How Den memorizes words

Okay, here's Den explaining his superb memory. (This is a follow up from the post I did yesterday.)

"I read a book several years ago called "The Memory Book" by a guy with the last name of Lorayne. His technique for memorizing lists involves trying to make a story by connecting each item together. It is often ridiculous to picture this kind of story, but the more crazy the story is, the easier it is to memorize the list.

Try to picture this crazy story:
There was a violin being played. The bow (or whatever you call it) punctures a balloon, causing a loud boom in stereo, which is on the top of a building. There is also a large cradle on top of the building with a strawberry inside. Next to the cradle is a mast going straight up. A lizard is crawling up the mast. The mast turns into a wand that a music teacher is using. I couldn't think of a way to add the word oven to the story, so I just threw it in at the end.

The book said that you need to picture vividly in your mind the words as you're creating the story. The crazier the story, the easier it is to remember. If the story was normal and made sense, it would be far more difficult to remember."


Okay, it's me again. After Den told me his made up story last night I can recite those 10 words with no problem. I'm sure you can, too. Try it.

9 comments:

Mary said...

Aha! So he did use my old method! It works great.

Grandma Honey said...

Yes he did! When I saw your comment I thought, well this next post is not going to surprise Mary. So I wonder what this means...if one uses a story to help memorize words, are they not really memorizing them??

Eileen said...

I remembered all ten and that's exactly how I did it! (A violin with a red balloon attached, it pops with the loud stereo being played by someone building a strawberry colored cradle with a mast on top. Some kids walk by saying they'd like to put their lizard teacher into an oven.)! But the big question is will I even have a memory of taking this test ten or twenty years from now?! Nevermind the words!

I actually used to do things like this in school to help me at test-taking because school was such a constant struggle for me!

This was fun! And I'm going to have my family try it too!

Thanks, Jill!

grandmapeg said...

I've heard of the way Dennis uses to memorize things. The crazy thing for me is that I woke up this morning about 4:00 and could remember all ten words, then I went back to sleep and then when I sat down to eat breakfast at 7:00 I wrote all 10 words down, not in order but still I got all of them right despite still having my headache. So, does remembering the words this morning improve my score at all????

JudyD said...

I was in college the last 8 years, and for 5 of those years used "Super Memory--Super Student" by the same author, same method. It works! It saved me many times, especially for essay tests; and essay finals, which were the worst! Before the book I memorized by repetition, which didn't work very well!

Richard said...

Doesn't work for me. There are no masts on buildings. They're on ships. The strawberry would rot being left out like that. Lots of problems...

Rebecca said...

Ha! That is exactly how Lizzy remembers all her medical words for school!

Lisa said...

That's good to know! Maybe somewhere down the line you can post 10 more words and tell your blog reading friends to go check two more blogs and the come back and try to remember the words using that technique! It makes perfect sense to me!

So...we learn something new every day! Thanks!

Mar~ said...

Very impressive!

Look what happened last night

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