There are many products on the market today on how to improve your memory. Some are herbal remedies, which are supposed to increase the ease with which your neural networks can effectively work together. Others are more chemically oriented and work through stimulation of the mind. There are several brain-enhancing concoctions you can buy are your local health food store, or online that have been shown to enhance, at least temporarily, your working memory.

Others are non-chemical, and work by manipulating your brainwaves to a better state of memory production and recall. These are somewhat interesting, and I’ve used them with a great deal of success. These work in two different ways. Both involve using sound waves to guide your brain waves into an optimal state.

The first method is used to guide brainwaves into an optimal state while you are actually learning or studying that which you’d like to easily recall later. While this is very effective, it requires the ability to listen to a CD or an MP3 while studying. This is fantastic if you are studying written material, but for anything else, such as a lecture, or a skill, which requires outward focus and dexterity, this can be less than efficient.

The other method is to listen to the same kind of mind programming sound, but during “off” times, when you are not studying. The theory behind this method is the sound slowly restructures and strengthens your neural connections so that later when you do want to recall something, it is much easier. While this takes a bit longer, and has much more subtle effect, it can be a good way to slowly increase both your short term and long term memory.

The next method, and in my experience by far the most effective, is choosing how you store the memories you’d like to remember. How some is inputted into your neural network has a huge effect on how easy it is to recall it later. Curiously, this simple method is not taught in school, where it would do the most good.

It works like this. Instead of staring at a piece of information, and trying to force it into your memory through sheer will power, there is a much easier way. Specifically, you use the power of your imaginative memory. The brain naturally remembers things easier if they stand out. The brain takes all incoming information, and immediatley sorts it according to relevance. Things that it determines is relevant, it tags somehow to make that particular piece of information easier to recall at a later date.

So the trick is to put the information in a way so your brain will tag the information as relevant. This is easily done with colorful, comedic pictures and images coupled with sex and pain. Sex is the number one desire of the human brain, and pain is the number one “away from” motivating factor. Whenever you add these two elements, along with an interesting picture, it will be very hard to forget.

For example, lets say you are studying a foreign language. You want to learn the word for apple in Japanese, which is ringo. So you say to yourself, “ringo, ringo,” until a picture appears. Ringo Starr. So you create an image that involves Ringo Starr, apples (the key to attach all this to) sex, and pain. For example, you might imagine you are at a Beatles concert, and the part of the bass drum that actually hits the drum (that big round white thing) is a large apple. And every time Ringo steps on the bass pedal, the apple slams into the drum making the “thump thump thump” sound.

If that is not a vivid enough picture, you can add in some sex and pain to make sure you recall it. Like maybe he is surrounded by beautiful playboy bunnies, who are naked of course, and every time you try and approach on of them they throw apples at you and hitting you in the face every time.

This might sound a bit too cumbersome to try at first, but after you discover how easy it is to recall something that you’ve inputted this way, you’ll never go back to the old ways of memory again.