Your daily task • Harriet Harman was born on
30 July. Imagine her spending
Remembering dates and birthdays
Birthdays, like foreign vocabulary,
are difficult to remember because
they don’t produce a distinctive or
recognisable image in the mind. It’s
not easy to “imagine” 14 December,
for example.
Naturally, you need to turn
birthdays into vivid images to
make them stick. One way of doing
this is to develop a kind of private
vocabulary of images to help make
the months more memorable (we’ll
come to numbers in a second). For
example, how about a sunbed for
July? It’s the middle of summer and
time to get a tan. August marks the
middle of the cricket season, so how
about a cricket bat? And the first
syllable in October makes it easy
to visualise an octopus in its place,
whilst a Christmas tree inevitably
means it’s December.
Let’s see how these images can
help make dates and birthdays more
memorable. Consider the following
five examples:
• Elvis died on 16 August. Imagine
him singing Sweet Little Sixteen
while playing air guitar on a cricket
bat (August).
• Simon Cowell’s birthday is on
7 October. Imagine him as a baby
biting a leg from an octopus
(October) to make it seven-legged.
Friend Birthday Mnemonic
30 minutes on a sunbed (July).
• The last time that someone walked
on the moon was on 11 December
1972. Imagine moon walkers finding
a Christmas tree, and placing 11
baubles on it.
So when was Elvis born? Note
that we are imagining the numbers
as elements of the scene – if they’re
part of the scene they automatically
become more meaningful. They
could have their own mnemonics, but
it’s easier to incorporate a connection
with a number into these stories to
make them memorable. (To learn
the most popular system devoted to
learning numbers, the Major system,
go to memrise.com)
With all this in mind, today’s
challenge is to learn the birthdays
of your nearest and dearest. Use the
first column of the grid below to
write down the names of 10 friends
and family members whose birthdays
you don’t yet know. Next, get hold
of their dates (check Facebook if
you can’t face a phone call) and
write them down in the second
column. Finally, in the third column,
devise an image to remember each
birthday, making use of the previous
suggestions, or preferably devising
your own. Inventing and learning
these images can be surprisingly fun.
Once you’ve finished, test yourself.
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