On the other hand, some people try to remember music by making pictures or having feelings, instead of hearing the sounds. So it's always a matter of remembering in a way that's appropriate to what you want to remember.

Another good way to have a bad memory is to do something totally irrelevant to memorizing the data. If you repeat to yourself, "I've got to remember the phone number," then what you will remember is that sentence, rather than the phone number! A lot of people do something like that, and then wonder why they have such "bad memories." Actually their memories are excellent; they're just using them to remember idiotic things.

If you study people who have phenomenal memories, you find out that they do some really interesting things. One man with an excellent memory puts subtitles under all his pictures. He actually prints words on his pictures that describe what the pictures are about. That short verbal description codes and categorizes the memory, so that it's easy to go back to it. It's like putting a title on a movie, so you can glance at the title and know what it's about without having to watch the entire movie. In the computer business we call that a "drop tag code" — something that is arbitrary but distinctive, that relates to this and also relates to that, linking them together.

We had a woman in a seminar once who was rapidly introduced to forty–five people by first and last name. That's all it took for her to know everyone's name. I've seen Harry Lorayne do the same thing with about three hundred people on a TV show. When this woman was introduced to someone, she would focus on something very distinctive in what she saw — the shape of the nose, skin coloring, chin, or whatever she spontaneously noticed that was unique about that person. She would continue to focus on this distinctive feature as she heard the person's name, and that would connect the two together. She even checked herself quickly by looking away briefly to visualize that unique feature, and listen for the name, to make sure the connection had been made. I like to have people wear name tags, so I don't have to bother to do that. However, it certainly is a useful talent that could be taught to salespeople. They often have to deal with many people, and it's considered important to remember their names and be personally friendly with them.

If you deal with people mostly over the telephone, this visual method won't work. However, you can easily adapt it to the auditory system: notice something distinctive about the person's voice tone or tempo as you hear the name, and hear the name spoken with that distinctive feature. Very visual people might prefer to imagine the name visually as they hear it. You can always adapt a memory strategy in this way, to make it appropriate to the context or the skills of the person who wants to recall something.

If you really want to remember a name, pair it with something unique in all three major representational systems: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic. While you listen to the sound of the name, spoken in his voice tone, you could notice something unique in what you see as you look at him, and also what you feel as you shake hands. Since that gives you a drop tag code in each major system, you will have three different ways to recall the name.

Another way to have a "good memory" is to be as efficient and economical as possible in what you do remember, and to use what you have already remembered as much as possible. For instance, if you always put your keys in the right front pocket of your pants, you only have to remember that once. Someone who puts her keys in many different places may have to remember it four or five times each day, instead of once in a lifetime.

One of our students has a couple of businesses and has to file a lot of papers and records. Whenever something has to be filed, he asks himself, "Where would I look for this when I need it," and starts moving toward the file cabinet. As he does this, an image of a particular file tab appears in his mind, and he files it there. This method uses what he has already remembered to organize his files, so he seldom has to remember anything new. Each time he files this item he strengthens the existing connection between it and the file tab, making the system more dependable each time.

One way of thinking about these two examples is that they create a situation in which you have to remember as little as possible. Here's another example. Take a look at the set of numbers below for a few moments, and then look away and see how much of it you can remember. . . .

149162536496481100

Now look at it long enough so that you can still remember it when you look away. . . .

If you have actually tried this, you probably started to group the numbers into twos or threes to organize the task and make remembering easier:

14,91,62,53,64,96,48,11,00

Or

149,162,536,496,481,100

This is a process we call "chunking": breaking a large task down into smaller, more manageable, pieces. In business there's an old joke, "How do you eat an elephant?" The answer is, "One bite at a time."

At this point, how long do you think you could remember this number accurately? — an hour? — a day? — a week?

Now let's chunk the number a little differently. Does this suggest anything to you?

1 4 9 16 25 36 49 64 81 100

We can write this same set of numbers a little differently, as squares of numbers:1²2²3²4²5²6²7²8²9²10²

Now it's obvious that the number we started with is the squares of the numbers 1 through 10, strung together. Knowing this, you can easily remember this number ten or twenty years from now. What makes it so easy? You have much less to remember, and it's all coded in terms of things that you have already remembered. This is what math and science is all about — coding the world efficiently and elegantly, so that you have fewer things to remember, leaving your brain free to do other things that are more fun and interesting.

Those are just a few of the principles that can make remembering a lot easier and faster. Unfortunately they're not yet used much in mainstream education.

One of the nice things that happens after you write enough books is that people let you do things that you wanted to do before, but couldn't. Typically by that time you can't quite remember what they were, but I had written some of them down. When I was asked to work for a school district, I had a few things I wanted to go after. One of them is the whole notion of "learning disabilities," "minimal brain dysfunction," "dyslexia," or "educational handicaps." Those are very important – sounding words, but what they all describe is that the teaching isn't working.

Whenever a kid isn't learning, experts are quick to conclude that the problem is a "learning disability," ... but they're never quite clear about who has it! Perhaps you've noticed that they never call it a "teaching disability." The implication is always that the cause of the failure is that the kid's brain is weak or damaged, often by presumed genetic causes. When people don't know how to change something, they often start searching for a way to justify failure, rather than thinking about how they could try doing something different to make it work. If you assume that a kid has a limp learning lobe, then there's nothing you can do about it until they perfect brain grafts.

I'd rather not explain failure that way. I'd rather think about it as a "teaching dysfunction," and at least leave open the possibility that we can learn to change it. If we pretend that you can teach anyone anything, we'll find out where it's not (yet) true. But if we think that when someone isn't learning it means they can't be taught, no one will even try.