By Lynne Curry, Ph.D, SPHR bio
Which problem fits you?
- Your practice has grown and you don’t remember the names of all the employees and you realize this hurts some employees’ feelings;
- Several of the sites you regularly access ask you to change passwords monthly and you have a hard time remembering the newer passwords;
- Several long-time clients expect you to remember their names when you pass them in the lobby or on the street, and you try to bluff when you don’t remember names, but several have seen through your bluff.
Memory, if only it was easy.
The good news?
It’s easier than you realize. Here are a few easy ways you can improve your memory.
Strategy 1: Breathe
What? That’s too simple.
Yes, except you don’t—breathe deeply and slowly that is. Consider this scenario. You’re walking down the street and meet someone you know, but can’t remember their name. You try to fake it. Then, when you walk off, their name comes to mind. What happened? Nothing easily come out of nor goes into memory and you breathe rapidly and shallowly. As you walked off, you relaxed and breathed more deeply.
Strategy 2: Make it matter
When we notice something, we quickly and transitorily register the information in our brain only to lose it as other information supplants it. For example, if you drive up to an intersection and see a car entering an intersection on the tail-end of a yellow turning to red light, you may think “that car took a risk.” Even though that’s a relatively dramatic traffic incident, you forget it within minutes.
If you want to remember something, shift your mind off cruise control into “on” by making it matter. For example, imagine that you’re given the password 8224300N0IM86ED and need to remember it. At first glance, that looks like a particularly difficult password. What if you made up a story about it? Here’s a story that might work, “I ate too, too much for free, oh oh no, I’m 86ed.” If you like it, you now have a strategy for designing hard to break passwords.
Strategy 3: Link audio to visual
Do you remember faces but not names? That’s because, like approximately sixty-five percent of people, you have a stronger memory for what’s visual than what’s audio. Here’s how you’ll know if you’re in that sixty-five percent. Think of a giraffe.
Did you just “see” a giraffe in your brain or did you talk to yourself about the giraffe? If you saw an image of a giraffe, that indicates how you tend to store information—visually.
Try applying this thought to names. Consider what happens when you meet someone with a foreign or unusual name such as Tanzeem. Chances are you think “what an unusual name, possibly a Middle Eastern name.” Then when you next meet Tanzeem, you remember that, “this man had an unusual name,” but you’ve forgotten the name. Imagine instead that you spelled the name to yourself, “T-a-n-z-e-e-m,”
Now, please look up from the page and spell Tanzeem.
Strategy 4: Repeat
How many days in September? If you found yourself repeating a rhyme in your mind, “30 days has September…,” it shows you the value of repetition. We don’t, however, do this when we meet new people. They tell us their name and then we tell them ours, and enter into conversation. If you want to remember name a person’s name, use it in the conversation. If that’s not feasible, repeat it in your head within several minutes of meeting the client or employee.
Research shows silent repetition increases your memory of anything by thirty percent and out loud repetition increases your chance of repetition by fifty percent.
Conclusion
Would you like a better memory for names or passwords? It’s easier than you thought.
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