Do you ever feel like you have the memory of the goldfish; that somehow you were born without the "memory gene"? Well, toss that notion out the window, because it turns out the brain's memory superpowers aren't limited to a select few who were gifted at birth.
Kevin Horsley wasn’t always the renowned International Grand Master of Memory that he is today. (How would you like that title?) As a student, Kevin had to really struggle just for passing grades. His dyslexia and memory - or lack thereof - made school miserable for him. Ironically, when he finished school he decided to dedicate himself to improving his memory. By unlocking how our memories actually work Kevin went on to win several worldwide memory competitions. The man could tell you the number pi to the 10,000th digit!
If you have ever wondered why some crazy piece of gossip sticks in your head forever while everything you learned through hours of studying for a chemistry test just seems to vanish then Kevin’s book, “Unlimited Memory” is the one for you.
In it, Kevin shares how he came to understand that there is no such thing as a bad memory or a good memory. Instead, there are bad and good memorization strategies. All you need to do is adopt his tricks, throw in a little effort, and you’ll soon forget you ever had a bad memory.
To improve his memory Kevin utilizes what he calls, the 4 C’s:
Concentration
Creativity
Connection
Continuous Use
Concentration
If you don’t capture something in your head on the first go around then it’s lost. Memorization requires focus.
If you don’t believe you have great focus then you need to change that belief. You can never be more than how you define yourself, and the truth is most of the labels you give yourself probably aren’t accurate. Your beliefs aren’t tattooed onto you - you can pick them. Here are 3 beliefs that you are going to need to adopt to have incredible memory.
I have the focus of a Zen Master
My memory is unlimited
Failures are the cairns that mark the path to success
If you are having trouble focusing, then stop multitasking. It is frying the brain’s circuit for focus. Despite what you may think, multitasking cuts your processing speed in half and doubles your mistakes.
Creativity
Our brains are wired to remember images and movies - not trivial factoids.
When I was a kid my parents bought me some trivia books - the Cliff-Claven was strong with me from an early age. I have since forgotten every fact I ever read in that book - except for the few facts that had pictures associated with them.
There is a reason why most people struggle to remember anything they learned in Chemistry but can quickly recall a Farside comic for just about any occasion.
If you need to remember something then create an image or a movie in your head using the S.E.E. principle.
S - Senses
Create an image that uses all 5 senses. The more vivid the image the more powerful the memory.
E - Exaggerate
Make the movie or image worth remembering. There are no budget constraints when it comes to your imagination. Don’t limit yourself to some independent art house flick of a memory. Go full Michael Bay with this: think bigger, stranger, and add in some explosions.
E - Energize
Punch up the script with laughter. Make it funny. We remember the bizarre and the humorous.
Let’s put that together now to learn the first 12 presidents of the United States:
An old lady in a small town in the Old West sits at the pump washing a tin. She has an unusually large adam’s apple for an old woman. Jeff, her son, walks up, but she is mad at her son because he is dating Marylin Monroe, who also happens to have a very large adam’s apple. That’s when Michael Jackson shows up in a van with beer in it, he’s got his head out the window screaming, “Wooo! Jamon!” His very hairy son is driving and he hits the gas and swerves, narrowly missing a tiler carrying a stack of poke-a-dot tiles. The van loses control and crashes head-first into the window of the town tailor’s shop. Michael and his son run to safety just as the van and all of its beer explode!
- End scene.
Now, if you can remember that story then you can remember the first 12 presidents of the United States. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, Jackson, Van Buren, Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Tailor.
Connection
Your brain doesn’t work like a file cabinet with everything stored in its own folder. Our brains are networks. We connect new information to what we already know. The more connections a piece of information has the more context it has, and the the more likely you’ll be able to recall it.
If a piece of information has only one connection to what we already know then it is vulnerable. You may forgotten a word in a poem or a single note in a piece of music. And just like that, with that one missing piece, an entire chain of words or notes is gone with it. All it takes is something to trigger that one missing piece and then, voila, everything comes rushing back to you.
You can protect against losing information by taking the time to discover how any new information fits with what you already know. That may sound like a waste of time, but it wastes less time than forgetting and having to learn the same thing all over again.
Constant Use
If you are learning new materials then it helps to peg it to something you already know well and constantly use, like a place, a car, a shape, a song, or your own body.
For example, if I were trying to remember the following sequence: Jelly, Assorted Nuts, Penguin, Shoes, Neptune, Ronald, Cards, and a microphone - we could tie them to a car.
The Penguin is in the driver's seat. Ronald McDonald is riding shotgun and giving the play-by-play of the trip on a microphone. The car doesn’t have wheels, but a bunch of shoes that run on the ground. Someone has smeared Jelly all over the dashboard. The car doesn’t run on gas, but on assorted nuts that you dump into the tank. Neptune, the god of the sea, sits in the back practicing his card tricks.
Try forgetting that image if you can.
Willpower vs. Why Power
One of the few things I have retained from school is that forcing yourself to remember random facts is difficult, but it’s much easier if you are interested in the topic. When you understand why you want to learn something you’ll do much better than by expending willpower to force yourself to learn it.
Homer, the blind poet of ancient Greece, memorized epic poems like they were pop songs. More recently, Alexander Solzhenitsyn composed the 12,000 lines of his book, The Gulag Archipelago, all in his head while he was imprisoned. In his 3rd volume, he notes that he was not the only person in his camp performing such remarkable feats.
With a good reason and a decent strategy, any of us can access an unlimited memory.