How To Memorize Anything You Want: A Quick Primer on Mental Mapping

by Ron White
The Art of Manliness

What if you could play a game of cards with your buddies and recall every card that had been played? You can.

What if you could meet a client today and six months later see him at a football game and recall his name along with his wife’s and kids’ names? You can.

What if you could look at a 50 digit number for 90 seconds and then repeat the number forwards and backwards from memory? You can.

So how do you master your memory to this level? By utilizing a simple system of mental maps, you will be amazed at the amount of knowledge you will be able to store.

Here’s how to begin:

1. Select 5 rooms in your home or office.
2. In each room, number 5 large items. Number these items 1-25. The first item in the first room is #1, the first item in the second room is #6, the first item in the third room is #11, and so on. For example: Bedroom – 1. desk, 2. bed, 3. tv, 4. dresser, 5. computer…Bathroom-6. toilet 7. window, 8. shower, 9. sink, 10. towel rack…etc. Remember, this is just an example.You want to select the pieces of furniture in the way they flow around your particular room.
3. Practice saying these pieces of furniture and their corresponding numbers over and over until it becomes second nature to say them forwards or backwards. We will refer to these pieces of furniture as “files.”
4. Now whenever you wish you to recall something, turn it into a picture and imagine it interacting with this piece of furniture.

Let’s say that you want to memorize all the Super Bowl winners. Once you have your files (the pieces of furniture) memorized, the next item of business is to turn whatever you wish to recall into a picture.

So you would be looking at a list that looks like this:

1. Green Bay Packers
2. Green Bay Packers
3. New York Jets
4. Kansas City Chiefs
5. Baltimore Colts
6. Dallas Cowboys
7. Miami Dolphins
8. Miami Dolphins
9. Pittsburgh Steelers
10. Pittsburgh Steelers

In order to remember anything, it must be an image that you can imagine. For example, if you wanted to recall the number 593787, it might be tough to recall. But a photo album with a coffee cup in it would be easy to remember. That is my picture for 593787. For now, lets address turning the football teams into pictures, a much simpler task that turning 593787 into an image.

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October 1, 2011

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