How to memorize stuff FAST

This article will teach you how to quickly memorize information, be it for a grocery list, for an upcoming exam or just out of personal interest. In general it's easier to memorize information that's less technical and therefore evokes more pictures in one's mind. Memorizing technical or mathematical information perfectly makes it necessary to build an extensive mental foundation and is not the focus of this article.

The method I found leading to the quickest results for the beginner is the Journey Method, originating in ancient rome.

In the Journey method information is linked with a well-know succession of places (a "journey") by connecting images in your mind. Recall is based on mentally taking the journey and automatically remembering the needed information through the associations made before.

The easiest journeys are those you have taking many times in your live and can remember easily without much strain. An example would be your daily journey to work, or a mental tour of your home or that of a friend.

Let's say you decide to take your home as a base. Here you would start e.g. with the porch, continue inside to the hallway and following up with the living room etc. Make the journey easy to remember, so that you are always able to not only recall each element but to recall all of them in the same order every time.

After generating your journey you will be able to easily remember lists with number of items equal to the number of places in your journey. This number can be easily multiplied with another method but for now let's get into the actual memorization.

In the beginning it's advisable to write out the journey's steps with the information beside it, so you can test yourself e.g.

1. Porch - eggs
2. Hall - bananas
3. Living room - medicine
   etc.

Visualize the first place and put the first object inside, resizing it so it fits onto your mental screen. It doesn't matter whether you open your eyes or not, but for practical purposes it's advised to strive for open eyes at some point.

For some people it's easier to remember outrageous images (thousand of eggs occupying their porch) for others it doesn't matter.

What's important though is making the images big, vivid, detailed and colorful.

Fix each image for a couple of seconds while ignoring outside thoughts.

Ok, so now this is where the real fun begins.

Put away your paper with the information and take the mental journey. Each stop will instantly bring the embedded information back into your mind. The better the quality of your association (big, vivid, detailed and colorful) the faster.

Don't worry if you don't get it perfectly the first time, just return to your paper and re-associate those you missed. After a while you will be able to perfectly recall 100%.

Go over the list again after an hour and during the next day, to fix the information.

Q: What happens when I want to use my journey for a new list?

Q: What if I want to memorize something I can't find a picture for? A: Ok, this brings us closer to memorizing technical info, butI'll give you a quick pointer. You don't need to actually find a picture of what you want to remember, but a picture which instantly reminds you of it. Let's say you want to remember "happiness", as a concept. There is no way to remember this exactly, so you picture something that means "happiness" for YOU (maybe playing your favorite sport, having fun with friends or being with your family).