Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (17 page)

Since anything can be linked to anything else, we can
always
free-associate from the stuff we want to remember, looking for sticky images involving visceral issues of rapid movement and bright color and bodily functions and food and threat and sex and danger.

Take
Howards End,
for example.

Yes, definitely. Let’s start there.

Aha! You’re getting ahead of me already, aren’t you? Yes, yes, I thought so. Very good. (An aside to the prudish or easily offended: go away. Go away right now. We’re studying British Literature here. We shan’t be disturbed.)

I’ll bet there’s someone you know named Howard. I’ll also assume, for the sake of argument, that your Howard has buttocks.

If not, get another Howard.

If you don’t have a good Howard handy, just use someone else’s: Howard Hughes, Howard Stern, Howard Cunningham (the fictional father from
Happy Days
), Howard Alan O’Brien (novelist Anne Rice’s real name), or Moe, Shemp, and Curly Howard of the Three Stooges. You can even use Howard University, although this will take some organizing.

Pick a Howard, grab him or her or them by the gluteus, get a good clear mental picture—complete with as much detail as you can stand—and now let’s attach that
Howard’s particular End
to the rest of the list, one by one.

Let’s imagine
A Room with a View.

Of, obviously:
Howard’s End.

(I’ll be misspelling
Howards End
hereafter, including the possessive apostrophe for clarity’s sake. Thirty-foot buttocks often require such flexibility.)

So let’s picture ourselves in a big empty room with a floor-to-ceiling bay window, and then mentally shove our
Howard’s End
into view, filling the window completely, a giant throbbing thirty-foot-wide buttocks of doom.

Do not continue until you see it clearly.

Didn’t take long, did it? Notice that “memorable” and “logical” are different and often contrary things. Now we should do something sticky with the room itself.

Let’s look at
Where Angels Fear to Tread.
For this, we can use a member of the Angels baseball team (or the halo kind of angel, or Charlie’s Angels, or any angel image that pops into your head; it’s usually best to trust your own first instinct), and now create a circumstance
Where Angels
really would
Fear to Tread.

Thumbtacks, maybe. Or—much better, because it involves unexpected motion and danger, always interesting to our inner beast—let’s imagine an enormous sucking force threatening to pull our Angel helplessly up and away if he dares set foot in the room. The Angel is now filling with Fear of this whole Treading thing. Excellent.

This is good and scary and odd. So now our
Angels Fear to Tread
in
A Room with a View.
And what is the source of this vacuum-like force?

Howard’s End,
of course.
Whooosh!

That wasn’t so hard, was it?

If you’re feeling a little guilty about being amused by thoughts like this, don’t. It’s utterly human, just your brain doing what it’s wired to do. In fact, if you’re smiling right now,
that’s how you know you’ll remember it.
Laughter is a visceral reaction that means your brain is going into Record mode.

Laughter provoked
by
visceral imagery is even more memorable. Ask any drunk to tell you a joke, and you’ll get instant proof that even pungent alcohol can’t overcome the most primitive neural connections.

So. That leaves just one question: If we let ourselves be pulled along with the fearful
Angel,
and we turn and focus our attention from the
Room with a View,
what do we see in the distance,
in
our thirty-foot
Howard’s End?
What, pray tell, are we being pulled so forcefully toward?

A Passage to India.

In fact, if you’re in the
Room with a View
and looking at
Howard’s End
from just the right angle, you can just barely glimpse the Taj Majal.

OK. There’s a chance now that you’re just appalled. So cover the whole thing up in your mind with a forest—one built by a “forester” himself, in fact—and never, ever go back. Oh, the shame of it all.

Unless a week from now you want your Forster to pull back the trees and reveal
A Room with a View
where
Angels Fear to Tread
because
Howard’s End
sucks everything in sight toward
A Passage to India.

Two or three damn minutes, that took. With a bit of review in the next day or two, you’ll probably remember most of it for years.

I swear this on my own eventual grave: If you get good at this, learning the driest subjects can quickly turn into endless outbursts of childish giggling.

If you ever saw me play
Jeopardy!
and wondered why I was smiling at odd moments during clues, now you know why. The other players might have been intensely focused on
RUSSIAN BATTLES
or
FRENCH ROYALTY
or
ASIAN CITIES
or whatever. Me, I was mostly remembering a lot of naked people throwing things on fire at each other’s butts.

Years after first creating that image, I learned that E. M. Forster had written a novel called
Maurice
as well.

No worries. I just tossed Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees into Howard’s End—
thwup!
—and sent him on his merry way toward New Delhi.

Took all of two seconds. Whoosh,
glurk,
new knowledge.

Obviously this has absolutely nothing to do with knowing
anything
about Forster himself or his novels or his place in literary history. Not one bit.

But it
is
extremely useful for connecting together and learning any pile of stuff that doesn’t have to be in a particular order. And that can often be a real foothold on any subject.

What we’ve just done, incidentally, is also an example of “chunking,” the fancy word for remembering stuff by grouping things together. You do this every time you use a telephone area code or consider a chorus as one refrain instead of four lines or thirty-odd words. You don’t need to know the term, but you do want to get in the habit. Organizing and grouping information together so it all sticks at once can be amazingly powerful.

How cool would it be for our world if a first-grade class could quickly learn the names of all the states and their capitals, and laugh in the process? If junior-high kids could buzz through the Bill of Rights and major Supreme Court rulings, making the time spent in the classroom more about discussion and understanding?

In the short term, of course, all I had in mind was only one purpose: getting me through
Jeopardy!

Long-term, I had no idea how my own world would start to change as a result.

Sometimes you need information in a specific order, as when trying to memorize how scientists divvy up life. No worries.

Given a list, you’ve probably looked at least once at the first initials, hoping they might spell out a recognizable word or an acronym. Unfortunately, this almost never works, beyond FACE for the notes between the lines of a treble-clef music staff, NAY for the world’s longest rivers (Nile, Amazon, Yangtze), STD for the three most senior U.S. cabinet positions (State, Treasury, Defense), and a few dozen others I’ve come across. You’ll make that work perhaps once more in your life, and even then you might have to rearrange the letters a little.

A slightly better tactic is to make up a sentence using the first letters of the desired sequence. The treble-clef music staff is often remembered as Every Good Boy Does Fine. (Inspired, I taught myself how to tune a guitar with Every Bad Girl Does Assorted Extras.) The seven colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet) are often taught in England as “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain,” which I mention despite the great unlikelihood that Richard III will come up later in the story, over and over.

Better still, just make up your own sentence: “Rabbits On Yo-yos Go Bouncing In Vegetables” or “Radio Orator Yelps: Got Balls In Vinegar” or whatever makes you smile most. You’ll probably store it as part of the process. As a rule, if you can make yourself laugh, you’re halfway to long-term memory.

If you’re dealing with things more complex than individual letters and familiar words—Latin phrases or strange names or foreign words, say—the solution is still simple: cheat harder. Just change the words slightly until you can make a recognizable sentence, preferably something visual. My own chunky mnemonic for the biological classifications of life—

Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species

—is one mental picture of a minimalist composer with a crown on his head enjoying a good meal with his loved ones:

King Philip Glass Orders his Family a Generous Special.

If you’re not familiar with Philip Glass and his music, use something else:

Keith in First Class Orders a Flunky to Genuflect Spastically.

Ken Fights the Clap by Offering Frauleins a Gentle Spongebath.

Whatever works best for you. (And no, the “Ken” here isn’t Ken Jennings, much as he enjoys volunteer work.)

What if you have a spectacularly long list to memorize? Still, no worries. Just glue each piece to an existing list you already know—anything from the streets in your neighborhood to something as simple as the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc., themselves.

When I first passed the
Jeopardy!
test, I had no idea what order the presidents came in, other than the first few and the recent ones since World War II. Somewhere in between was an enormous void containing William McKinley and Martin Van Buren and even Millard goddam Fillmore. I did, however, know how to count (although if I had thought more about the mathematics of probability, I would have stopped taking the
Jeopardy!
test long before passing).

There’s not room here to include over forty separate presidential mnemonics—those would belong in yet another book (or someday, perhaps, a series of books someone will write this way, reducing the basic facts of human history into memorable, bite-size nuggets)—but here are a few at random, just to give you the flavor:

12 = Zachary Taylor. There is a
Zin the word “dozen.” Done.

16 = Abe Lincoln at a Sweet Sixteen party. Make up your own “stovepipe hat” jokes.

35 = JFK, the youngest elected president. Minimum age for the office: 35.

It also helps to link not just to the number, but also to what comes before and after. This is pretty much how I finally sorted out Pierce, Buchanan, and Millard goddam Fillmore, a few days after my first
Jeopardy!
game, using romance as a unifying theme:

13 = Millard Fillmore. What an unlucky name. Completely unlovable.

14 = Franklin Pierce. Valentine’s Day (Feb. 14) means hearts
pierced by arrows. Better
still: a burning hail of fiery arrows, piercing a whole field of Valentine hearts. And I am not bitter.

15 = James Buchanan. After any romance, once the hail of arrows is over, you need to Jump Back Again.