"We've been training our memory to get worse, and we're surprised when it does"

Becoming a memory whiz

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/12/twitter-facebook-dellis-technology-data-companies-10-memory.html

Tricks:

He uses images and word association to help him, say, remember peoples' names. Dellis picks out a visual characteristic of a person he's meeting for the first time and uses that image and associations with the person's name to create a mental image that will help the name stick.

For instance, Dellis is very tall at 6' 7", and he shares a name with Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, a country that enjoys soccer. A visual of a looming Mandela with a soccer ball stuck to him might help you remember the name "Nelson." The more creative and playful the image, the easier it will be to remember the name.

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Another visualization method Dellis uses for remembering lists of information is the "Roman room" method. This involves creating a very specific mental journey of a route you're familiar with, perhaps your home. You can arrange the rooms in the order you encounter them: You normally see the living room first, then go into the kitchen, then the bedroom and so on. In this way, you create a mental map where the rooms are akin to storage folders on a computer.

For example, if you were memorizing a list of the first 10 presidents, you could start by putting George Washington in the living room, John Adams in the kitchen and Thomas Jefferson in the bedroom. If you had a longer list, say all 44 presidents, you could further subdivide the rooms in your mental map, by corners or specific areas.