Improve Your Memory and Exercise Your Mind by Memorizing Random Word Lists

The key to improving your memory is to exercise your imagination and get as many of your senses involved as possible while encoding the information that you want to remember. The better your imagination , the better your memory and your ability to memorize a list.

The following exercise will help you to better understand what I mean. I want you to take no more than 60 seconds to memorize the following list in order:

* juice
* cheese
* oatmeal
* muffin
* sausage
* pudding
* toast
* beef
* milk
* popcorn

After the 60 seconds are up, look away from this article and try to recall the list in order. Most people will make a mistake before they reach the seventh item in the list, and almost all will struggle and hesitate along the way.

I'm now going to teach you how to memorize a list quickly and flawlessly.

Imagine that you see a gigantic carton of juice. Really try to visualize it. It's huge! You are surprised not only by the fact that this carton of juice is unusually large, but also by the fact that it is somehow jumping around. The carton of juice is jumping around on its own, and then suddenly explodes. As the carton of juice explodes, you see cheese fly out of it! Picture that as best you can.

The cheese flies out of the carton of juice, sprout legs, and then starts to do a little dance. You can see the cheese dancing and can even hear it dancing as feet tap on the floor. All of a sudden, one of the pieces of cheese starts to crack. It cracks open, and out shoots a bunch of oatmeal. The oatmeal continuously shoots from out of the cheese like a machine gun. You now notice that the oatmeal is shooting up a fluffy muffin. It is shooting up against the muffin with such force that the muffin is being sliced. Really try to see and hear this happening in your mind.

The sight of the sliced muffin makes you feel hungry, so you decide to walk over to it and take a slice. Just as you are about to take a bite of the muffin slice, it magically turns into a link of sausage. You bite into the sausage and it tastes delicious. Really try to imagine that you can taste it. You still have some of the sausage in your hand and now inexplicably decide to dip it into some pudding.

When the sausage touches the pudding, you see it completely dissolve and nothing is left but the pudding. The pudding starts to bubble and it appears to come to a boil. As you watch and listen to it boil, you see toast start to rise from out of it. The pieces of toast are coming out of the pudding in alternating sizes of big and small. This is the strangest toast that you've ever seen. Lodged into the center of each piece of toast, you see a juicy slab of beef. One of the slabs of beef jumps out of its piece of toast and starts rolling on the floor. The beef rolls faster and faster and suddenly knocks over a carton of milk. The milk bursts open as it is knocked over, first squirting out milk, but then popcorn. The carton of milk is now squirting out popcorn!

Now, in order to recall the shopping list, simply replay through the unusual and funny little story in your mind, starting with when you saw the gigantic carton of juice. As you do, simply take note of each item that you encounter, and you will have recalled the shopping list in order: juice, cheese, oatmeal, muffin, sausage, pudding, toast, beef, milk, popcorn. If you stumble at any point during the recall, quickly reread the paragraph above. As you do, take special note to just relax and enjoy what you are seeing and experiencing in your mind. If you are smiling inwardly or outwardly while reviewing the scenario, then it's a very good sign. Don't worry about having to remember anything. Just focus on vividly experiencing the scenario, and the remembering will come naturally.

This technique, of creating a vivid scenario or story in your mind to encode information, is very powerful and easily extensible. What if the list were longer? For instance: juice, cheese, oatmeal, muffin, sausage, pudding, toast, beef, milk, popcorn, crackers, lettuce, fudge, beans, pasta. After the popcorn leaves the soda cans, it might magically start to dance on a wall made of crackers; the crackers start to grow lettuce; the lettuce starts to sprout chunks of fudge; beans shoot out of each piece of fudge; and the beans shoot and mix themselves in a giant bowl of pasta. Get the idea?

It's important to note that this technique can be applied to much more than just memorizing random word lists. It could also be used to memorize the points of a speech or presentation that you need to make. All you would need to do is come up with an image to represent each major point that you want to talk about. For instance, war could be represented by images of guns or soldiers. The economy could be represented by stacks of money. Health care could be represented by images of bandages or doctors.

So if you first wanted to talk about war, the economy and then health care, you might imagine soldiers fighting against a huge pile of money, which is later bandaged and cared for by doctors. Perhaps the doctors start to melt, if you next wanted to talk about global warming. If you come up with images for each major point and even sub-point that you'd like to make, and then link the images together using your imagination as I've illustrated in this article, then you will be able to easily give a speech or presentation flawlessly without looking at any notes.

You've just a learned a powerful technique that will help you to easily remember random bits of information, and at the same time exercise your creativity and imagination. This story method, as it is often called, gets many areas of your brain involved in the encoding process. The more you practice using it to memorize a list or other information, the better you will get at it. You'll begin to notice that you are able to create stories in your mind quicker and experience them more vividly. This will improve your memory and it is also a wonderful exercise for your brain.