Bad Memory? Sharpen Your Ability to Remember With These Techniques

How many times have you heard someone say, "I can't remember anything. I have a bad memory." Do you say this yourself? Under normal circumstances, there's no such thing as a "bad memory." It's usually a case of paying attention and retaining the information that your senses take in. An effective way to sharpen your memory so that you can retain more information is to use a technique called, "Word Association." I use this technique on a daily basis. It helps me to remember names, dates, appointments, and other important information that I need to know.

Word Association is simply what its name implies. If you want to improve your memory, you need to associate words with mental images. For example, let's say that you can never remember your wedding anniversary, and this aggravates your
mate to no end. Remembering that special date could make your marriage happier, so let's see how you can do that. Let's also say that your anniversary is on June 25. You can associate June with "June bride" to remember the month. Then you can associate the day with how old you were when you wed your June bride. Or, maybe the number correlates with the number of guests at your wedding. You get the idea. You need to think of something that will help trigger your memory so you can successfully remember the date of your wedding anniversary.

A second method that works well for sharpening my own memory is to associate people's name with a distinctive attribute about them. For example, it would be easy to remember a man you just met if he had red hair and his name was Red Smith, right? So, how can you remember a man you just met who has the name of Jim Levin? There's nothing about his looks or personality that you can associate his name with, so let's go a little farther. How about using the fact that he owns a car dealership? What kind of numbers do car manufacturers put on vehicles? Vehicle Identification Numbers, or "VIN" for short. LeVIN and VIN- do you see the association?