Creative Memorization: You Can Try This at Home

Going by comments to the previous thread, there’s general agreement that activities that leave the conscious mind open and relaxed help the creative process. It lets the subconscious operate freely. We find that new ideas are more likely to arise spontaneously.

A problem with many of these activities is that they put us in a bad position for writing down our thoughts. We may be driving, in the shower, on a jog or long walk for exercise… But if we solve this problem by learning how to memorize the ideas that come to us until we can write them down later, memorization can actually extend the subconscious process of creation. As I mentioned last post:

What you have to go through mentally to remember enhances the creative process. I think the way it works is that the grunt work of memorization keeps your conscious mind from attempting to control or even pay attention to the more fundamental unconscious processes of creativity, allowing them to play themselves out undisturbed.

Memory Tip: Picture This…

Without using some tricks, you won’t be able to remember a list of even just several items for very long. Here’s an easy trick to try:

Once you feel your memory’s full and adding another item would put you in danger of forgetting most of them, switch to mental pictures. You can easily add one or two “images” to the end of your word list. Example:

Gotta get…

Milk
Coffee creamer
Cereal
Lettuce
BBQ sauce
Kleenex…

Oh-oh… also a loaf of bread and look for a toothbrush, I’ll never remember all that…

So after you recite your six items, you add a mental picture of bread and a mental picture of a toothbrush to the end of your rehearsal list for

Milk
Coffee creamer
Cereal
Lettuce
BBQ sauce
Kleenex…
MENTAL PICTURE OF GRANDMA’S BREAD (adding emotion to any item always helps)
MENTAL PICTURE OF TOOTHBRUSH

Wild Clamoring ?

It's easy to hold several items in short term memory for a few minutes - for example, a phone number until you can write it down - but much harder to hold onto them for, say, half an hour. So I’ve learned quite a few “middle memory” tricks - first, as per the previous post, from jogging-inspired creativity, and then developed them further on account of being a mostly bedridden person living alone. Wish I knew how to post graphs or diagrams – I think some of them may be hard to articulate with just words.

But if I hear people wildly clamoring for more memory tips on this discussion thread, I’ll try to deliver. It would have to be at least two or maybe three people and it would have to include some variation of the phase “wildly clamoring” in the comment since I’ve never had anybody wildly clamor for anything on one of my threads and it might be fun. Almost as much fun as showering with Lisa, but I expect not quite.