If you have trouble remembering names, faces or phone numbers, these tips from memory champions and neuroscientists can help.

You slide the key into the door and hear a clunk as the tumblers engage. You rotate the key, twist the doorknob and walk inside. The house is familiar, but the contents foreign. At your left, there's a map of Minnesota, dangling precariously from the wall. You're certain it wasn't there this morning. Below it, you find a plush M&M candy. To the right, a dog, a shiba inu you've never seen before. In its mouth, a pair of your expensive socks.

And then it comes to you, 323-3607, a phone number.

If none of this makes sense, stick with us; by the end of this piece you'll be using the same techniques to memorize just about anything you've ever wanted to remember.

The "memory athlete" Munkhshur Narmandakh once employed a similar combination of mnemonics to commit more than 6,000 binary digits to memory in just 30 minutes. Alex Mullen, a three-time World Memory Champion, used them to memorize the order of a deck of cards in just 15 seconds, a record at the time. It was later broken by Shijir-Erdene Bat-Enkh, who did it in 12.

We're going to aim lower, applying these strategies to real-world scenarios, like remembering the things we often forget at dinner parties or work-related mixers.