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How to Create a Memory Club

Here are some ideas on how to create your own local memory club.

  1. Decide to create a memory club.
  2. Decide on your organizing structure. Will there be just one organizer or will you have co-organizers?
  3. Let people know about your memory club/group in the Art of Memory Forum. You can also ask questions and share tips there.
  4. Choose activities from the ideas below.
  5. Create a meeting schedule.
  6. You can use sites like Meetup.com to find members.

Schedule Meetings

The meetings can be weekly or monthly, depending on the members' interest.

Ideas for Activities

Memorization tests:

  1. Pick a subject for memorization. There are ideas in the list below.
  2. Discuss strategies for memorizing the information.
  3. Then, at the following meetup, review the last meeting's project.

Competition training:

Train & Compete on Memory League

  • Sign up for Memory League and choose one or more events to practice.
  • Hold mini-competitions between members of your group to practice for larger competitions like regional, national, and world championships.

In addition to training for competition events, a memory club or group could choose memorization projects like:

  1. Anatomy – names of muscles and bones in the body
  2. Architectural terms.
  3. Periodic Table of Elements
  4. Logical fallacies
  5. History of [country] (with dates and figures)
  6. Literature: e.g., Shakespeare play
  7. History of philosophy
  8. Presidents of the US
  9. Speech or long poem, word-for-word.
  10. How many digits of pi can be memorized in a week.
  11. Stats on countries around the world (country name, capital, population, government type, year founded, basic history, leader)
  12. Scientific plant names
  13. Tree identification
  14. Bird identification
  15. Language
  16. English vocabulary
  17. English grammar
  18. Latin
  19. Greek
  20. Spanish
  21. Kanji (e.g., how many of the top Kanji can a person learn in a week?)
  22. Lists of historical dates
  23. Poems
  24. Speeches
  25. Biology terms
  26. Memorizing tropical fish before a diving trip
  27. Memorizing ancient Greek history before a trip to Athens
  28. Memorizing the New York Subway system map
  29. Memorizing US States and Capitals
  30. Memorizing countries of the world, with capitals and leaders
  31. Memorizing the periodic table of elements
  32. Memorizing trivia questions
  33. Other subjects: biology, math, economics, art, music, ecology, chemistry, physics, engineering, geology, geomorphology, botany, etc.

For more ideas, see the memory challenges page.

If you happen to have a memory expert in your memory club, they could present tips to the other members. If you are near a school or university with an neuroscience department, you could ask a teacher or professor if they would like to present a topic to your group.