Lateral Thinking for Every Day

35

Memory technique: Pegging a List

There are many tricks and techniques you can use to boost your memory and help you to recall important information. Sometimes you need to remember a list and be able to access it at any point. For instance, you might need to know what item 6 is, or item 11.

I recommend using this memory pegging technique. We ‘peg’ each item to a visual symbol for its number. The method I use is a rhyming approach. The list of pegs is as follows:

1. Ton (one ton)

2. Zoo

3. Tree

4. Door

5. Hive (with bees buzzing around)

6. Sticks

7. Heaven

8. Gate

9. Line (fishing line)

10. Den (e.g. the lion’s den)

11. Soccer 11

12. Shelf

13. Hurting

14. Courting

15. Lifting

16. Licking

17. Leavening (baking bread)

18. Hating

19. Lightning

20. Plenty (horn of plenty)

Say our task was to remember the first 10 ...