The first step to getting a good memory is to remember! Isn’t that helpful? No? Think of it this way: Have you ever had a friend that can raise only one eyebrow? Can you raise only one eyebrow? Have you ever tried? Do you hold one down, while moving your eyebrows to try to get your muscles to learn to not always engage together? Or what about learning to wink? Or that game where you entwine your fingers and try to move specific fingers? Have you ever done that and found that as soon as you touch one of the twisted fingers you no longer have trouble moving that finger on cue? It’s because your body remembers. By touching the finger, you’ve created a path. Building memory skills is sort of like building a path. The good news is you can use most anything to build it.
As a child, we learned nursery rhymes or poems, songs, chants, or the catechism. These seemingly useless bits of information may seem well, useless. But they aren’t. Although I can’t tell you how knowing all of the words to Dr. Seuss’ “One Fish, Two Fish…” has ever helped me, I can tell you that memorizing it has helped me open the path to memorizing other things. So how do we build memory skills? We memorize.
Start with something small, a short poem perhaps, and build from there. Begin with a single bible verse, like Romans 12:1, and move onto a part of the chapter. Write it, repeat it, sing it, clap it, and make visual cues. I’m a visual learner, making small icons for key words has helped me to memorize some scriptures. The key to building a great memory is to start remembering, start small, start today, just start.