h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of my old tutors at uni used to do odd things during each tutorial to help us remember.

"Oh, defamiliarisation - that was the day he stood on the desk for the entire tutorial; it means 'to make strange'... Freud's Thanatos theory - that was the one where he juggled with oranges with crosses felt-tipped onto them; that's the theory which is all about obsessing over death..."

See, I can still remember it now!

A way I used to revise was doing impresions of the teachers or tutors. I'd practice my impresion to make my friends laugh, but I found I was also able to remember the way the teacher pronounced certain words and it helped me to recall whole chains of information. I came top of the class in chemistry one year because we had a teacher with a very distinctive voice, whereas the following year I came absolute bottom because the teacher was so non-descript.

And of course, the Memory Palace - an idea that appears in the book 'Hannibal' - where you construct a mental image of your dream home and then fill each room with all the things you need to remember. For example, in your 'study', you might have a table where you keep your bills, and because you mentally store each one face up, you can then use it to remember which bill is due next. You might have a birthday room, where you celebrate people's birthdays, and all around the room are photos of your friends in the order of their birthdays.

In the 'kitchen', you might lay out all the ingredients to a complicated recipe so you can then remember them - and the order they come into use - as you work just by bringing forward the mental picture.

It takes time to perfect, but it can come in handy if you have to remember things like a shopping list. You can picture your Memory Palace and place all the items you need to remember on the floor along your route from, say, the bedroom to the kitchen, or one in each of the rooms you come to if you mentally 'walk' around the upper landing in a clockwise direction...