Remembering ideas on the go

Writing is indisputably the best way to remember things, but sometimes you're taking a walk or brushing your teeth and it'd be inconvenient to take notes. This is a quick way to lock ideas down until you're able record them.

The premise is to plug stuff you want to remember into a bidirectional linked list. This provides structure - items are arranged in a sequence, you can recall them by following that sequence instead of dredging them from your intermediate-term memory. Each item also references the items before/after it, which provides redundancy and helps the information stick.

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The method:
For each thing you want to remember, come up with some image that represents it. For example, if I wanted to remember the first item of this table:

• open up your skull and let your brain come out and glow with the light and heat of the sun.

I might use the image of a brain. Try to make sure it has a strong relation to the thing you want to remember; the biggest risk when using this method is that you'll recall the image but not the thing it's supposed to represent.

For the first item in the sequence, I like to imagine holding the image in my left hand. It can help to come up with tactile details - what does this thing feel like? My brain-image is squishy and wet. I can imagine squeezing it like a sponge.

OK, now we'll add the next item.

• turn drops of blood into swords.

For this one, let's say our image is a red sword. Now we start to construct our linked list, by coming up with a way to connect the sword to the brain and vice-versa. This one's pretty easy - the sword is piercing the brain straight through.

Next item!

• when you speak your words become stairs, if you climb them far enough you end up in the place you described.

OK, our image for this one is a spiral staircase. We've gotta connect this to the previous image in our list, the red sword, so let's say that the spiral staircase is wrapped around the sword's handle.

We'll do one more:

• exactly at midnight, the rest of the world freezes and you can wander around and do whatever you like for an hour.

Our image can be a pocketwatch frozen at midnight. To connect it with the previous item, we'll say it's rolling down the staircase.

Every now and then you might want to reinforce your memory by going backwards or forwards through the list, image by image. There's never any need to visualize the entire sequence at once, just the current image and the connections it has with the images before and after it.

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I find these image-chains surprisingly durable and extensible. If you're so inclined, you can remember 40 things at once or reconstruct the whole sequence days after you last thought about it. Still, do yourself a favor and WRITE THINGS DOWN as soon as you can.

Memory tricks all get a bit grody if you use them many times in rapid succession. When I no longer need a sequence, I like to hold out my left arm, where I was keeping that first image, and brush it off with my other hand as if I'm scattering the whole thing into dust. I don't know if this has any practical value, but I enjoy it as a little re-centering ritual.