I've been practicing improving my visual memory. It started as a litlle game for me. I had been looking through all of my childhood school reports and found that I had always tested very poorly on visual memory.
Looking back on the history of this, I often was too distracted by my imagination to really focus much on what things really looked like. It took some training for me to really be able to start paying attention to things like this when I was directed to. In contrast, when thinking alone to myself I would often stare deeply at an object paying careful attention to every detail and day dreaming about it. I would do this for hours if no one came to interrupt me. I could recall these things perfectly, but the psychologists never got to see this side of me. . . (Read more on this history in my next blog post)
I was also thinking about how it was a little difficult for me to remember people's faces growing up. I remember a particular incident when I was around 12 or 13, I was away from home on a camping trip and for whatever reason was thinking about my mother. I tried to picture her face in my mind, I was shocked when I found that I was unable to do it. I hadn't noticed before because I had never tried to imagine someone's face before. I could get a very vague image of a human face, but it was more like some generic face form. I tried to visualize others, but again I was unable to do it. I couldn't believe it! I wondered how could I not picture these people in my mind because I had known them my entire life. It bothered me. Later on I eventually was able to do this a good deal better after I had known someone for awhile. I just had never really paid attention to what their faces looked like, my mind must have associated them in some other way.
So, riding the bus a few weeks ago (now 6:28am Feb 26 2010) I wanted to try really paying more attention to what people's faces looked like. However, i didn't want to just sit there staring people down so I decided I would just take a quick glance and just see if I could hold the image long enough to analyze it at all. I glanced at the face of the first girl to step onto the bus and then shut my eyelids. I could see her face almost perfectly. I was amazed. I tried it with every other person to step onto the bus. For at least a few moments I could remember each face and picture them clearly in my mind. I still remember the face of that first girl, though I did turn around at glance at her 3 or 4 more times before she got off of the bus (Note that each of these glances was less than one second, performed while turning my head without stopping). From those glances I am today still able to almost perfectly reconstruct the first image of her. From the lip ring hanging from the right side of the bottom of her lip to the style of her hair, her complexion, her moles, the shape of her lips.
These quick mental snapshots work really well for small simple things and faces. The technique requires you to put a lot of faith into your intuition. Just look at something shut your eyes and continue seeing it. Don't try to hard. Use a small simple thing to practice with if you find this trust difficult at first.
With practice this can be extended to your entire field of vision. Just stare forward, but don't really pay attention to the center so much (The point at which your eyes are directed is the center). Instead try to see everything. Pay attention especially to outlines. Look at the general shape of everything there. Areas where it is hard to determine the borders of may be difficult or impossible to recall accurately.
Another technique I've come up with and find useful is what I call "Mental Painting." Basically you look at the thing you want to remember and use your imagination to "paint" over top of it. But paint it to look exactly the same as it already appears! Then when you close your eyes repaint it, but this time onto the black canvas.
Very similar to the Mental Painting is another technique I call "3-D Modeling and Imposing." Instead of painting the object with your imagination you use an imaginary 3-D Modeling program (If you haven't used one of these programs you could also think of it as molding clay which would also be useful if you are a more tactile learner) and model the shape. You'll have to use imagine that you can see through the object so that you can see the other side without rotating it. Once you have "captured" it this way you can close your eyes and rotate it all you want, though.
OK, now my favorite. You can use any method like those above (I encourage you to come up with your own and post them in the comments!) to kind of get an initial "sense" of something you want to memorize, to just assimilate it into your brain but you will find that though some of these images will stick with you for a long time (like the girl on the bus) many others will disappear not soon after you discontinue thinking about them. Why, do you think this is? It is because though you brought them in and focused upon them they were not related strongly to anything else. It is like you added a conceptual island in your brain, but never built any bridges so people(your thoughts) don't go there very often and so they never put it on the map. I remember the girl because she was distinct and I related her to this technique because she was my first successful use of it - thus whenever I think of this technique I will think of her. The image of her means something to my mind. If I got to actually know her this meaning would be gradually modified to include all of the complexities of her personality, but for now she is a visual representation of my technique, for me. Everything you see has some meaning to you and some temporary connection is formed in your mind, but often it is subconscious and the connection very slight and hard to notice if you are not very confident in your intuition. But, when you do consciously recognize this personal "meaning" (or association) the connection suddenly becomes very strong and you feel an epiphany. So the trick to long term memory is to visualize the object (or person!) and understand what it means to you. WHY it is shaped the way it is. This brings perfect or near perfect memory. The tough part is how to figure out what some arbitrary shape "means" to your subconscious mind. I believe that it lies in trusting your intuition. Look at an object and just trust whatever pops into your mind, think about it and strengthen that connection. Through this process you can reorganize your mental "database" and find new connections that not only help you to memorize things better but also to think more intelligently and creatively.
Now back to the story I started with. I was playing around with some of these snapshoting techniques and I was trying to figure out a way to memorize a more complicated image. To experiment I started memorizing what the entire bus looked like. To do this I looked ahead and mentally broke the bus down into much smaller and more simple components. Then I focused on an individual component and took a snapshot. Next I snap-shot a component that was adjacent and also made note of how the two were connected and held together. As I worked my way through more of the bus I noticed that I was spiraling. Constructing the image by spiraling outward allows for more connections to be made than by moving horizontal or vertical.
The people who memorize a location using a spiral examination probably had broken the room down into smaller components whereas the side-to-side examiners likely either broke the room up into vertical slabs or simply looked at the eye catching objects while moving across, ignoring the space between them and giving them no connection. If the goal is to memorize as much as possible the slab technique would work better than the individual objects, but the spiral technique trumps them both. Most people don't use the spiral technique or even the slab technique because in our day to day lives we do not have time to memorize everything and so few people develope a method of doing this; instead just remembering a few isolated important details. I think if we were trained from an early age how to do this it would come more naturally and it would be easy for us to remember as much as we need instead of struggling when the number of things to remember exceeds 7.
For some things it can be helpful to try and imagine how they got to look the way they do. Sometimes this is easier and faster than using the spiraling method. For instance I was looking at a pair of pants wadded up on the floor of my room and I was trying to memorize their exact shape in that position. I started by snapshotting the outline but I still found it somewhat difficult to remember because it was a very complicated shape. So instead I visualized what the pants look like when they lay flat which is a very simple shape. Then looked at the wad on the floor and piece by piece wadded my mental image of the pants until it matched the image I was actually seeing. To make this a bit more long term I can imagine how they actually got this way (because certainly I did not carefully wad them up and place them on the floor), seeing myself getting ready for bed mentally imagining how they fold as I take them off and then lazily toss them across the room until they land and complete the last few folds.
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