Face it. Your memory is not quite what it was at 20. Or 30, for that matter. But hope is not lost. There are ways to sharpen your memory and avoid memory loss (both short term memory and long term memory). Here's some helpful advice on how to improve your memory, courtesy of Ron White, one of the winners of the 2010 USA Memory Championship. Just don't forget his tips!
White, 37, of Fort Worth, Texas, makes a living teaching people how to remember things. Returning a call, he said he remembered the last four digits of the phone number -- 6077 -- by picturing in his mind Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton screaming.
"Basically, whatever it is you want to recall, you turn into a picture," he said. "The language of our minds is pictures."
But what does a screaming ballplayer have to do with the number 6077? Part of White's memorization system is to assign every number from zero to 99 to a person, either celebrities or people he knows personally. It so happens that he assigned Josh Hamilton to the number 60. As for the screaming part, that's because he assigned the number 77 to Sam Kinison, the late comedian known for screaming in his act.
For a four-digit number, the first half is assigned to a person and the second half is assigned a personality trait. Had the number been reversed -- 7760 -- White says he would have pictured Sam Kinison catching a baseball.
It seems like a convoluted system, but apparently it works. He's a two-time winner of the USA Memory Championship. So what does he get for that?
"Other than a lot of phone calls from nice folks like you? Nothing."
