So now we’ve addressed how to lay out your revision so that it’s more manageable how do you actually get it from the sheet of paper and etched into your mind?

Our brains are designed in such a way that we retain bits of information that might be useful to our survival. That’s why you can probably remember the last argument you had but not what you had for dinner last week. That’s also why it’s so hard to remember who was Prime Minister in 1934 for that History exam; dry bits of data are boring and have no emotional aspect to them so it’s incredibly tricky to seer it into our minds. Fortunately there are many tricks and techniques you can use to help here. It’s a bit ambitious and extreme to use techniques from ‘Memory Masters’ for an exam but if it can help so what?

Firstly mnemonics can be helpful such as acronyms and rhymes. What can also help is to create mini-stories linking names or dates together. For example, in psychology I had to remember that a researcher Frankenhause did an experiment to test if there was a gender effect on a recent finding. Firstly, I only had to remember that he was finding a gender effect as I’d previously learned the context and I’d be able to remember it being under the relevant study on my sheet. I could remember the outcome as that was interesting – it was just the name and the date that I needed to link to this information. So I controversially used ‘Frankenhause – because women belong in the house’. It barely makes sense but it’s controversial and related to genders so it sticks in my mind (an unpopular example but it’s the one that springs to mind, I’m not really that sexist!). The date was 1987 – the year I was born – and I’m pretty sure something similar to ‘Frankenhause’ means hospital in German. Like many of you I was born in a hospital and this was enough of a connection for me to remember it. Hey, it worked for me! The weirder and more nonsensical it is, often the better you’ll be at remembering it later.

That’s not what the true Memory Masters do however. Although they do often use a story they prefer to ‘visualise’ that story as our sensory memory is often more reliable. So maybe for this one you’d imagine a gender confused guy called Frank in his house. This method is particularly good for remembering long lists of objects – say a shopping list – as they’re easier to visualise. Here you create a visual image tying together two consecutive images. So for Monkey, Brick, Cleaner, Squirrel you might imagine a monkey bashing himself with a brick – now think about that in detail and really drink it in/enjoy the image for a good minute or two. Now the next one, a brick being feather dusted by a cleaner for example. Funny or bizarre images work best – make up your own!

So how can this apply to numbers or dates? Well here ‘Memory Masters’ use a clever trick, utilising a visual ‘code’ based on rhyme and use these universally across images. For example one can be ‘bun’ or ‘sun’ and two can be ‘stew’ or ‘loo’… you get it. Now you have to incorporate these into your images and hey presto, easy to remember dates.

Armed with this stuff the other students don’t stand a chance.

Mack LeMouse

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