I am not sure, but I do know that your brain is making associations with everything you experience, whether you like it or not. Might as well use those associations for something useful.
I thought of a simpler technique the other day that uses triggers like fear or pleasure. Fearful incidents people tend to remember very clearly. Imagine you have a big test and need to do a lot of memorization you could turn it into a fearful experience that will really burn it into your memory but without making dozens of crazy associations. Take a hammer, spread your fingers open wide on a table. Start saying out loud the things you need to memorize while hitting between your fingers with the hammer. I have not tried this myself but I am guessing that the information will be written to the brain as part of the fearful experience making the information easy to pull up for a test.
This technique does have a cost. Every time you activate your amygdala (which, in turn, activates your sympathetic nervous system, which primes your body for fight or flight mode), it becomes more sensitive both in the moment and the future. You don't want to be in fight or flight mode. It's enormously unhealthy and hard on your body. Moreover, it inhibits your medial prefrontal cortex, which is your "head" in coloquial terms, the region of your brain that houses rational, abstract thought, making it harder to think straight. Fear is the mind killer.
I think if you did that enough it would go the way of the crazed runner chasing dog technique that I used a few times.
It goes like this.
You are running and a dog chases you. So you run toward the dog acting like a lunatic. I've tried this and the dog does run away. But only the first time. The second time (that I tried) the dog was on to it and continued the confrontation.
What works for me is being very annoyed about something because I forgot it in a test. It's the best way to remember things so far - just do them wrong once when it counts.
I lost a spelling bee on "tawny" when I was a child. I had never noticed seeing or hearing the word before, but I sure noticed it when I saw it five years later.
I still vividly remember the moment a week later when I dislodged the lost and then found spelling bee study guide that was jammed behind the drawer of my nighttable.
