If you’d like to memorize 10 times faster, this video will show easily you can improve. You remember information in two main ways – as words, using your verbal memory, or as pictures, using your visual memory. They’re different mental processes and they achieve dramatically different results.
People never believe how crazy the difference is, so here’s a challenge for you and you can prove it for yourself.
First, let’s test your verbal memory.
I’ll give you a list of ten words and let’s see how many you’re able to remember. Here we go:
Piano
Elephant
Truck
Bottle
Basketball
Chair
Pineapple
Dog
Painting
Trampoline
Ok, close your screen and write down all the words you can remember. How’d you go?
If you’re like the average person, you were able to recall about five to seven words, not necessarily in the right order. So that was your verbal memory, now let’s test your visual memory.
I’ll give you another list of words, but this time, I’ll also give a short story and a picture. To activate your visual memory, just create a mental picture of everything I describe. Here we go.
Ferrari – Imagine you’re driving a bright red Ferrari with the top down. The music is pumping above the throaty growl of the engine, and your hair is blowing in the wind.
Chicken – With a loud ‘thump’ a giant chicken lands in the seat next to you. It’s the size of a person, enormous and yellow. It must have fallen out of the sky.
Watermelon – The chicken opens the car door and leaps out onto the road. As it stands there, an enormous green watermelon rolls over the top of it and keeps rolling down the road.
Barack Obama – You watch the watermelon roll down the road and straight into Barack Obama. The watermelon splits in half and Obama is left standing there, dripping in watermelon juice.
Poodle – Obama picks up a passing poodle and uses it to wipe the juice off his face. The poodle is pure white, but as it soaks up watermelon juice it slowly turns bright pink.
Flagpole – Obama throws the poodle away, it flies through the air and lands on the top of a tall flagpole. The weight of the juicy poodle causes the flagpole to slowly topple over.
Cake – With a loud and messy ‘splat’ the flagpole falls into the middle of an enormous birthday cake. Icing, cream, and candles go flying everywhere, raining down on people passing by.
Doll – A large dollop of cream lands on the head of an oversized Barbie doll. It creates a weird chemical reaction and the doll shoots into the sky like a space rocket, blonde hair trailing behind her.
Pizza – The doll rockets upwards and just as it starts to fall, a large pizza explodes open above her head like a parachute. The pizza is attached to the doll by long strings of melted cheese.
Giraffe – The pizza eventually lands on the ground, covering the doll, and a giraffe walks over and starts eating the pizza, bending its long neck and stretching its tongue to lick up the delicious cheese.
Skateboard – After eating too much pizza, the giraffe pulls out a skateboard, jumps on it, and starts gliding down the street, ducking signs and street lights as it rolls along.
Cigarette – The skateboard begins coughing, and it stops and uses one of its wheels to light a cigarette. The cigarette becomes engulfed in flames and the skateboard throws it away.
Statue of Liberty – The flaming cigarette flies through the air and lands on the torch being held aloft by the Statue of Liberty. The torch bursts into flames too.
Ice cream – The Statue of Liberty comes alive and thrusts the burning torch deep into a big bucket of ice cream. It’s cherry chocolate ice cream that melts and starts to bubble ominously.
Fireworks – The ice cream explodes into fireworks, lighting up the sky above the Statue of Liberty with brightly colored fireworks forming the words.
Ok, again try to write down how many words you’re able to recall using your visual memory. The trick is to re-create a picture in your mind of each image in the story.
Did you see the difference?
And I did something sneaky, I gave you fifteen words, not ten, but the average person would have been able to recall from ten up to all fifteen words, and mostly in the correct order. Leave a comment below and let me know how your verbal memory scored against your visual memory.
I tried the first word list. The second one I haven't tried. I'm a little busy now. 😁 Let's test it now.
1) Lottery, 2) Elephant, 3) Truck, 4) Bottle, 5) Basketball player, 6) Pineapple, 7) Dog, 8) Picture, 9) Tamboline
9 out of 10 🥈
Actually, I also used visual memory and story building technique to remember. 1) Looking at the lottery and the elephant behind him, 2) The lottery is walking towards the truck. 3) There is a bottle right in front of them. 4) Basketball player takes the bottle and throws it into the basket. 5) Right under the crucible is a pineapple sitting on the chair. 6) Pineapple I have a string in my hand. 7) The rope is tied to the dog's throat. 8) The dog is painting. 9) There is a Tambolin on the paper that the dog is painting.
Actually, if I made the connections in the story a little more carefully, I could remember them all. The reason I couldn't remember the chair was because I imagined it as a pineapple under the crucible in the story. In fact, although I created the story that pineapple actually sits on a chair, I have imagined the visual picture as standing.
The important thing here is that the relative contains exactly the word and to construct it as a story. I also remembered the word painting instead of the word painting. This is actually not very important. When we just recite a story and visualize it, we can remember almost anything. I was a little rushed. 🤣
It was a nice and useful article. It really inspired me. Thank you.