An excerpt from "Remember This Book," by Mark Shouldice

"Remembering a list of things. The first thing we're going to do is learn how to remember a list of items in their proper order. Usually when you try to remember a list of things, even if it is three or four, your brain just scatters each of the items around in different places, making it difficult to recall. After you learn this technique you can create a mental list of things you need to do tomorrow, or this weekend, whether it's five things, or twenty-five. The first thing we should do is choose a starting point for our list, so we know where our brain should start searching when we want to remember it. This point can be called a memory peg. Let’s use our right fingers for now. Later we’ll use a series of pegs on our body for different lists.

Mail the phone bill

Do laundry

Check E-mail

Buy Airline Ticket

Do Homework

Wash Car

Go surfing

Dinner at sunset

Read the Paper

Take out the garbage

The first item on this list is to pay the phone bill. Take a second and just picture the bill in your mind’s eye, and make it big and clear. Now lets combine that image with a picture of the starting point, your fingers. You could picture your fingers are phone bills, or maybe tiny phone bills are growing out of your fingernails. This may sound pretty weird, but stick with me for a while. The next item on the list is to do the laundry. For this you could picture a washing machine. Then we need to link that image to that of the phone bills. In order to "file" these items next to each other you could visualize the washing machine spinning around with hundreds of phone bills inside being washed. Next on the list, you have to check your e-mail. You could use an image of a giant computer for this, and smash it down on top of the washing machine and computer chips and phone bills go flying everywhere. You might be laughing at how weird this seems. All of this talk about "generating" mental cartoons with huge distorted images does sound funny, but they seem to work quite well. After you build up your mental muscles you might be able to picture each item sitting next to each other in your mind’s eye, and remember them fine. Next, you want to buy an airline ticket. Create an image of a plane, or a ticket, and then link it to the e-mail.

Maybe picture yourself buying the ticket online, and typing in your information. Are you getting the hang of how you're mind's eye works? By combining mental images of each item we want to remember, we can put those items in the same "memory bank", or "mental file folder" for easy recall. After being exposed to these ideas and applying them, they seem almost obvious. Next we must do our homework. Maybe, link your books to an airplane. The wings or propellers might be books for example. Use your imagination to create your own images and associations for the rest of items on the list. You should have the hang of it by now. "



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