todayiamadaisy | Picture this (Reply)

I've seen two separate newspaper articles this past week suggesting that the best way to remember things is to make a mental picture of them. Do people actually do this? One of the examples was if you want to remember a four-digit PIN, the best thing to do is think of words that rhyme with the numbers and then come up with a sequence to remember them. So if your PIN was 2468, then the words could be "shoe, door, sticks, gate" and the mental image would be that if you want to use your PIN, you need to put on your shoe, open the door, step over some sticks and go through the gate. Gosh, that sounds like a lot of work. In fact, it seems to be generating more things to forget. Is this how those people remember pi to one hundred thousand places? Tell a long, rambling story: "Well, first I climb a tree and point at a bun and then go back down to the floor and look at the sun and then go to the bee hive... I think I'd rather just remember the number.

The other article was about remembering names, with the suggestion of matching the name to what the person is wearing. The example in that was a woman called Olivia, who was wearing a scarf draped around her neck like an "O" for olive. That sounds good, but it's only going to work as long as Olivia never takes her scarf off, isn't it?