30 Days to a More Powerful Memory

Chapter 12. Chunk It and Categorize It

Chunking is one of a number of organizational principles to help you more effectively encode information by putting it into a series of smaller packages that are easier to remember. One way to do this is to simply break up the information. In addition, you can further organize it into clusters or hierarchical categories, and when you call up the clusters or categories, you will better remember what you put in them. It’s like putting your CD collection into categories by genre.

Another approach is to combine chunking with using imagery to remember different chunks, as described in Chapter 20, or to combine the chunks into a story or narrative, as described in Chapter 16). Plus you can use rehearsal (Chapter ...