A few days ago, I was on a walk with our dog, Leia, and we ran into one of our neighbors who’s been very supportive of Mullen Memory over the years. We started talking about memory and learning (as one does), and he brought up an interesting challenge.
As someone in the real estate business, he often has to deliver pitches to potential clients, and part of that pitch is listing a set of commitments he will make. It’s a short, simple list of 9 words. He had recently downloaded Anki, because he wanted to remember this list of commitments in a specific order, and more importantly, to be able to say it without sounding like he’s thinking it through in his head.
I thought this might be a fun challenge to think through. Though not strictly academic, the ability to say your spiel with confidence is beneficial to most of us. Alex and I try to make a point to never memorize lists we can write down (or Alexa can write for us), but there are just some things you want to be able to say fluently, whether for work or personal improvement.
To take this example to the extreme, let’s look at a list which is very abstract, making it more difficult to visualize and more difficult to remember semantically or grammatically. I was required to memorize and recite this list in the fifth grade:
Is, are, was, were, has, have, had, am, can, be, may, will, shall
(This is a list of the “being” words in the English language.)
The first step is to “chunk” this list. Chunking is a well-studied shortcut to boosting memory. The idea is that we remember clusters of information better than one big glob. (More about chunking here.) This is the way I chose to break it down in fifth grade:
Is, are, was, were
Has, have, had
Am, can, be
May, will, shall
Now all you have to do is memorize four chunks of words. Not dissimilar to learning the phone number—a simple echoic technique of reading it out loud in chunks can get you almost there. While auditory memory is generally a short-term solution, in this case, chunking and auditory repetition can make things stick in the way that song lyrics you’ve heard over and over do.
I wouldn’t choose to use a memory palace for this task, because the end goal isn’t searchability. If my goal is memorizing a list of drugs known to cause pancreatitis, then a palace allows me to browse my pancreatitis section images for the offending drug. In this case, however, the end goal is verbal fluency, based on my ability to hear the words in my head and rattle them off without thinking.
In other words, auditory memory of the list lends itself more easily to verbal fluency, when compared with spatial memory. For me, if I can hear the list in my head, then I can say the words easily. Compare that with seeing images of the words in a palace, which still requires translations of visual representations to phonetic words. This difference touches on the theory of “directness,” which we wrote about last week—it’s a term we quite like, used by Scott Young in his new book, Ultralearning. “Directness” is a lot easier to say than the mouthful “transfer-appropriate processing,” the term usually used in the literature. Essentially, practice how you perform.
If this list were longer, however, I would consider using something like a body palace to help me remember the order and to cue up the first word of each chunk, which generally leads to recall of the chunk’s remaining words. Alex actually uses this technique to fluently take a 32-point review of systems when interview patients. He chunked a list of 32 symptoms and then memorized it using his body, so he can always cue up the next few words.
In this case, I might do something like this:
Is, are, was, were (think of my eyes but pronounce it ‘iz’ for is)
Has, have, had (think of my mouth laughing HA HA for has)
Am, can, be (think of my arm but pronounce it like “ahm” for am)
May, will, shall (think of hand holding out some mace pronounced MAY-ce for may)
This is an actual strategy I used for an elevator pitch contest in college. Connecting my words to my physical body gave me a sense of security, and rehearsing the pitch out loud gave me fluency.
Do you have a favorite strategy for generating verbal fluency? Let us know in the comments below!