Summary of Other Memory Distinctions

While the above four topics offer the most leverage for improving your memory, there are a few other distinctions that play a role:

Primacy and Recency: We tend to remember the first and last ideas more than the ones in between. This means that many short sessions are better than a single long one, because you will have more firsts and lasts.
Synesthesia: The more sensory experience you incorporate into your memories, the more likely you are to remember them. As Colin Rose describes in his book, Accelerated Learning, the Russian psychologist, Professor Luria, spent 30 years studying a man named Shereshevskii (referred to as S.), who consistently exhibited perfect recall over long periods (several years). In addition to having amazing visualization skills, he was also adept in synesthesia, which is the ability to express a memory generated in one sense in terms of another. For example, S described a tone with a pitch of 2,000 cycles per second as looking something like fireworks with a pink-red hue. S. continued, "The strip of color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has an ugly taste--rather like that of a briny pickle."
Context: Ideas are easier to remember when they can be associated to a specific context.
Unusualness: Things are remembered more easily if they stand out from the ordinary in our minds, which is why Kevin Trudeau's Megamemory course emphasizes the use of outrageous and ludicrous multi-sensory imagery.