right when the entire building collapsed. Because the bodies of those that remained inside were so badly mangled, Simonides identified the dead for their families by recalling where people were sitting at the time of the accident. This memory device of associating things with a place or location became known as the method of loci, and it was all the rage for teaching in Ancient Greece. If you've ever said, "in the first place" or "in the second place" when rattling off a list, then you're using a modern derivative of the method of loci.
In using the method of loci, you're essentially piggybacking the information you need to remember on top of information that would be near impossible for you to forget. For example, it would be hard for you to forget a bus or subway route you use every day, or the setup of your own house. If you select between five to seven locations on these routes or in these places, you can use the landmarks to remember a list of errands by using the visualization methods we discussed earlier.
For example, let's say that you've selected places you pass daily on your commute to the office. You drive by a large yellow house, a fast food chicken restaurant and a tire shop. You need to remember to stop by the store to get detergent, bread and orange juice. For each familiar place, visualize an association with an item on the list. You could envision the detergent dripping down the sides of the yellow house, making the yellow even brighter. You picture the chickens eating pieces of bread thrown to them in their chicken coops, and you could imagine tires trying to move through a rising river of orange juice. You can expand the list with more landmarks as needed, and then when you arrive at the store, you just pull up this route information and think of your visualizations.