How to develop your memory
Published by Hypno on Thursday, May 22, 2008 - 18:10:39 - Filed under
There is no such thing as a poor memory, only a trained or untrained one. – Harry Lorayne
The human brain has extremely good memorizing abilities. The problem is that people don’t know how to use it. Your subconscious mind memorizes EVERYTHING you have ever experienced. The only problem is that people can’t access those memories consciously on demand, so in a way those memories are worthless to the average person. But if someone understands the way the memory works, and learns to develop better control over it, then that person gains a huge advantage compared to those who don’t.
In the book called “The Trained Memory” Warren Hilton writes about a woman who became seized by a nervous fever, and because of it she started talking in languages that she never learned before. Priests of the neighborhood thought that she was possessed by some “devil”. Later it turned out that she was a waif and lived with a clergyman when she was nine years old. The clergyman used to walk around in the house and read to himself passages from books written in languages that the woman later used when she had the fever. The woman’s subconscious mind stored that information, but the woman couldn’t access it consciously, only the fever “recalled” those passages. You can read about that and other examples of the memorizing capabilities of your subconscious mind in the book
Using proper memory systems the human memory can be boosted tremendously. These memory systems have been around humans for hundreds of years. Most of them are based on the concept that the subconscious mind remembers everything. People who used those systems gained a massive memory boost. For example: Lucius Scipio was able to remember the name of every Roman citizen. Seneca could memorize two thousand words after hearing them only once, and Cyrus was able to recall the name of every soldier in his army.
Now, before I get into explaining techniques on how to memorize things. Let’s see what you can do to gain a general boost in your memory.
People who complain that they have a bad memory usually don’t have problems with their memory; the problem usually is with their concentration skills. It’s mostly because of the nature of human memory: When you pay full attention to something your brain forms neural connections and connect that thing with other things that are similar. Then later when some of those similar events happen the original memory gets triggered and gets recalled. If you don’t pay full attention there will be less connections occurring, and it will be harder to recall your memory.
Let’s see an example; it’s easier to explain it that way. Let’s say that one of your friends told you to check out his/her new website the next time you browse the internet. Your mind then stores it in your memory, and associates your friends’ website with computers and internet. Then later on you “forget” about it (by forget I mean that it isn’t in your conscious mind). You do your regular stuff and pay attention to those things, the website doesn’t even pop up into your consciousness (sometimes it does but usually not). Then later when you sit down at your computer to browse the net, that event will “trigger” your memory about your friends’ homepage and that way you will remember it. (Note: This is just a simplified but effective explanation about the workings of your memory).
If you want to train yourself to have better concentration, then I highly recommend you to meditate regularly. Not only will your concentration skills become better, you will also gain other benefits as well. The more you meditate the better your memory becomes.
Some things which can cause bad memory are:
-Worrying about memorizing (or worrying too much in general)
When people notice that their memory isn’t perfect and start worrying if they will remember the things, then the worrying causes them to pay less attention. Of course this lack of full attention makes the memory much worse. – Meditation helps a lot in this case.
-Disinterest in a subject
If a person is not interested in a particular subject their memory works much worse. – Either become interested in the subject, or try to make learning about it more fun.
-Limited past experiences
If you have experiences on a particular subject, you will memorize similar things a lot easier. – Gain more experiences about subject to get a better memory
-Too many things going on in your life, which require your attention
If you have too many things going on in your life, you will become stressed, and it will be hard to concentrate. - If that’s the case then I highly suggest you to write down EVERYTHING you have to do, and create a plan to do those things. This will decrease your stress levels and make you calmer.
A great exercise to sharpen your memory is to walk into a room, look around, and notice the objects in it. Keep looking around for a while, then close your eyes and try to recall as much as objects as you can. You can do this exercise almost everywhere. Or you could download some pictures from the internet, watch them and later try to recall them.
Another way to increase your memorizing skills would be to use visualization, self-talk, or hypnosis to condition your subconscious mind to become better at memorizing.
For daily everyday life the above general memory boosting tips should be enough. Now let’s discuss the techniques that can be used to memorize things that are hard to memorize without techniques. (Note: After a while the techniques will become second nature to you and you will do them without thinking about them)
First of all I’ll write down a list of 15 words. Your job will be to memorize as much of them as you can in one minute. So grab a watch, a timer or whatever you can measure 1 minute with. When the 1 minute passes, open up the notepad application on your computer, or grab a paper and a pencil and without watching the list, write down every word that you can remember. Later I will write down the tactics that you can use to memorize lists more effectively. And after that I will write down another list (that you will memorize with the technique). And that way you can compare your results.
Here comes the list: car, window, table, cat, keyboard, telephone, running, watch, necklace, flower, sky, mouse, zebra, television, brick
Now open the notepad and write down everything that you can remember.
Go on, DO IT NOW!!!
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Ok, now you’re back. How much did you remember? It actually doesn’t matter how much you remembered, the most important thing is that you did the test and have a result.
Now I’ll explain a simple method of memorizing things that are not related to each other. Experts call it the “link system”
I’ll explain an easy way to memorize the above list.
The reason that makes the list hard to memorize is that the words are not associated to each other. In order to make the list memorizing easier we just have to ‘associate’ the words together.
The association is done in your mind. First you look at the first two words, in this case it would be car and window. Cars have windows so the association can be easy in this case. You just have to imagine a car and pay attention to its window. But in order to memorize it better I recommend that you imagine a car with an unnaturally HUGE window. This unexpected (and unnatural) proportion will leave a better imprint on your memory. BTW there is no exact method that you have to do in order to link them up, for example you could imagine a car which has windows instead of its wheels. The associations that I will show you are only a guideline to show you how it’s done, later when you get the point you can make up your own ways of associating.
Next you have to associate the window with the table. In this case you could imagine a window with little tables floating through it. This will be an unnatural and unique picture, and because of that it will get stored better in your mind. The mind is better at storing unique, unexpected things than the boring expected ones.
Now you have to link up the table with the cat. In order to do that, imagine a table, but instead of its legs imagine four pink cats holding the table.
Next you imagine a cat sitting in front of a computer typing an e-mail to his friends with his brand new golden colored keyboard. In this case then you imagine these things make sure that the cat and the keyboard are brighter in your imagination than the computer.
Next you link up the keyboard with the telephone. You can imagine a keyboard which has buttons that have a shape of a telephone instead of regular buttons. Imagine pressing those buttons and hearing a telephone ring when you push it.
Now imagine a telephone with legs, which is running in an extremely fast pace.
After that, imagine HUGE running legs stepping on a watch, and breaking it into little pieces.
Next imagine a necklace which has a gaudy watch on it instead of the pendant.
When you want to link up the necklace with the flower, you could imagine a bouquet of flowers tied up with a very thick golden necklace.
Next imagine that it’s raining, but instead of raindrops imagine that flowers are falling down from the skies.
Next imagine a huge flying mouse trying to bite the skies.
Next imagine a mouse with zebra stripes on it’s back, after that imagine that a zebra ran into your home and kicked your television set. And finally imagine a television set made out of small bricks.
Ok. That’s the end of the list. Now you just have to recall the first picture (car+window) and after that the second picture (window+table) will pop up naturally, and you will just have to follow the pictures and recall the objects in them. Now if you want to test yourself then open up your notepad application, or grab an empty piece of paper and write down how many words can you recall from the list.
Remember that there is no specific way of linking things together; you have to do it in your own way. The most important things to remember are that the pictures get linked up better if they are unique or unexpected.(As you practice this your creativity will also get better)
Some people have trouble recalling the first word from lists. In that case you can associate the first word to yourself. Then you won’t have problems recalling it.
Now I’ll write down another list of 15 words which you can memorize using the explained method, and compare your results with the results that you’ve got the first time. At first you may be slow in creating unique associations, but as you practice memorizing lists, your creativity will become better and faster. When your memorizing skills get to a certain level memorizing a list of 15 items shouldn’t take you more than a minute.
Here’s the list: fish, book, dog, lake, lion, tea, chimney, bell, river, skating, button, pyramid, spaceship, wolf, bubble gum
Have fun using the method :)
There are lots of other techniques for remembering things like names, faces, dates, cards, numbers, etc. If you are interested in memory systems then I would recommend Harry Lorayne’s book called : How to Develop a Super Power Memory.
P.S.:Maybe one day I’ll write about those other memory systems, but don’t take my word for it.