I Tried This Psychologist-Approved Memory Hack and It Helped So Much
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The other day, I had a very important package to mail (not to brag, but my daughter sold another one of her old Webkinz on eBay). I had a million things on my mind, so the night before, I put a yellow sticky note on my computer at home that said, “Mail package!” As I checked my email the next morning, I saw the note and made a mental plan to drop the package at the post office on my way to work. Then I finished getting dressed, gulped down the rest of my coffee, headed out the door…
… and walked straight to the subway on autopilot, leaving the package behind.
I'd bet my bottom dollar this happens to you, too: You need to pick up the dry cleaning or send a birthday card to your mom, and you leave yourself a note on your desk or phone, and then it just slips out of your brain like a moth flittering away.
But memory experts agree there is a foolproof plan for remembering these tasks: Create a visual clue — the weirder, the better.
In my case, I could have tied a stuffed animal to the front doorknob, where I couldn't miss it on my way out. I would reach for the door and say, “What the heck is a pink-stuffed puppy doing here?” Then it would surely click in my brain that another stuffed animal was waiting to be mailed to its new owner.
Some other examples:
If you need to book that flight for your business trip in the morning, put a paper airplane in your coffee mug.
Need to pick up allergy medicine at the drugstore? Draw a picture of a giant flower with a nose and tape it to your front door.
You promised to call your sister to discuss plans for Thanksgiving? Since your sister's pet name when you were kids was "Stinko," put a bag of onions or garlic on top of your handbag, so when you pick it up in the morning, you think "Stinking Plus Cooking = Call Sister About Turkey Day."
Why it works
Many of us write reminder notes on our phone or desk, says memory expert Todd Rogers, PhD, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, but the problem is that these kinds of reminders don’t stand out or grab your attention — especially if there are a million other notes littering your desk.
The key element to a good memory hack is to make it capture your attention, he says. “The problem with a sticky note is that it is often in a crowd of other sticky notes, and you don’t even detect it.” (In a recent study published in Psychological Science, Rogers showed that most people didn’t notice an important message written on a sales counter, but they did notice a picture of an alien, which reminded them to do a task.)
Instead, he says, use something that will definitely grab your eye by being out of place — an upside-down teddy bear, a cactus with a ribbon on it, a toy airplane. “When you see it, you'll think, ‘What the hell?’” and as long as you’ve connected that object with the task that needs to be done in your brain, you will remember it. “It’s a pretty good way of hacking our own memories,” he says.
Timing matters, too, says Rogers. In my case, there was too much time between when I saw the reminder and when it would have made the most impact. “The question is, how do you remember to do something in the moment when you can actually enact the behavior?” he says, pointing out that it doesn’t take much to distract the mind into forgetting the very thing you just remembered. “Something as simple as walking into the kitchen from the living room can make you forget what you were going to do,” he says. So putting a reminder closer to my front door, the point at which I could turn around and grab the package, would have been a good start.
The power of the visual
Whereas our eyes may glaze over that sticky note or memo on our phone, “We instantly notice when things are different visually, and then we interpret it cognitively,” says Rogers.
“Visual cues create an anchor to help us remember information, and it facilitates greater recall,” adds clinical psychologist Robert Roopa, of Counseling Services for York Region in Ontario, Canada, who advises patients on improving memory. “External memory cues such as placing a grocery bag on your desk can be particularly useful when trying to remember to do a task.”
“The more senses that are involved in learning, the better the information gets coded into memory,” explains Elise Caccappolo, PhD, a neuropsychologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. This type of “multimodal learning” is helpful whether trying to remember to book the babysitter or remember the capital of Minnesota.
Gary Small, PhD, chair of psychiatry at Hackensack Meridian Health and author of The Memory Bible, agrees that visual cues are key for remembering things, in fact it’s a part of his method for storing facts in your brain. “We called it look, snap connect,” Small says. “Look stands for focusing your attention. Snap stands for creating a mental snapshot that leverages your brain natural ability to remember visual information. Connect is a way of linking up those visual images so they have meaning. If you can make something meaningful, it will become memorable.”
Two other ways visual learning can help memory
Create a mental image to remember names: This is a tip I remember from a looong time ago, when a family friend gave my brother and me tickets to a popular children's TV show, Wonderama. That day, memory expert Harry Lorayne appeared as a guest, and in mere minutes, memorized the last names of every one of the 50 or so kids in the studio audience. He advised us to choose one visual feature and tie it to the name. (I assumed he pictured my nose as an ice-cream cone to remember Cohen, but who knows?)
Color-code your memories: One memory trick Caccappolo swears by is using different colors to write down different information she needs to retain. "I carry around a pen that you can click and use different colors," she explains. "When I write things down in red or green, it sticks in the part of the brain that processes colors, so then I picture that note in its color, and it's easier to recall." This way the fact is input in two ways, as both an image and a phrase, so it gets stored twice, she adds.
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