The link method: chaining items into a story#
You already met this technique without me naming it. In the creative association exercise you linked fifteen unrelated items into a daft little story, and the list that should have been a slog came back almost on its own. That is the link method — also called the chain or story method — and it is one of the oldest tricks in the memory toolkit. Each item is tied by a vivid image to the one before it, so recalling the first pulls up the second, the second pulls up the third, and you walk the chain to the end.
If you’ve not done the exercise, go and do it now. It makes the rest of this page land far harder than reading about it can.
How to build a chain#
The link method shines when you need to hold a short, ordered list of related points — the kind of thing you’d otherwise try to drum in by repetition. Earlier, in the association example, we used a polar bear to remember that one role of engine oil is to keep the engine cool. The other roles are shock absorption, protection, cleaning, sealing and lubrication. To chain them:
- Link the bear to the next item. Picture the polar bears with shock absorbers where their legs should be, boinging across the ice.
- Link that image to the next. Those shock absorbers are wrapped in a thick protective case — armour plating, perhaps.
- Keep going, one hop at a time. The armour to cleaning, cleaning to sealing, sealing to lubrication, until the whole list is one connected scene.
The reason this works is the same reason the green rollerblading cat sticks: you are elaborating — encoding each fact deeply, as an action you already know, instead of as a flat word on a list. Make the images move, exaggerate them, and let them be absurd. A boring chain is a forgettable chain.
Does it actually work?#
Yes — and unusually for memory techniques, this one has a clean piece of evidence behind it. Roediger tested four mnemonics head-to-head against ordinary rote rehearsal for recalling a list in the right order. The imagery methods, the link/story method among them, clearly beat rehearsal (Roediger, 1980). So when the task is “these items, in this sequence,” a chain is a genuinely better bet than reading the list over and over.
I want to keep that grounded, though, because the memory-course industry rarely does. The win is real but it is specific. Broad reviews of study techniques rate mnemonics as having moderate overall utility: they are excellent for remembering set lists, but they do little for genuine understanding — seeing how ideas connect, solving new problems, applying what you know (Dunlosky et al., 2013). A chain will lock in the six roles of oil. It won’t teach you the engineering of why oil does those jobs. Use the link method to make the facts stick, then use comprehension techniques to make sense of them.
The weakness: a broken chain#
There is one real catch, and it’s built into the method. Because every item hangs off the one before it, forgetting a single link strands everything after it. Blank on “protection” and you may never reach cleaning, sealing or lubrication — the cue that would have fetched them is gone. With a long or high-stakes list, that is a fragile way to store things.
This is exactly the gap the next technique closes. Peg words give each position its own fixed, independent hook, so a forgotten item leaves the rest of the list untouched. The method of loci does the same with places. Reach for the link method when the list is short, the order matters, and you need it now; reach for a peg or loci system when the list is long or you can’t afford a broken chain.
Takeaway: the link method chains items into one moving story so each cues the next — strong, evidence-backed help for short ordered lists, weaker for deep understanding, and vulnerable to a single forgotten link. Learn it first, then graduate to peg words or loci when the chain gets too long to trust.