TOTAL RECALL

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The elite sales force has a month to bone up on a new product in two languages&You’ve got an hour to learn the names and titles of 20 VIPs attending tonight’s banquet&Don’t panic. Bring on the memory experts.

Offering everything from two-hour workshops designed to teach the simple skill of matching names to faces, to weeklong immersion programs for specific training purposes, pros versed in the art of memory recall are in demand.

“The bottom line of memory training is confidence,” says Ormond Beach, Fla.-based Jon Keith, The Memory Trainer (904-677-8118; www.MemoryTrainer.com). “You work better, and your productivity increases when you remember,” adds Keith, whose seminars on building memory skills have attracted the likes of IBM, Chevron and Ralston Purina.

The secret to having a great memory, says Marguerite Ham of Memorease in Elizabeth, Colo., (303-646-2857) is recognizing how you learn. “If we know how we learn, we can shorten our learning curve,” says Ham, whose interactive sessions encourage attendees to use touch, smell and auditory senses to work a room. “When I work with a corporation, I take that new product line and integrate it into my seminar,” says Ham. “When they walk out, they walk out knowing that product line.” Last year, she was called in to help 47 Denver police sergeants cram for the Denver Police Academy’s final exam.

Don Lofland, Ph.D., a physics teacher at West Valley College in Saratoga, Calif., and founder of Powerlearning®Systems (831-425-7971; www.power-learning.com) in Santa Cruz, Calif., offers learning technique seminars, which he begins with a lesson in Portuguese. “I began in this business with the angle that super memory depends on learning methods,” says Lofland. “I teach my students 80 to 100 words of Portuguese in an hour, and they are able to retain 85 percent.” Why Portuguese? “It’s a very difficult language to learn. And that shows them if they can learn those words, they can apply the method to anything in life.”

CHERYL-ANNE STURKEN