Memory Boot Camp

Learn new skills to improve memory from Gary Small's book, The Memory Prescription.

By Willow Lawson, published on November 01, 2004 - last reviewed on August 21, 2008

The mission: To plug a 30-something's leaky memory.

My problems are typical: misplaced keys, forgetting a task while in the middle of it and, of course, name amnesia. But I also have brain lapses that wipe out all traces of events from college or intimate dinners with friends. To me, this isn't the occasional mnemonic hiccup, it's a cognitive hacking cough.

So I turned to Gary Small's The Memory Prescription, a 14-day recipe to fix a limping memory. At over 300 pages, it's a commitment, but the writing is breezy, even fun. I skimmed through familiar advice about drinking plenty of water, exercising and healthful eating—all habits that affect memory. The rest of the book is a manual for stress relief, task organization and brain teasers.

The first skill Small teaches, "Look, Snap, Connect," is basic to all subsequent memory techniques. First, you observe your target, using all senses. Then you create a mental "snapshot." Lastly, you "connect" the "snap" to your senses. It sounded good to me.

At "Mental Aerobics," I stumbled. In one exercise, I had to link a series of unrelated words: wig and basketball, moon and washer, novel and broccoli. Later, I had to conjure up visual images of people I didn't even know. More useless information was not what I needed.

I complained to Small, director of the University of California at Los Angeles' Memory Clinic. He agreed, and advised me to focus on building moments of stress reduction into each day and "tough love" when it came to multitasking and clutter. The challenge of an overstimulating world, Small said, "is figuring out what is important and what is not."

I confided to Small that I had scored a low 126 on the memory self-test. (Over 200 is excellent; under 100 is basically brain-dead, as far as I could tell.) Should I be worried? "You're too hard on yourself," Small said, after ascertaining that Alzheimer's didn't seem to run in my family, but that the trail of diabetes was a concern.

So after 14 days, did I see results? Not really. My self-test scores were about the same. But I do feel confident that I can prime myself to remember more.

It's on my to-do list.