Brain Health Blog

By contributing author Paul Li, a neuroscience graduate student at Columbia.

Memory strategies – or mnemonics – can be used to help you put things into memory so that they’re easier to remember later. Those who forget their keys or have trouble remembering peoples’ names could benefit from these tips. We previously described a way to use the linking technique to make it easier to remember a grocery list. What if the elements don’t fit together as a story?

“Chunking” is a common technique used to remember several items. Specifically, chunking is used to break down a long series of units into easy-to-remember groupings. Phone numbers or social security numbers, which are usually broken up into 3 to 4 digits by hyphens, make use of chunking.

Using this strategy in Monster Garden, one of the Lumosity spatial memory games, you can group monsters together into a single memory element. For example, if 5 monsters display but 3 of them form a triangle, try to remember the triangle of monsters plus the other 2 individual monsters. This will require 3 working memory slots as opposed to 5. See if you can improve your Monster Garden score with this approach. Chunking is also linked to advanced skills, such as expertise in chess, and ultimately captures the idea that we can remember more things if we chunk them together into groups.