I have a life hack for recalling a forgotten word that works quite reliably in my case. Maybe, it will work for yours too.
It involves listing the letters of the alphabet, trying to recall that specific word by asking myself “does it start with A? B? C?”. And on the letter that the word actually starts with, I remember it entirely.
For instance, today I needed to recall a band from the 90s. I remembered nothing. No song titles, nothing I could quickly find by Googling. But I had a certain “picture” in my head. Probably, if I had struggled a bit more, I would have come up with search queries that would lead me where I needed, but I pulled out this technique and started going through the letters.
And as I was going through A, B, C, … at the letter K I remember — “Karmen”!
Sometimes, rarely, a “second pass” is necessary. Of course, it doesn’t always work, but on the other hand, if there’s absolutely no system, it’s unclear how to recall anything at all. This system exists, it’s a starting point, and it quite often works.
And as for remembering short numbers, to later recall them more easily, I mentally draw a zigzag line navigating the keypad of a button phone. This results in a visual squiggle, which serves as an additional mnemonic to the numbers. True, unlike the first approach, I use this one rarely, because in life, there’s rarely a need to remember and then recall numbers.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 