Master Your Memory

Tony Buzan is well known for his books, tapes and videos on improving memory--the best known being Use Your Head. Master Your Memory is perhaps his most ambitious project aimed at giving people a memory system with potentially "hundreds of applications". The system, which originally dates from the 17th Century, revolves around the use of mental imagery ("pictures in the mind") as a basis for remembering facts--images are considered more robust as a means of remembering because their distinctiveness makes it less likely that each one will be confused with any other. The method is known as the "Self Enhancing Master Memory Matrix--SEM³". The matrix is a set of key images that can be manipulated to produce thousands of more complex images each relating to a particular set of facts (e.g. details about an artist). There is no doubt that the method has great potential if you can master it but it requires a good deal of creativity and time to construct all the different images. To this end I think it was a pity that Buzan did not give more examples of how the technique can work in practice. --Alan Parkin