Thursday, September 1, 2011
As the years go by, remembering student names poses an increasing challenge for me. ProfHacker provides some helpful techniques for meeting this challenge. Most memory experts don’t have exceptional memories; rather they have techniques that work for them:
Most memory contestants use variations of the memory palace to learn all kinds of information. The memory palace, based on the classical rhetorical technique of loci, connects visual images of the information you want to memorize to spots in a familiar location. So if you want to remember a shopping list containing bread, broccoli, and tofu, you might visualize those items in specific places around the entryway of your childhood home. But since an image of a loaf of bread isn’t likely to stand out in your memory, you have to make it noticeable in some way: visualize a talking loaf of bread, or one that looks like a celebrity or someone you know. Then you walk through the space of your memory palace first placing the items there, and then again when you want to remember the list in order.
ProfHacker gives detailed guidance on using this technique. http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/student-names-and-the-memory-palace/35664?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en