Remember Conversations Better: a Simple but Highly Effective Technique

In this article, I will tell you how to remember all the important details from the conversations you have with people.

Apart from school, the main bulk of learning in life comes from the following situations:

• Reading, videos and audio consumption
• Participating in lectures, masterclasses etc
• Experiencing, practising and learning by doing
• From conversations you have with people

Conversations are the most vulnerable situations in terms of memory decay. This is because you can’t go back and look over the material again like you can when you’re reading or watching a video. Taking notes during a conversation is also not really an option - it’s just not socially acceptable.

Life’s most valuable wisdom and epiphanies are often gained through conversations you have with other people. Picture the following situation. You meet someone for the first time, and you have an hour-long conversation with them. You are baffled by their incredible insights, and you can’t imagine going through the rest of your life without this knowledge you have just gained. Unfortunately, your brain is not a computer, and you can’t simply click ‘save’. After the conversation, you desperately try to recall all the important details, but frustratingly, you can only vaguely remember three or four of the last points that were said. The beginning of the conversation was over an hour ago, and by now, your memory of that has become a hazy mist. It has vanished completely, like a lost dream that fades away seconds after waking up in the morning.

All you can do is to accept the few takeaways your brain was capable of absorbing, forget about the rest and beat yourself up because of your terrible memory capacity.

This has most likely happened to you many times, and it’s an incredible waste of your life. However, you can solve this problem by employing this simple memorisation technique that I will now explain in detail. This technique will enable you to memorise multiple things for long enough until you have a chance to write it all down. It’s perfect for situations where you're unable to take any written notes.

How and Why it Works

This technique takes advantage of a very powerful concept in effective memorisation:

forming a mental image of the word, phrase, idea or situation that you want to remember.

Forming mental images is something that people have taken advantage of for centuries in order to memorise impressive amounts of information. And it’s what memory champions or “mental athletes” use to memorise a list of 50 words in under a minute. Getting to this stage takes a bit of work. But most people won’t need to take their memorisation skills to such extreme lengths. So you will be able to use some of the same proven techniques with a lot less effort.

Images are much easier to remember than just plain text. The reason for this comes down to how the human brain evolved throughout history when we were hunter-gatherers.

Back in those days, we didn’t need to remember speeches, passwords, lists, and concepts. Instead, what we did have to memorise were features in nature, such as where to find food, what food that was edible, and the route back to the camp.

This is highly visual stuff. And since these were the skills that our ancestors’ survival depended on, we developed these abilities. This is now a fundamental part of how we think and remember things.

Now that you know why it works, I’m going to explain how you can use this to remember conversations better.

How to remember conversations better

Choose a room, space or some other real or imaginary location. This will be your temporary memory room - a room where you produce mental images of things you want to remember for just long enough until you get a chance to write it down.

Visualise What You Want to Remember as A Moving Image in your Mind

When something you want to remember comes up in a situation where you are unable to make notes, visualise it as a picture or situation in your mind. This can be a still image, but you will remember it even better if you can make it into a moving image or a short "mental video". When you have finally written down what you want to remember, you don't need these images anymore, and you can mentally erase them from your temporary memory room so that it's cleared for next time you need to use it.

The images you create will usually stay in your memory for a few hours. But in many cases, you can remember them for several days.

An Example

Let's say that you have met a fascinating person in a bar. They have explained a lot of interesting things that you want to remember. It's unlikely that you will remember all of this if you don't do anything actively in order to place it in your memory. Too often, we rely on our brains to automatically memorise things for us. Our brain's "automatic memory function" is often extremely inadequate, so I don’t recommend to always rely on this function.

Let’s say that the person you met mentioned the titles of three great films that really changed their lives. You want to remember these titles without writing them down.

The film titles are:

• "Latex Hearts"
• "MAG"
• "Snitch-hockery Rollercoaster"

(These are made up titles just to give you an example.)

I have deliberately made them a bit strange just to prove the point that this memorisation technique can be used in literally everything.

You could create one image for each film title, but it might be easier to remember one strong image instead. So we're going to create one image for all three film titles. 

I'm going to go through the images I personally might have created to remember this. There are lots of ways to do this, and it's up to you and your own imagination to create images that work for you. And that's one of the most important parts with this technique - we are all different in the way we memorise things. You have to create images that make sense for you. No one else is going to use the images you create. They are for you and you alone, so they can be as bizarre as you want them to be. In fact, the more bizarre, the better.

Ok, let’s get to it.

Creating the Image - Step By Step

In my mind, there is a gigantic ROLLERCOASTER that fills up the whole room. The floor of the room is a hockey (HOCKERY) field with small, naked people running around with broomsticks between their legs looking for the Golden SNITCH. There are red love HEARTS riding the rollercoaster. Instead of the usual 'cars' that people sit in when riding rollercoasters, the cars are made out of rubber gloves (LATEX). The love hearts are yelling “LA LA!" while they are violently being bashed from side to side in the rollercoaster cars. Rubber gloves are what my mind thinks of as 'latex', and the fact that the love hearts are yelling “LA LA” helps me remember that the word is 'Latex' instead of 'plastic' or 'rubber'. This whole rollercoaster room is inside a MAGazine, so when you flip the magazine page open, the whole room appears, like in those 3D children books.

The fact that each film title is a new dimension of the room separates the film titles so that I will remember which words belong to which film title:

• The MAGazine is the outermost layer that encloses the whole room.
• The ROLLERCOASTER and the HOCKEY field are separate from the magazine by being inside the room.
• The love HEARTS riding the LATEX cars is separate from the two other dimensions by being a small part of the rollercoaster.

Can you see all of this as a crazy, mental cinema in your own head?

This is quite an elaborate example. In most cases, you only need to make a quick, easy image just to remember the fact that you spoke about a given topic. When you recall this image later, it works as a trigger to remember the details about that topic.

A quick way to test this technique to see if it works

In a few hours, try to recall this moving image again. It's pretty much certain that you will still remember it. In fact, I would be surprised if it's not in your head even after a few days or maybe longer.

After you have recalled the image, try to remember the film titles. You are a lot more likely to remember the titles by connecting them to this image than if you tried to remember them simply as words.

Another good thing about this technique is that you can memorise multiple things at a time by creating several smaller images in the same room. One image doesn't have to take up the whole room.

Some Tips

• Use a lot of colour in your images. This makes it more visual. The colours ping out in your mind making it easier for your brain to pick up on. In his book Use Your Memory, Tony Buzan writes that the use of colour alone can improve your memory by 50%.

• The crazier, wackier and more exaggerated the image is, the better. If the most important feature of your image is an old man who is carrying something heavy, don't just imagine a 90-year-old man carrying a heavy rucksack. Instead, imagine that someone has strapped the fattest infant you can imagine to the back of a 150-year-old wizard with a long, thin beard. The baby is so fat and huge (5x larger than the man itself) that he can barely carry it.

• Creating an image should be quick and easy. Don't go through several choices in your mind before settling on something. Just pick the first one that you feel might work and settle on that.

• Find moments to refresh the images in your mind by thinking about them for a few seconds. If there are several hours before you get a moment to write it down, you will remember the conversations much better if you review the images a couple of times.

This is a very effective and powerful technique, and I hope you will find this helpful and start using it to remember conversations better. It’s very versatile, so it’s really up to you and your imagination what you choose to do with it. 

Photo credits:

Photo by Wynand van Poortvliet on Unsplash