Draw things you want to remember

Do you have things you particularly need to remember?

Rather than writing a list or using mind maps, you’ll have the best recall if you get out a pencil and paper and draw what you want to remember.

This is the conclusion reached by Jeffrey Wammes and his team of researchers at the University of Waterloo, who wanted to discover the most reliable way to enhance memory.

They began by giving a large group of students a list of 40 easyto-visualize words such as ‘apple.’ The students were allowed 40 seconds per word. They asked half of them to copy each word repeatedly, while the rest were instructed to draw a picture of each word.

Next, they gave everyone a “distraction” task — to classify the pitch of a set of musical tones.

Having had no warning, the students were then asked to try to remember as many of the words as possible. Those who had been asked to draw them remembered more than twice as many as those asked to copy them.

To make sure that drawing was the reason for the improved recall, and not any other factor, the team then conducted further experiments.

They asked some students to write the words and then to add visual details, doodling or shading letters.

They asked others to create mental images of the words.

Others were asked to look at pictures of the objects depicted by the words.

Every time, those who drew pictures remembered more of the words than those who had been asked to use any other strategy.

Why is drawing such a powerful aid to memory?

The keys are effort and meaning. In a famous paper published in 1972, Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed that memory is a by-product of how deeply we process the information we wish to remember.

The more work we put into learning the material, the more likely we are to remember it.

When we draw something that we’ve seen in word form, we must translate the language into an image, and this requires us to call up other examples of that information from personal experience.

We then engage our motor skills to draw it.

As Wammes put it, this “seamless integration of semantic, visual and motor aspects” creates a powerful memory trace.

So, next time you want to give yourself the best chance of remembering something, try drawing it.