THE ART OF MEMORY · LESSON 2 OF 30 · PART I: FOUNDATIONS

Pictures That Stick

A Roman handbook, a man with a goat on his head, and twelve ways to make any picture impossible to forget.

Memory hook: a man in a toga walks through a dull grey Roman forum with a brightly lit goat standing on his head.

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In this lesson: you will learn what makes a mental picture memorable, use a twelve-point checklist (SMASHIN' SCOPE) to build one, and turn a plain word into a picture you could not forget.
Where we left off
Name the three stages of memory.
Encoding, storage and retrieval.
S. remembered long lists without writing them down. What did he do with each item?
He turned it into a vivid picture, often with colour, and put it along a street he knew.
Why is a chunk easier to hold than ten separate letters?
Working memory holds only a few units. A chunk counts as one unit even when it contains several letters or digits.

The man with the goat on his head

Imagine a morning in Rome, two thousand years ago. You cross the Forum on your way to a lesson. You pass a hundred things: stalls of olives, a woman arguing about the price of cloth, a boy with a basket, the same stone steps you climb every day. At the end of the day someone asks you what you saw. You can hardly say. It was all ordinary, and ordinary things slip straight through the mind.

Now imagine that halfway across the square a man comes towards you wearing a bright red wig, leading an elephant by a string, with a live goat balanced on his head. The goat is chewing a letter. You would remember him for years. You might not even need to try.

Why do you forget most of what you pass in the Forum?
Because it is ordinary. Ordinary things do not stand out, so the mind does not keep them.
Talk about it. What is the strangest thing you have ever seen in the street? How long have you remembered it?

The Roman author who made this point in a handbook on public speaking, written around 85 BC, is unknown. For centuries people thought it was Cicero. The handbook is called Rhetorica ad Herennium, and it says something very close to the Forum story. We remember little things, ordinary things, everyday things, it says, because nothing about them surprises us. But anything shocking, ugly, beautiful, funny, huge or unbelievable stays with us a long time.

So the advice for anyone who wants to remember is make the picture unusual. Do not hold a polite, realistic picture in your mind. Give it colour, make it move, make it louder and bigger than life, make it a little silly or a little shocking. The handbook adds that the pictures should be active: people doing things, not still lifes.

What does the Roman handbook say about ordinary things?
We forget them because they do not surprise us. Striking, strange, beautiful, funny or huge things are the ones we keep.
Talk about it. Why do you think a funny or shocking picture is easier to remember than a calm one?

People have been rediscovering this ever since. Modern memory trainers have turned the advice into a checklist you can use to build a picture on purpose. One popular version is a twelve-letter word, SMASHIN' SCOPE, and you will learn it in the next tab. Each letter is a way to make a picture richer: add a sense, add movement, add a joke, add a number.

There is a catch, and it is a good one. The picture has to be yours. A picture borrowed from someone else, however wild, does not hold as well as one you made, because making it is the work that fixes it in the mind. This lesson is where you start making them.

Why should you make your own pictures?
Making the picture is the work that fixes it in memory, so your own picture holds better than someone else's.
Talk about it. Describe, in two sentences, a picture you could use to remember the word Monday.

Words worth knowing

Say what you think each one means, then open it.

so unusual or strong that you notice it at once. a striking image
very strange and surprising. a bizarre picture
to make something bigger or stronger than it really is. Exaggerate the size.
normal, with nothing special about it. an ordinary morning
sight, hearing, smell, taste or touch. Use as many senses as you can.
to be easy to notice because it is different. The red wig stood out.

The handbook is the Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 85 BC), Book III. Our own paraphrase.

Twelve ways to make a picture stick

A good memory picture is not a photograph. It is a small film with something happening in it, and it breaks the rules of real life.

LetterIdeaWhat to do
SSynaesthesia and sensesMix the senses. Taste a colour, hear a shape, smell the scene.
MMovementMake it move: fly, spin, crash, run.
AAssociationConnect it to something you already know well.
SSensualityAdd strong feeling: touch, taste, delight or disgust.
HHumourMake it funny or silly.
IImaginationBreak the rules of the real world.
NNumberCount it: three hundred ducks, one giant.
SSymbolismUse a symbol: a crown for a king, a heart for love.
CColourMake it bright, or the wrong colour.
OOrderPut things in a clear order or pattern, or stack them in an odd one.
PPositivityPleasant pictures are easier to return to than horrid ones.
EExaggerationMake it enormous or tiny. Overdo everything.
one tool is good.
three or more
= unforgettable.
Building one picture
Word to remember: ORANGE (the fruit).
SizeAn orange as big as a car.
ColourNeon orange with yellow stripes.
MovementIt rolls down the High Street, bouncing off lamp-posts.
SensesYou smell the citrus, hear the crunch, feel the spray of juice on your face.
HumourPeople run away screaming, holding tiny umbrellas.
The picture: A car-sized neon orange rolls down the street, crunching lamp-posts and spraying juice, while people run away under tiny umbrellas.

When the word is not a thing

You can picture an orange. You cannot picture justice or Brazil or lecture. For those you substitute: find something you can see that sounds like the word, or means something close to it, and picture that. Brazil sounds like bra; Russia sounds like rushing; lecture can be a person talking at a lectern. You will do a great deal of this in the rooms to come.

  1. Find the thing. A word you can see, or a substitute for it.
  2. Make it do something. Movement, a crash, an action.
  3. Add three tools from the checklist. Size, colour, sound, humour, a number.
  4. See it for a few seconds. Close your eyes. It is a picture only if you can see it.
Say it aloud. Describe the orange picture aloud, and add one more tool from the list that is not in the example.

Now you build

Have a go before you open any answer. A rough attempt teaches you more than a perfect model you only read.

Which tool is this?

Match each detail to the letter of SMASHIN' SCOPE it uses best.
The pen is ten feet tall.
The pen is spinning and spraying ink.
The pen smells of strawberries and sounds like a trumpet.
There are three hundred pens.
The pen wears a crown.

Build it together

Make a picture for BICYCLE using at least three tools. Think: how big? What colour? What is it doing? What can you hear and feel? Write your picture in a sentence or two.
A bicycle as tall as a house, bright pink, is pedalling itself down a staircase, ringing its bell like a fire engine. You can feel the whole building shaking, and a hundred pigeons burst out of the windows.

Your turn: PENCIL

Make a picture for PENCIL. Use at least three tools. Write it down.
A pencil the size of a tree trunk, glowing gold, is writing your name on the sky with a scraping sound that makes your teeth ache. Rubber dust falls like snow.

Your turn: HAMMER

Make a picture for HAMMER. This time try to use Sensuality (strong feeling), Number and Humour.
Seven tiny hammers are tickling your feet, and every time one taps you laugh so hard you cannot stand. They are bright green and ring like bells.

Fill the gaps

A picture is easier to remember if it (it is not still).
When a word is hard to picture, we it with something that sounds like it.
To remember "Brazil", you might picture a giant .
Which picture is the best memory picture for the word LEMON?

Describe it aloud

Pick one of the pictures you made and describe it aloud in sixty seconds. Add as many senses as you can while you speak.
1:00

Drill

Flash cards

Say the answer first, then tap the card.

tap to turn over

Quick quiz

How many items are in the SMASHIN' SCOPE checklist?
What should you do with a word like "justice" that you cannot picture?
Why does making the picture yourself work better than borrowing one?
Which is the strongest set of tools for a picture of CLOCK?

The memory challenge

Memory challenge: eight words in ninety seconds

Make a vivid picture for each word, using at least three tools. Study, then type what you remember.

Do not repeat the words. Build one wild picture for each, a few seconds each.

0:00

The list has gone. Type what you remember, one item per line.

Look back

These reach back to earlier rooms. Answer in your head or out loud, then check.

Lesson 1 · How Memory Works. What are the three stages of memory?
Encoding, storage and retrieval.
Lesson 1 · How Memory Works. What is a chunk?
A group of things you treat as one unit, like FBI or a year.
Lesson 1 · How Memory Works. When is forgetting fastest?
Right after learning, then it slows. So the first review matters most.
Lesson 1 · How Memory Works. Why was S.'s memory sometimes a problem for him?
He could not forget; old pictures piled up and got in the way.

What I can do now

A thought to keep

Pick a word from today you found hard to picture. What did you substitute, and why did that work?

Saved on this device as you type.

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