Your memory in mind

RadioScope: Sharpen Your Memory, BBC Radio 4, Wednesday, August 9th, 9am

If you can rattle off car registration numbers from memory with ease, or if your party piece is to recite pi to 40 decimal places, then tune out now. But, if like the rest of us you struggle to recall mobile phone numbers or you embarrassingly forget the name of a person who introduced themselves minutes earlier, then Mariella Frostrup wants to help.

As part of the BBC's memory experience theme this summer, she presents a weekly series called Sharpen Your Memory. Last week's focus was mainly on working memory, our "mental jotting pad" that holds information in the short term. Frostrup gathered a crack team of experts to share tips on how to stop information vanishing from our internal screens.

A poor working memory can be frustrating at best and in children can even contribute to underperformance at school. We need working memory to be able to read and perform calculations, we hear from cognitive psychologist Susan Gathercole.

Making a decision to remember and believing that you can do it will help the information to stick, says pianist David Owen Norris. He prefers to ditch the score and memorise sonatas by understanding the music and feeling the harmonies.

While few of us are put on the spot to play a piano concerto from memory, number lists trip us up daily. From financial accounts to mobile phones, remembering number sequences can be a regular annoyance. Most mortals can hold a string of seven digits in working memory, give or take two digits depending on your individual capacity, and less if you are distracted.

Memory guru Tony Buzan leaps in with tales of the world memory champion, who memorised a list of 198 random numbers and could still recite them backwards five hours and many glasses of champagne later. Show off, mutters Frostrup, her finger as ever on the pulse.

No one is born with a bad memory, claims smooth-talking Buzan, who makes a tidy living out of teaching memory-enhancing techniques. He tells us we need to create fantasies and stories about information we want to remember.

Memory researcher Alan Baddeley sums up memory-improvement tips: Concentrate and relate the new information to something you already know. Now you'll remember that, won't you?