I want to test something out. I want you to remember these six faces, and I want you to remember the order in which they appeared.

Don’t spend too much time on studying them.

There will be a test later.

A large part of the human brain is dedicated to vision, and quite a large proportion of that area is dedicated to recognizing faces.

So my proposition is that you can use our brain’s facial recognition ability to remember long strings of numbers or other important information by associating elements of the information, e.g. individual digits, with a picture of a particular person’s face.

So now scroll the browser window so that the sequence faces above are no longer visible, and pick out the original six images from the following four dozen mug shots, and place them in the order that you first saw them.

How well did you do?

Every time I’ve tried it, with a selection list of hundreds of images of people, with sequences of images easily 30 images long, I’ve been able to get it right 100% of the time. And every person I’ve tried this out on is able to achieve the same results too. I’ve found that people on the second or third test only need a few seconds to learn a sequence of images 10 or 20 images long.

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