Stimulate more of the senses at the same time.

 

We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc.), disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole.

The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in deciding how to combine these signals, so two people can perceive the same event very differently.

Our senses evolved to work together—vision influencing hearing, for example—which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once.

Smells have an unusual power to bring back memories, maybe because smell signals bypass the thalamus and head straight to their destinations, which include that supervisor of emotions known as the amygdala.