Creating visual images or even mental videos in your mind can dramatically increase the rate at which your brain retains new data. By taking already familiar objects, you can learn layers of new information quickly and easily through the use of linking. In fact, the more fun you have with images and photos, the more likely you are to retain the information for longer periods of time.

Memory Pegging has been around for a long time, but it’s a very useful tool for any area where you need to assimilate new information quickly. However, many people have never tried this trick, or dismiss its effectiveness as it seems too simple to use. It’s very simple, so it’s worth incorporating into your learning. The reason it works so well is that it allows you to create a visual image in your brain, an image if you will, and visual images stay longer in our memory banks. They are easier to remember, which increases familiarity and subsequently increases the level of retention. You can probably recall images from childhood memories. These images are just as easily remembered as the mental images of the past week. You can probably remember entire scenes from a movie or billboards you saw on your way to work today, all due to the fact that you were constantly taking mental snapshots and your brain was uploading those images into mental photo albums, all without conscious effort.

Pegging can be adapted to any situation and any learning need with just a little creativity. Our brains like to stay in the area of ​​things that are familiar to us, so memory linking uses that concept as its foundation. Something familiar is already evident to us, it is already acquaintance, so it’s easy to remember and requires no effort to recall mentally. For example, you probably know his birthday without question, but you may not know his neighbor’s birthday. Therefore, the date of his birthday could be one of the things that help you learn a new information. If we say that your birthday is on February 1, then in numerical form, it would be 2-1. Every time he needed to learn something that had the numbers 2 and 1 in succession, he could see a birthday cake in his mind.

We can look at other specific pegs and we’ll stick to the number system as it’s easy to apply. If you can create a set of standard visual images that look like the numbers 0 through 10, you can learn almost anything numerically. Any image will work, and you’re free to create your own, but here are some easy ones and why they work visually:

• 0-egg; a zero looks like an egg
• 1 barbershop bar; again these are visually compatible
• 2 shoes; because we have two feet to wear and we can all “see” the shoes
• 3-tricycle; three wheels
• 4 cars; oven tires
• 5-gloves; five fingers to cover
• 6 pistols; a six shot
• 7 dice; “lucky seven”
• 8 skates; the 8 skate with skates
• 9-cat; a cat has “nine lives”
• 10 pin bowling; a complete set is 10 pins

These are all very familiar images and therefore very easy to work with. Let me illustrate how I’ve seen this before.

A group of students I worked with once had an afternoon, about 2 hours, to memorize all the amendments to the United States Constitution. They decided to use pegging to quickly move up the list. I heard your discussion of the Fourth Amendment. They were describing how they could imagine themselves in their cars (4 is car, remember), shaking their fingers at a police officer who wanted to search their vehicle. They each had their own highly personalized image in their head, and as I listened, I created my own. The Fourth Amendment says that citizens are entitled to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. This conversation was three years ago, and I still remember it. I might add that the students had all 27 amendments fixed in less than an hour.

Another very practical application is that many times we have to park our cars in large numbered car parks, but we forget the number when we try to find our car. If we fix the batch number, this problem could be eliminated. If you parked in B-9, for example, you might imagine a cat (cat is 9) wearing a giant collar with a gold “B” on it. The silverier the image, the more likely your brain will “see” and remember it.

Another commonly appropriate application for linking is the use of PINs, personal identification numbers, for many of our accounts and debit cards. We don’t like to write down our PINs for fear of having our paper stolen or our computers hacked, but we have to learn the PIN. With linking, the numbers can be in your mental photo album, securely protected, yet accessible all the time. Imagine that your PIN for a new credit card is number 891. Your image might be a pair of skates picked up by a cat, who puts them on and quickly skates straight into a barber pole. See how easy that is? I consider this tool to be a perfect game of bowling!