Want to Improve Your Memory? Think Like a Synesthete!

Intrigued? Then get ready to take some notes — this can really help you!

With the PSAT coming up in a week, I recently began to focus more on discovering ways to memorize all the study material we’re given efficiently. 

Don’t we all wish to simply press a button and have this math textbook or that English speech uploaded straight into our brain? Maybe in a couple hundred years. For now, I want to share a memorization technique that doesn’t require Elon Musk’s NeuroLink to help you in your studies. 

This simple plan nearly wrote itself a few weeks ago under some unexpected circumstances: as I was looking for an empty seat on the afternoon bus, I heard a junior high student ask, 

“What color is math?” 

Of course, he was joking, and the question was really strange, out of context, and largely ignored, but… what IS the color of math. DOES it have a color?

That’s when and where I realized — it usually doesn’t, at least not for most. And that’s the problem we’ll try to fix today. 

Remember your cram sessions before AP exams. 

Maybe you read class notes and study guides again till the words were drilled into your brains, or wrote concepts again and again till your hand threatened to fall off, or recited the information again and again and again till your voice turned hoarse — all the traditional methods that probably left you wishing for the magic button. Again. 

These methods aren’t all that bad, not really, but what we all need — what YOU need — is a new strategy that minimizes the time you spend repeating and reviewing.

Would you believe me if I told you that assigning a color to math is the answer? That sorting thoughts and memories into the pages of a mental coloring book, the brush strokes layered on an abstract painting, could become the magic button? 

Take it further than that: how about the songs at a musical concert of every genre? 

The tastes of every possible cuisine? 

In any case, according to Andrew Budson, a professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine, memorization takes place in the hippocampus, where sensory information combines with thoughts and emotions from the cerebral cortex to create memorable chunks of information that our brain can then neatly file away. 

Budson’s research suggests that the more senses are linked to an idea, the longer we can remember it. Whereas connecting a new concept to only its definition may let you remember it for a few days, creating additional neural pathways that connect it to an image, sound, smell, taste, or feel may let you recall the memory years later.

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford, agrees, explaining that for some people, this kind of thought process is natural, subconscious, almost inevitable. It connects multiple senses to memories, makes them inseparable…

...in the mind of a synesthete. 

Does that word ring any bells? It’s likely that you’ve heard of the condition before, even if its formal name wasn’t mentioned. 

Modern science defines it as a neurological condition that results in a sort of sensory fusion, where something one sees, hears, tastes, feels, or smells stimulates a completely unrelated sense. 

Instead of linking a single sense to an event, a synesthete ends up with neural links between multiple senses because the parts of their brain that would usually work relatively separately communicate. 

See where this is going? Thinking like a synesthete who has the senses closely interacting improves memorization because more neural pathways are made to the memory. And I’m here to teach you just how to think like one, because, well, I am a synesthete. I see letters… 

in color. 

Not sure how I got this; scientists’ current best guess is that it’s in the DNA. All I know is that I rely on color so heavily that while being able to write essays in a foreign language within a year of first stepping into an American school in third grade, I couldn’t spell “gravity” — G-R-A-V-I-T-Y — during the fifth grade spelling bee, simply because I didn’t have the word written down to check its colors.

Basically, I remember words by the colors of their letters, so for me to spell something correctly I have to first write it down and then check if the colors in my head match the colors I see on the page. The colorful words can then be connected to the concepts I want to memorize. 

Or, the letters-and-words part can be bypassed entirely, such as when I give a piece of information its own vivid pattern based on associated mental images, prior knowledge, or connotation. 

This is how colors have been helping me remember not only the spellings of words, but also SAT vocabulary, trigonometric identities, the Krebs Cycle inside the mitochondria, the polyatomic ions on the back of the periodic table, the four Mongol Khanates, the functions of the trapezius muscle, and this speech, really. 

This is the kind of memory I have. The kind Nikola Tesla had, relating his ideas to colors and numbers. The kind Marilyn Monroe had, associating the taste of her food with colors. The kind Billie Eilish has, connecting sounds and time to shapes and textures. The kind I will try to help you develop right now. 

So, are you ready to hear of this great technique that I’ve foreshadowing-ly built up to and that you won’t be able to live without? Here we go:

• Step one: Don’t isolate the memory. Place it on a chronological timeline, connect it to prior knowledge or an image you’ve seen, think of it as one part of a set of ideas — anything to give it some kind of context. That’s your first link.

• Step two: Explain the memory. Put that definition in your own words, prove that mathematical formula, know why that chemical reaction occurred. You will remember something better if it makes sense. That’s your second link.

• Step three: This is the one step that a non-synesthete would usually skip. Associate the memory with at least one of your senses. Visualize that diagram in a specific spectrum of colors, hear that scientist’s name said in your friend’s voice, feel the sour taste of a lemon when thinking of the Citric Acid Cycle. That’s your third link and beyond. The more, the merrier. 

Alright, now that you’re armed with these new memorization tools, let’s try to remember something together: three simple words — house, sunshine, penguin. Don’t worry, they’re supposed to be random. And don’t try to use repetition. Instead follow the three steps:

• Step one: Think of the words in the context of this speech, this classroom, the current time of day, the fact that there are three of them, the basic knowledge you have of them.

• Step two: You should be concerned if you still don't have an explanation or a definition down for “house,” “sunshine,” and “penguin.”

• Step three: Try giving them a color, or a sound, or maybe a texture. The important part is connecting the idea to at least one of the senses, whichever one feels right. Give the word “house” more than just an image of a building. Make it look like the color brown, or sound like a deep base, or feel like the rough texture of bricks. Remember “sunshine” as something bright yellow, ringing in a high pitch, nice and warm. How about a light blue, squeaking, fluffy penguin? 

Well, guess what? You’re thinking like a synesthete! All that’s left is to see whether you remember these words till after reading our next article.