Derek Burnett
Derek Burnett is a Contributing Writer at Bottom Line Personal, where he writes frequently on health and wellness. He is also a contributing editor with Reader’s Digest magazine.
We’ve all been there. On our way out the door, our significant other says, “Honey, while you’re out, could you please pick up some milk, carrots, chicken breasts, cat food, and orange juice? Oh, and some dog shampoo?” It sounds like an easy enough list, just six items. You repeat it to yourself once and head out the door. Hours later, as you’re headed home, you stop off at the grocery store. What was it again? Milk…carrots…and some other things. You call home and ask for the list.
You’ve just bumped up against the limits of the human short-term memory. If you’re kicking yourself for forgetting the items on the list, you shouldn’t. It’s been hours since you heard the list, and although you repeated it to yourself once, you haven’t revisited it in your mind, and you’ve had plenty of other things to occupy your thoughts during the interval (a near-miss in traffic, a phone call from your brother, a doctor’s appointment). Those aren’t excuses but more a description of how short-term memory works. As described in 1956 by Harvard psychologist George A. Miller in his now-classic paper The Magical Number Seven Plus or Minus Two, we can only hold between seven and nine items at a time in our short-term (or “working”) memory, and those memories usually fade within one minute, unless we make some kind of concerted effort to remember them (by repeating them until they stick, usually). Short-term memory is also quite vulnerable to interference from competing thoughts, events, and concerns.
Have you ever admired someone with impressive recall? Someone who never forgets your birthday, or who was able to drive to a strange location after hearing the directions just once, or someone who could remember the name of a website hours after being told about it? While there are a few individuals who can do these things with less effort than most, what you’ve probably observed is someone who was willing to make an effort to remember. Many of us walk around under the sway of magical thinking when it comes to memory. “Oh, he has an incredible memory. I’m not like that.” The truth is, the person with that “incredible memory” probably has a memory about like yours, but is better at putting it to work.
Does that mean the person knows some memory hacks? Perhaps, but most memory techniques are not hacks at all. They’re methods of working within your natural limitations to retain things in short-term memory or to move them from short-term to long-term storage. In the case of your friend who remarkably always remembers everyone’s birthday, chances are she has them written on a calendar, maybe even with electronic notifications in advance of the events. Call that a hack if you like, but what it really amounts to is her saying to herself, “I acknowledge that I’m never going to remember all these birthdays without some kind of aid. So I’ll go to the trouble of setting up that aid.” Compared to being blessed by the gods with astounding powers of recall, it sounds rather mundane, but the end result is identical.
“Memory chunking” is one of those practices that’s sometimes thought of as a hack but really is another acknowledgement of how difficult it is to remember things. It’s a broad concept that is highly effective in boosting your recall. It just takes some conscious effort.
At its most basic, chunking is a memory strategy that acknowledges an essential truth about our brains. We can remember more information when it’s presented in manageable clusters than when it’s presented as a long list of individual items. Consider this example…
6224235111
It’s daunting before you even think about memorizing it, isn’t it? It’s an awful lot of numbers (10, to be exact), and it would be an impressive feat to commit it to memory expeditiously. But what if it looked like this?
622-423-5111
That’s suddenly much simpler, isn’t it? Now, instead of memorizing one 10-digit number, you only have to memorize two three-digit numbers and one four-digit number. As you’ve surely realized, this is the US phone-number format, which is deliberately broken up into chunks for ease of memorization. And it’s a format you’ve been used to your whole life, which also makes it easier to remember. The same is true of Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
So, yes, chunking can help you remember long strings of numbers by breaking them up into shorter units. But that’s not everything it does. Think of chunking as a very broad strategy that can be expressed or improved upon via several additional memory tools (visualization, patterns, mnemonics, and acronyms) to help you recall all kinds of things.
Let’s take that grocery list that your spouse hit you with on your way out the door…
Can this list be chunked? Sure it can, in at least a couple of ways. For example, you might decide to chunk it into two lists, one pertaining to animals (chicken breasts, cat food, dog shampoo) or one pertaining to beverages (milk, orange juice). For that strategy, you’d picture a cow and a chicken facing a dog and a cat. This is an example of visualization as a memory aid, layered onto your chunking.
Or maybe you split it into “three C’s and a MOD,” that is, three items that begin with C (carrots, chicken breasts, cat food), plus Milk, Orange juice, Dog shampoo (MOD). For that strategy, you’d repeat “three C’s and a MOD” as a kind of mantra until it stuck. That little jingle, “Three C’s and a MOD!” is an example of a mnemonic, a word, phrase, poem, rhyme, or song to help you remember information. One of the best-known mnemonic devices will take you back to sixth-grade music class. Do you remember the notes on the lines as Every Good Boy Does Fine? And how about the notes between the lines as F-A-C-E?
Let’s look again at the phone number in our first example:
622-423-5111
Step one for memorizing it was to break it up into three numbers. But who couldn’t use a little help in remembering the three numbers themselves? If you look closely at the number, you might be able to pull out a pattern that will help you remember it. In this case, the first three digits add up to 10 (6+2+2), the second three add up to nine (4+2+3) and the final four add up to 8 (5+1+1+1) for a nice clean 10, 9, 8 pattern. Obviously, not all lists or numbers will offer such convenient patterns, but you might be surprised at how often they do appear once you start looking for them (Historic dates are a great quasi-pattern that can often help to chunk off part of a number sequence, such as 1492, 1066, 1776, 1945, and so on).
As the above examples should make clear, just about anybody can improve their short-term memory by using chunking and similar techniques. The more you practice these methods, the better you’ll get at coming up with chunks, mnemonics, visualizations, and so on, and you’ll likely experience a bump in recall as you begin to exercise your “remembering muscles.”
If you’re serious about improving your short-term memory through these techniques, adopt this mindset as it is most conducive to success…
