Memory Tricks

Many people have trouble remembering things, which can be a great hindrance in daily life. In this short from 1941, we see a few different methods that are supposed to help with memorization, even though one of them is really a stretch. The first is to apply a mental image to the name of someone or something you want to memorize, so that whenever you think of the thing in question, its name will be easy to pick out of your subconscious. For example, if someone's last name is Bagges, it'll pay to imagine him carrying bags when you first meet so you'll remember his name. The second method is admittedly pretty ridiculous and in my opinion just serves to make things even more difficult to remember. The film shows how a wife is giving her husband ten errands to do on a particular day. At the end of the day, he comes home and has remembered to complete every single one. How? The narrator says it's easy if you think up a system pertaining to the errands that makes use of rhymes of the numbers between 1 and 10. For instance, the man's first task is to visit his dentist. For this, he commits the mental picture of the dentist stuck in the middle of a hamburger bun to his mind (bun rhymes with one). His eighth task is to purchase a hammer, so for this, he visualizes a hammer smashing something that rhymes with 8: a plate. You get the idea. The film then asks us to recount the tasks the man's wife assigned to him, proving (at least in my case) that the method doesn't work. While this short was pretty pathetic, it was at least narrated by Pete Smith, MGM's foremost short narrator for many years, especially during the 40s. Maybe if you had enough patience, you could make the second method shown here work in your favor, but in most cases, it's just going to make your mind more tired and you'll end up forgetting anyway. If the guy in this short was trying to use his mind as a notepad, then why not just use a notepad? Overall, this short wasn't anything special, but I'll now have the image of a dentist in a sandwich in my head for the rest of the day thanks to it.