General association principles#

What colour would a rollerblading cat be? How big would it be? Where would it be rollerblading? If you answered green, about the size of a car, and over the Golden Gate Bridge, you have just built an association the same way the techniques in this section ask you to. The image is concrete, and you had to do a little work to picture it, so it sticks better than the bare words “cat” and “rollerblades” sitting side by side.

Good associations tend to share a handful of features — senses, emotions, situations, categorisation, exaggeration, combinations — and there are a few basic steps to building one. Below I cover the features, the steps, and how to practise. A quick caveat first.

How much does this actually help?#

Be clear-eyed about what association buys you. For remembering lists, sequences, names, vocabulary and other fairly arbitrary material, structured mnemonics reliably beat plain rote repetition. Roediger compared four such methods and found the organised ones (the method of loci, peg words) clearly out-performed ordinary rehearsal for recalling items in order (Roediger, 1980). That advantage is real and large.

But the gains are specific, not magical. Reviewing the major study techniques, Dunlosky and colleagues rated mnemonics as moderate utility: excellent for fixing facts and arbitrary pairings, much weaker for understanding, problem solving and transfer (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Treat the features below as a toolkit for memorising particular things, not a substitute for thinking your subject through. The two work best together.

One feature gets oversold. You will often read that bizarre, rude or shocking images are remembered far better than ordinary ones. The evidence is thinner than the folklore: the “bizarreness effect” shows up mainly when bizarre and common items are mixed in one list and tested by immediate free recall, and frequently vanishes otherwise (McDaniel & Einstein, 1986). What more dependably helps is making the image vivid, concrete and interactive so you encode it as a picture as well as words (Paivio, 1986). Strangeness can grab attention; do not count on it to do the heavy lifting alone.

Features of good associations#

There are seven features I find useful when building an association. Some are better supported by research than others — vivid imagery and interaction most of all — so take them as practical prompts rather than laws.

• Use the senses. Bring in vision, sound, smell, touch and taste — colour, size, shape, rhythm, rhyme, the noises objects make. A concrete, multisensory image is encoded in more than one way, giving recall more than one route back to it (Paivio, 1986).

• Use emotions. Emotion and humour make an image more memorable and more pleasant to rehearse, so you keep using it. Rude or shocking content is a popular tip, but the research backing that specific flavour is weak (see the note above). Use whatever genuinely sticks.

• Use situations. Put the objects in a scene and have them act on each other — crashing together, sitting inside one another, merging. An interactive image, where the items genuinely engage, reliably beats two items merely placed side by side.

• Use categorisation. Group information before memorising it. You recall four groups of four more easily than one list of sixteen, because grouping works with the limited capacity of working memory. When you order items, find a reason — even alphabetical helps.

• Use exaggeration. Making things huge, tiny or absurd forces you to picture them deliberately rather than skim the words, and that extra processing is part of why it helps. Exaggerate a sense, a situation, or an emotion — an object laughing at the fix it is in.

• Use objects. Tangible objects are easier to visualise. Instead of love, picture an object with a big pumping heart, beating fast because it is besotted with another. Concrete beats abstract for memory (Paivio, 1986).

• Use combinations. Combine several features. An image that is colourful, loud and set in an odd little scene gives you more hooks than one resting on a single trick.

A handy way to remember the seven is EESSOCCiation — the first seven letters stand for Emotions, Exaggeration, Senses, Situations, Objects, Categorisation and Combinations.

Association and the brain’s neural networks

The brain stores what we know in networks of neurons, which points to three habits. First, we learn new material by extending networks we already have, so relating new information back to what you know beats treating it as isolated — this is the elaboration that makes association work at all. Second, the more time you spend building genuine relationships between ideas, the better you recall them. Third, an image you have actively pictured is usually recalled better than two items merely noted as adjacent — not because the brain craves weirdness, but because you processed it more deeply.

Steps to create an association, with an example#

The steps may seem fiddly at first. Stay with it; after a few they become quick. Here they are, with a worked example — memorising that one job of engine oil is to cool the engine.

1. Choose the known key image — an image tied to something you already know. Here the key word is oil; I picture oil in the sump at the bottom of the engine.

2. Create the target key image for the fact you want to attach. “Cools the engine” is hard to picture, so I choose something cold — a polar bear.

3. Consider both images together and look for comparisons. Oil is black, polar bears white; a bear is far bigger than an engine.

4. Create the primary link using one feature, and make it the first thing the known image brings to mind. The obvious link is not always strongest, so allow some creativity. I chose situation — thousands of tiny polar bears swimming in the engine oil.

5. Create supporting links for important material: for senses, a white bear in black oil; for emotions, the bears having a great time sliding down the metal, cooling it as they go.

6. Test it. Clear your mind, think of the key word, and check whether your attention lands on the primary link, which then triggers the target. If not, spend longer enriching that link.

Two more tips: preserve purity — use only the objects involved, as unrelated extras distract; and keep it simple — if you need an elaborate story to link two simple images, look for a simpler link. The best associations stand out without mental gymnastics.

Association needs practice#

Association is a skill, and like any skill it takes a little time to do well — but it does work. It is the core method competitors use to win international memory championships, and studies of those competitors find they rely on trained mnemonic strategies rather than any unusual innate memory (Maguire et al., 2003). In other words, it is learnable.

Shorten the learning curve by using it often and doing short drills. Try ten minutes a day for a week: pick two unrelated objects and run through the features above, inventing as many links as you can. You also improve by using association on real material — you can learn a technique while using it. I learned peg words twenty to one hundred while memorising a hundred review points from the training flights leading up to my pilot’s licence; recalling the list strengthened the very peg words I had just learned. One author even named a memory system the “Self-Enhancing Matrix” for exactly this — using it makes you better at using it.