How To Remember Twice as Much

Learn to memorize 10+ items in just 4 minutes

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

If you could recall double the information, your life would be a lot easier.

You wouldn’t spend so much time googling, you’d only look at your shopping list half as much, and you’d have twice as many chances to deliver a great idea in a meeting.

With over 30,000 citations, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two is one of the most referenced papers in history. Published in 1956 by Harvard psychologist George Miller, it asserts humans can store seven objects in their short-term memory on average, with variations ranging from five to nine.

Since then, researchers have found that memory span is not constant, that capacity depends on the nature of chunks (are they numbers, letters, words?), and that sound also plays a role in how much we can retain.

What hasn’t changed is that most people would likely struggle if you asked them to quickly remember a list of ten objects. You can test yourself online, but surprisingly, we had a solution to this before we even knew the problem.

In 1918, memory artist David Roth published his book Roth Memory Course. He called it, “a simple and scientific method of improving the memory and increasing mental power.” The book is packed with examples and exercises…