We’re all familiar with having a little memory fumble sometimes – whether it's ‘did I actually ever send that email’ or ‘where have I put my car keys? ’ .
Naturally, we don’t remember everything we’ve done that day all the time. But for somebody with dyslexia, there could be more to it than occasionally feeding the cat twice – dyslexia and memory have a lot of interplay, and dyslexia as a condition can actually affect memory quite dramatically.
But for somebody with dyslexia, there could be more to it than occasionally feeding the cat twice – dyslexia and memory have a lot of interplay, and dyslexia as a condition can affect memory quite dramatically.
Verbal short-term memory and working memory impairment are one of the most consistent; they’re not the long-term kind of memory that remembers a holiday to Disneyland or your tenth birthday- although some people with dyslexia struggle with this kind of memory too.
They’re the kind of memory that we use daily, to recall what’s been said to us in conversations, instructions we’ve been given, or what’s just happened in a narrative we’ve been reading.
There’s some crossover between the two, but perhaps the simplest way to visualise it is that short-term memory is a ‘bank’ of things we recall that have happened to us very recently.
Working memory is more of the ‘instruction manual’ that helps us process long-term and some short-term memory to retrieve what we know and work out how to complete a task.
But this doesn’t mean you’re destined to be forgetful forever. Although dyslexia is a lifelong condition, many people who have dyslexia have developed coping strategies.
These strategies can make all the difference when it comes to giving your memory a boost, and they’re often simple to implement and slot into your daily routine, too. So, they might work for you!
Colour Association can help a lot when it comes to sparking off a memory – people seem to remember many things by their colour over their feel, dimensions, or any inherent information.
This can be handy when it comes to organising notes – colour-code with index tabs and highlighters, as it may aid a sense of information recall.
This is part of a wider technique called Visualise and Associate, which works on the principle that our brains process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.
It’s all about creating an image a mental hook that you associate with certain information, and by recalling that image, the information should become easier to pull from the brain too.
A science example is associating different chemicals with differently shaped and coloured bottles in your mind’s eye, which should make their chemical formula easier to recall. There’s a more in-depth run-down of how it works at
When it comes to memory improvement tips, there are many different strategies. You could also try Mnemonic Linking as a way of remembering things like items or to-do lists. It’s argued that narrativizing a list makes it much easier to remember.
So, if you need to pop to the shops for, say, dog food, coffee and a printer ink cartridge, think of the starving dog novelist sat at his desk, drinking his black coffee and wondering if he’s going to get his draft printed out on time so that the publisher doesn’t shout at him.
(Did we just create 2026’s best new children’s novel?)
You can also try Chunking. This is a revision method that many of us pick up in school, but there are myriad applications in adult life where it can help out too.
Chunking works on the principle that if we take a long or complex piece of information and group it, it becomes easier to recall. Many of us do this without realising it – say we need to remember a new phone number; instead of learning it as 0985677234, we remember it as 098-567-7234.
Boost Education has some great chunking tips and tricks to try the next time you need to remember any long pieces of information.
There are also some more practical things that you can add into your daily routine that can really help with memory. A lot of these are simply ways of taking the onus of remembering off your brain, and turning it into a physical stimulus. You could try…
Having a weak memory isn’t fun – it can make somebody’s work, social, and educational life tricky in some ways, and when it’s thrown into the mix with dyslexia, it can make many aspects of somebody’s life feel stressful.
But there are a lot of things to try that can alleviate some of the memory anxiety – and we’re all different, too, so it’s important to remember that it’s all about what works for you.