One of the simplest methods is to try to remember just the first letter of a sequence. That’s how “Roy G. Biv” (the colors of the spectrum, in order from left to right— red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) got famous. Or “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” to remember the notes on a musical staff. Or, perhaps the simplest of all, “FACE,” to remember the notes in between. (The latter two use words to remember letters.)

Of course, not many sequences work out as nicely as HOMES, an effective way to remember the Great Lakes (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior). If you tried to memorize the signs of the zodiac with this method, you’d wind up with (A)ries, (T)aurus, (G)emini, (C)ancer, (L)eo, (V)irgo, (L)ibra, (S)corpio, (S)agittarius, (C)apricorn, (A)quarius, (P)isces. Now maybe you can make a name or a place or something out of ATGCLVLSSCAP, but I can’t!

One solution is to make up a simple sentence that uses the first letters of the list you’re trying to remember as the first letters of each word. For example, “A Tall Giraffe Chewed Leaves Very Low, Some Slow Cows At Play.”

Wait a minute! It’s the same number of words as the zodiacal signs themselves. Why not just figure out some way to memorize the Zodiac? What’s better about the second set? A couple of things. First of all, it’s easier to picture the giraffe and cow and what they’re doing. As we’ll soon see, creating such mental images is a very powerful way to remember almost anything. Second, because the words in our sentence bear some relationship to each other, they’re much easier to remember. Go ahead, try it. See how long it takes you to memorize the sentence versus all the signs.

Remember: Make your sentence(s) memorable to you. Any sentence or series of words that helps you remember these letters will do. Here are just two more I created in a few seconds: A Tall Girl Called Lively Vera Loved to Sip Sodas from Cans And Plates. Any Tiny Gerbil Could Love Venus. Long Silly Snakes Could All Pray. Isn’t it easy to make up silly, memorable pictures in your head for these?

There is a limit to this technique: Unless the list itself is familiar to you (like the colors of the spectrum), this method will do you little good. For example, medical students for decades have used the mnemonic On Old Olympia’s Towering Top A Finn And German Vault And Hop to remember the list of cranial nerves (olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory, and hypoglossal). The only way the letter “G” in “German” is going to remind you of “glossopharyngeal” is if you have already spent a significant amount of time studying (memorizing?) this list!

Let’s say that I was a history major who wanted to remember the year President Nixon resigned, which was 1974.

The usual way for me to do this would be to repeat “Nixon, resignation, 1974, Nixon, resignation, 1974...” ad nauseum. How much easier would it be to just say “Nixon walked out the door in ’74!” I’ve established a link between Nixon’s resignation (him walking out the door—and out of the presidency) and 1974, the date he resigned. (You’ll learn more about how to remember dates in Chapter 8.)

In addition, I was able to use another terrific memory technique—rhyming. Rhyme schemes, no matter how silly or banal, can help us remember things for years. For instance, who can forget that it’s “i before e except after c, or when it sounds like a as in neighbor and weigh”?

Let’s step away from schoolwork for a moment to consider the case of a woman who can’t remember where she puts anything—car keys, glasses, purse...

Using the chain-link method would ensure that she would never forget. For instance, let’s say she puts her car keys down on her kitchen counter and, as she does, thinks of a car plowing right into the kitchen and through the counter-top. Will that woman be able to forget what she did with her keys? Would you?

Or, to pick an example more germane to academic life, let’s say that you wanted to remember that mitosis is the process whereby one cell divides itself into two. Instead of repeating word and definition countless times, why not think, “My toes is dividing,” and form a mental picture of two of your toes separating? Much easier, isn’t it?

To make life even easier for those of you forever forgetting your keys, make it a habit to simply put them in the same place every time—in a particular corner of the table, on a hook, wherever—and never, ever deviate. It will be one less thing to remember (and, if you believe Reader’s Digest, save you 16 hours a year).

The best way to teach this technique is by example, so let’s take another one. Suppose you wanted to remember the following list of a dozen U.S. states and their nicknames:

Study the list for no more than two minutes, cover up the page, and try to write down as many combinations as you remember. Heck, you don’t even have to do them in order—but you get serious extra credit if you do!

How did you do? Did you get them all right? How long do you think you’d have to study this list to be able to recite it perfectly? I guarantee you it would take a lot less time if you established a chain link that you could just reel in out of your memory bank.

Here’s how I would remember this list (and remember, make your pictures, associations, and stories memorable to you!):

If you wanted, you could try to use the method we discussed earlier, making up a nonsense sentence or two using the first letters of each word (N, J, G, A, Y, T, L, S, I, H, N, Y, E, C, G, M, S, M, C, N, M, T, G, P, K, B, L, P). Here’s my try: Now, Jimmy George, After You Toss Lori Sue Into Her Nice Yellow Ermine Coat, Get Ma Some Marshmallow Chocolate Nut Mints To Give Pa Kent Before Lori Pouts.

You’re probably wondering just how much time it took me to construct these ridiculous associations and the even more bizarre story to go with them. The answer: about three minutes (about the same for the sentence). I’ll bet it will take you a lot longer to memorize the list of states and nicknames. And my way of doing this is so much more fun! Not only that, but I’d be willing to bet that you’ll remember ‘“California?” he asked her. “If you show me some gold,” the little miss replied sourly.’ a lot longer than the fact that California is the Golden State and Missouri the Show Me State.

The reason is that you use so much more of your brain when you employ techniques like this. Reciting a list of facts over and over to yourself uses only three of your faculties—sight (as you read them from the page), speech, and hearing—in carving the memory trail. Constructing a visual story like the one we just did also puts to work your imagination, perhaps the most powerful of your mind’s many powers.

Let’s try another example—some legendary (but not exactly well-known) British Kings: Pir, Brutus, Maddan, Leir, Rivallo, Ferrex, Porrex, Danius, Ingenius, Cap, Geta, Severus, Coel, Runo.

Here’s the way I would remember these monarchs:

Remember, it’s not enough to memorize this kind of story and use the words as triggers for your memory. You must create the picture in your mind using people and places you find meaningful. I have a hard time getting the picture of an animated John Madden out of my mind during football season, I’m a huge Danny Kaye fan, and my dog eats Rival. So this story clearly is easy for me to remember.

Now you try. How would you remember another obscure list— two dozen more British kings? (Didn’t know there were so many, did you?)

Octavius, Constantius, Sulgenius, Eliud, Redon, Eldol, Heli, Lud, Penessil, Idvallo, Millus, Archgallo, Jago, Belinus, Rud Hud Hudibras, Gorboduc, Kimarcus, Trahern, Malgo, Keredic, Cadvan, Cadwallo, Vortimer, and Uther Pendragon.

Time yourself. When you can construct a series of pictures to remember a list like this—and remember it for a while, not just a day—all in less than five minutes, you are well on your way to mastering this powerful memory technique.

Observations of people who have been in accidents or suffered other types of severe brain trauma have yielded many interesting insights into the ways our minds and memories work. For instance, people who have had the left side of their brains damaged might lose their ability to speak and remember words and facts, but often are still able to sing songs perfectly.

Current thinking on this is that the faculty for speech resides in the left hemisphere of the brain, while the ability to sing can be found in the right.

Since it is my feeling that the more of your mind’s power you put behind the job of remembering, the better you’ll do, I’d like to suggest song as another great way to remember strings of information.

For instance, I remember few things from high school chemistry (not having had memory training at that time). But one thing I’ll never forget is that ionization is a dissociative reaction—the result of electrons becoming separated from their nuclei.

The reason I remember this is that Mr. Scott, my chemistry teacher, came into class singing (to the main theme from the opera Grenada) “I-, I-, I-onization. I-, I-, I-onization. Oh, this is, oh, this is a dissociative reaction in chemistry.”

And there’s the case of one of Robert Frost’s most loved poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Did you ever realize that you could sing the entire poem to the music of “Hernando’s Hideaway” by Xavier Cugat?

Try it with the last four lines—“The woods are lovely dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.” Trust me: It works for the whole poem.

Music is one of the ways that you can create a chain link to improve your memory. As the examples we’ve already discussed show, there are many others:

You’re probably thinking that all of this doesn’t sound like it will make your life any easier. I know it seems like a lot of work to think of soundalikes, associations, and pictures and construct crazy scenarios or songs using them. Trust me: If you start applying these tips routinely, they will quickly become second nature and make you a more efficient student.

The only problem with this method is that you might occasionally have trouble remembering what your soundalike signified in the first place. But the process of forming the link will usually obviate the problem, because the link to the original item is made stronger by the act of forming these crazy associations. Again, the crazier they are, the more memorable they are.

In the next chapter, we’ll get away from straight factual memory for a little while and talk about how we can get a better grasp of material as we read through it the first time.