The Power of Forgetting (23 page)

The peg method is ideal for memorizing long lists because it’s not dependent on retrieving items in sequence. In other words, you can access any item on the list without having to work your way through the whole thing. This method,
however, is a bit more complicated to learn at first. In the peg system, first you must learn a standard set of peg words, and only then can you link the items you need to remember to the pegs. The peg approach can be used to remember ideas and concepts and to organize activities, as well as to remember lists for shopping and errands. In a work environment, you could use this system to recall certain facts or ideas that you want to present or highlight during a meeting when you’re in front of colleagues and superiors and you’d rather not rely on notes or turn to a computer. It can also come in handy if you’re giving a talk and want to remember the sequence of topics you’re covering without needing a prompter or turning away from your audience to look at the accompanying slides on a projected PowerPoint presentation.

The various forms of the peg system all use a concrete object to represent each number. What’s different among them is how you choose the object that represents each number. In addition to peg systems that rely on using pegs that look like the numbers they represent or pegs that rhyme with the numbers, another peg system relies on meaning, and yet a fourth peg system uses alphabetic pegs. There are potentially many types of peg systems, and you can invent your own peg system that works for you. My sister, for example, likes to use a peg system based on a group of random words that tell a story. Those random words are then the pegs for the new material she needs to organize and remember.

Alphabet peg systems are pretty easy to remember and use, like rhyming ones, because the alphabet makes a good system—it’s naturally ordered and everyone knows it. In order to create concrete images for the letters, each image either rhymes with the letter of the alphabet it represents or
has the letter as the initial sound of the word. The alphabet peg system might be: A = hay, B = bee, C = sea. Peg words can be chosen that rhyme with or sound similar to the letters of the alphabet they represent:

If you don’t like the rhyming aspect of the alphabetic peg-word system, you can come up with a list that doesn’t rhyme but that simply uses the same letter of the alphabet to begin each word.

The only problem with using the alphabet system is that most people don’t automatically know the numeric equivalents of the letters of the alphabet, so they can’t be directly retrieved as easily. For example, most people don’t know, without counting, that
S
is the nineteenth letter, so if they wanted to recall the nineteenth item out of sequence, they would have to count off the letters and then retrieve the associated image.

You can also select peg words on the basis of meaning: one = me (there is only one “me”); three = pitchfork (three prongs); five = hand (five fingers on a hand). Numbers make good peg words because they have a natural order and everyone knows them. Unfortunately, this system is limited, because it’s hard to find good peg words to represent numbers beyond ten.

Why are Social Security numbers given in chunks of three, two, and four (999-99-9999) instead of as one unbroken number (999999999)? Why do phone numbers have hyphens in them? Because it’s much easier to remember information when it’s grouped into smaller chunks. I find that my brain prefers to remember things in groups of five, but maybe groups of four or eight will be your magic number.

Groupings allow you to organize information and sometimes apply other memory strategies, such as key words, a peg system, or a code you totally make up using your imagination. When my son memorized that long number, he grouped the numbers against the backdrop of a drum-filled song, which is an excellent example of grouping by sound.
But there are no rules to this technique. It’s just a matter of breaking up information as you see fit and then finding a way to work with those chunks that is relevant to you. This method can be used for a wide variety of tasks, from recalling lists of items to remembering basic concepts, important points, or topics that you want to cover in a presentation at work or perhaps in approaching your boss for a raise. In a studying environment, if you’re trying to figure out how to commit to memory a long batch of notes, see if you can break down your detailed notes into chunks of five main concepts. This will help you mentally organize all the material and recall the important facts.

When taking in a lot of new information, don’t be detail oriented. If you try to absorb and mentally work with a truck-load of material bombarding your brain, you won’t be able to easily hold up a stop sign in time to begin sorting and organizing it well. It’ll quickly become muddled and unyielding. What happens is similar to shoving too many things into the X-ray machine as you’re going through airport security. In order to really see individual items, each object—some of which are filled with other objects—needs to be individually placed on the conveyor belt with a few inches of space in between. If you try to shove several items at once into the machine, suddenly you can’t really see anything and the whole machine gets jammed and breaks down—or the conveyor belt screeches to a halt and the TSA agent has to separate out all your items.

Now, the mind won’t ever literally break down if it receives
too much information at once, but all of us have experienced being inundated with too much information to the point where we can’t wrap our brains around any single piece of it. To maximize our ability to mentally organize incoming thoughts and ideas, we need to have a sorting system in place in advance and ready to work. We can’t wait until the mind is already sinking under the weight of too much data. By then it’s too late. This is when separating the
facts
from the
details
is paramount.

Most important facts get repeated more than once, but they tend to be buried by distracting details. Indeed, facts are important, but they can be hard to find amid the details, some of which are truly interesting. Let’s take a quick excerpt from Wikipedia about Mozart. See if you can pluck out the facts and disregard the details. Here’s a hint: None of the facts are repeated, and this passage is quite tight to begin with.

Now, let’s say that you have to take a test tomorrow on Mozart or give a short summary of his life to a team at work for a project. You have no idea what you’re going to be
quizzed on, and you also don’t know exactly how your team at work will use Mozart’s biography. You just sense that the important facts and anything unusual about his life should be featured. Of all the words and sentences in the above text, what do you think should be highlighted? Here’s my list:

From these I can retell the story of Mozart. I don’t need to know that his baptismal name is Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart or that he was “always composing abundantly” or that he “travelled in search of a better position.” Those are details that my mind will absorb when I read the material but that don’t need to be encoded by my key words. You’ll note that the number thirty-five wasn’t in the original text, and I didn’t make “early death” a key word. I calculated that number myself because it’s easier for me to remember that he was thirty-five years old when he died than to remember the year 1791 or the phrase “early death.” If I remember the year he was born, 1756, and the fact that he
lived to the age of thirty-five, then I can always do the math if I need to on a test that asks about his death. And the fact that his death was “early” and has been “mythologized” are details I can recall from this fact alone.

As you read the details of Mozart’s life in the Wikipedia excerpt, my guess is that you could picture him in your mind—even if you have no idea what he looked like. Stories make things memorable—and
organizable
—because they allow us to paint pictures and produce movies in our minds. They help us create order out of chaos by attributing a clear and tidy image to a piece of information. This in itself is a way of organizing thoughts and data. Stories inherently force order because they are themselves organized entities—they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They convey facts in a streamlined flow. And they can hold a vast array of details, but because those details are held within the rich context of a story, they remain orderly and structured by the sequence of events. They are “well regulated” by the story itself.

The Wikipedia excerpt on Mozart doesn’t even read like a story, but it gives the brain enough to conjure something that’s like a story. I’ve made the point several times that storytelling is essential to memory and that being able to create stories in your mind, however absurd or ludicrous, is a fundamental memory strategy. But I want to be clear on an important point: This doesn’t imply that you have to have a “photographic” memory. You don’t have to have been born with a photographic memory (or any other special type
of memory, for that matter) to maximize your ability to see things and immediately commit them to memory. People who train their brains to create instant associations and organize what they see do just as well as those with photographic memories—and even the people blessed with a photographic memory have to work on this skill to keep it in tip-top shape. Most people with amazing memories do
not
have a photographic memory—they simply know how to organize their thoughts.

Even if you don’t feel like you’re talented in visualizing or in transforming concepts and information into mental images, you can at least aim to organize data differently. Go with what works for you and, most important, what’s
fun
for you.

My son Josh knows the importance of this all too well. Although he managed to memorize a two-hundred-digit number, he still meets tough challenges in his studies when the strategies he used to stick that number in his brain don’t work. This is especially true with subjects he’s not very enthusiastic about, and history happens to be one of them. When he came to me for help in preparing for a test on the Roman Empire, I guided him through a process of mentally “seeing” the key takeaways from each paragraph in his textbook and relating them to a sentence, vignette, or image. The secret is to learn the content thought by thought rather than verbatim. So for Josh to remember a whole section about the Romans’ lifestyle, he had only to remember the sentence “The plumber got a job at the hotel.” This signified to him that “plumbers”—the engineers who constructed numerous aqueducts to carry water and serve thousands of people—played an important role in Roman life at the height of the Roman Empire.

If creating stories out of key words isn’t your thing, then try making up a mnemonic sentence instead. Find associations between the information you need to know and an area in your life you’re passionate about. For example, I associate lots of information I need to retain with baseball. Maybe for you connections can be made with marathon running, cooking, tae kwon do, dancing, or painting. Watch out, though: You may keep on thinking you’re not a “visual learner” or a good storyteller, but once you find ways to organize your thoughts around what you like to do, you may soon find yourself unconsciously telling stories. Stories make up the fabric of our lives, and they can be hard to avoid. However good you’ve been at avoiding this nightmare, what will you do one day when you’re asked to give a speech? Learn this secret and you’ll be ready.