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Improve Your Memory
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About This Book
From the bestselling author of Get Organized: S imple and ingenious techniques to improve your memory and retain information for a lifetime. Want to remember more of what you read, perform better on tests, or just be able to find your car keys? Ron Fry's effective system has helped thousands of people improve their memory by adapting today's best memorization techniques to their own needs. Packed with quizzes designed to pinpoint your specific trouble spotsâas well as proven strategies for any memory-based taskâthis is the only book you need to start improving your memory for a lifetime. Discover:
- The fundamental principles of memory
- Tests to evaluate and increase your memory
- The latest techniques and proven formulas for memory development
- Ways to identify the areas that need improvement
- Memory-retention formulas for those with specific challenges, such as ADD
- What strategies work best for each situation
Improve Your Memory offers a system that is useful, practical, flexible, and adaptableâfor work, school, and everyday life.
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Personal DevelopmentSubtopic
Self ImprovementCHAPTER 1
START YOUR MEMORY BANKS
Which do you think youâre more likely to rememberâyour first date with your future spouse (even if it was decades ago) or what you had for breakfast last Thursday?
Probably the former (though not if last Thursday was your first experiment with yak butter).
Which event conjures up the most memoriesâthe Blizzard of 1996 or the last time it rained (unless, of course, it really poured cats and dogs)?
Which name would you find difficult to forgetâJoe Smith or Irina Khakamada? Weâll deal with how to remember spelling Ms. Khakamada in Chapters 5 and 7.
What do all the âmemorableâ names, dates, places, and events have in common? The fact that theyâre different. What makes something memorable is its extraordinarinessâhow much it differs from our normal experiences.
The reason so many of us forget where we put the car keys or our glasses is that putting these objects down is the most ordinary of occurrences, part and parcel of the most humdrum aspects of our lives. (Believe it or not, according to Readerâs Digest, the average adult spends 16 hours a year trying to find his or her keys.) We have trouble remembering facts and formulas from books and classroom lectures for the same reason. To be schooled is to be bombarded with facts day in and day out. How do you make those facts memorable?
Beef Up Your RAM
In order to understand how to make the important facts memorable, how to keep them stored safely at least until final exams, letâs first take a look at how the brain and, more specifically, memory work.
Think of your brain as a computerâan organic computer, wired with nerves, hooked up to various input devices (your five senses), and possessed of both ROM (read-only memory) and RAM (random-access memory).
The ROM is the permanent data you canât touchâthe information that tells your heart to pump and your lungs to breathe.
On the other hand, RAM is much more accessible. Like most PCs, your brain stores RAM in two places: short-term memory (cache or virtual memory) and long-term memory (your hard drive).
Okay, so what happens to input in this system?
Letâs Play Memory Tag
Given the bombardment of data we receive every day, our brains constantly are making choices. Data either goes in one ear and out the other, or it stops in short-term memory. But when the cache or vitural memory is overloaded, the brain is left with a choiceâjettison some old information or pass it on to the hard drive.
How does it make a decision about which information to pass on and where to store it?
Well, scientists arenât positive about this yet, but, of course, they have theories.
The most readily stored and accessed is data thatâs been rehearsedâgone over again and again. Most of us readily access our knowledge of how to read, how to drive, the year Columbus âdiscoveredâ America, the name of the first president of the United States, and other basics without any difficulty at all. (At worst, you remember âColumbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492.â And arenât we lucky he did? Otherwise, if only in the interests of historical accuracy, weâd have to remember something like âLeif Eriksson landed at LâAnse aus Meadows, Newfoundland, somewhere between 997 and 1003.â) Weâve worn familiar paths through our memory banks accessing this type of information.
Why, then, can some people recite the names, symbols, and atomic weights of the elements of the periodic tableâwhile theyâre playing (and winning) Trivial Pursuitâas easily as they can the date of Columbusâs dubious achievement?
To return to our computer analogy, this information has been âtaggedâ or âcodedâ in some way so that it can be retrieved easily by the user. For instance, before storing a file in your computerâs long-term RAM, you give it a name, one that succinctly describes its contents. In other words, you make the file stand out in some way from the host of other files youâve stored on your disk drive.
For some people, myriad bits of data are almost automatically tagged so that they can quite easily and handily be stored and retrieved. But most of us, if we are to have exceptional memories, must make a special effort.
Can You Twist and Shout⌠And Remember?
First and foremost, there are three very different kinds of memoryâvisual, verbal, and kinesthetic, each of which can be strong or weak, and only the first two of which are associated with your brain. (This is, of course, a gross simplification of what we term âmemory.â Surveys have found more than a hundred different memory tasks in everyday life that can cause people problems, each of which require a different strategy! Sorry to break it to you, but just because youâve learned an easy way to remember a 100-digit number [see Chapter 8] does not guarantee that you wonât spend days looking for those darned glasses.)
Most people have the easiest time strengthening their visual memories, which is why so many memory techniques involve forming âmental pictures.â
To strengthen our verbal memories, we use rhymes, songs, letter substitutions, and other mnemonic gimmicks.
Finally, donât underestimate the importance of kinesthetic memory, or what your body remembers. Athletes and dancers certainly donât have to be convinced that the muscles, joints, and tendons of their bodies seem to have their own memories. Neither does anyone whoâs ever remembered a phone number by moving his fingers and ârememberingâ how itâs dialed.
The next time you have to remember a list, any list, say each item out loud and move some part of your body at the same time. A dancer can do the time step and remember her history lecture. A baseball pitcher can associate each movement of his windup with another item in a list he has to memorize. Even random body movements will do. For example, if you have to memorize a list of countries, just associate each one with a specific movement. For Burundi, lift your right index finger while saying it. For Zimbabwe, rotate your neck. Bend a knee for Equador and raise your left hand for San Marino. Kick Latvia in the shins and twirl your hair for Kampuchea. When you have to remember this list of countries, just start moving! It may look a little strangeâespecially if you make your movements a little too exotic or dramatic in the middle of geography classâbut if it works better than anything else for you, who cares?
You can also use this newfound memory as a backup to your brain. While you may still memorize key phone numbers, for example, you may also accompany each recitation with the hand movements necessary to actually dial the number. Youâll probably find that even if you forget the âmentalâ tricks you used, your âbody memoryâ will run (or lift or squat or bend or shake) to the rescue!
Once You Learn the TricksâŚ
Students, of course, must possess or develop good memories, or they risk mediocrity or failure. The mere act of getting by in school means remembering a lot of dates, mathematical and scientific formulas, historical events, characters and plots, and sometimes entire poems. (I had a biology teacher who made us memorize the 52 parts of a frogâs body. All of which, of course, have been absolutely essential to my subsequent career success. Just kidding.)
Practically, there are two ways of going about this. The most familiar way is rehearsal or repetition. By any name, it is the process of reading or pronouncing something over and over until youâve learned it âby heart.â
But a much easier wayâgetting back to our computer analogyâis to tag or code things we are trying to remember and to do so with images and words that are either outrageous or very familiar.
For instance, have you ever wondered how, in the days before index cards, ballpoint pens, or teleprompters, troubadours memorized song cycles and politicians memorized lengthy speeches? Well, in the case of the great Roman orator Cicero, it was a matter of associating the parts of his speeches with the most familiar objects in his lifeâthe rooms of his home. Perhaps the opening of a speech would be linked to his bedroom, the next part to his yard. As he progressed through the speech, he would, in essence, mentally take his usual morning stroll, passing through the rooms of his home.
This simple method works very well for a relatively short, related list, such as what you need at the grocery store. You can use the rooms in your house, the items in a particular room, even the route you drive to work. Use the landmarks you see every day to remind you of various items you need to buy at the store: Start right in the garageâremember the garbage bags! Turn the keyâthatâs right, the broccoli. As you pass the dry cleanerâs, picture soap suds spilling out the door (laundry detergent); McDonaldâs should remind you to pick up the hamburger meat (and, hopefully, the buns and ketchup!); picture a roll of paper towels hanging off that traffic light. Turn on your windshield wipers. Oh, yeah, the French bread! Oops, and the bananas. If youâre going to use landmarks to remember lists, write down those youâre going to use beforehand. That way, you wonât get mixed up by others you notice along your route.
Why limit your list? Well, unless you live in a 35-room mansion or drive three hours to work, there are only so many rooms and landmarks you can easily use!
In other cases, more outrageous associations work much better. The more ridiculous or impossible the association, the more memorable it is. Although absentmindedness is not one of the problems we will try to solve in this book, a common cure for it illustrates my point.
If you frequently have trouble remembering, say, where you put down your pen, get into the habit of conjuring up some startling image linking (a key word later on in this book) the pen and the place. For example, as youâre putting your pen down on the kitchen table, think about eating peas off a plate with it or of the pen sticking straight up in a pile of mashed potatoes. Even days later, when you think, âHmm, where did I leave that pen?â the peas and plate (or mashed potatoes) will come to mind, reminding you of the kitchen table.
âŚThe Rest Is Easy
These are the essential principles of memory for which the computer analogy is particularly apt. After all, when dealing with the mind, as with the machine, the GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) rule applies. If you passively allow your brainâs processes to decide what and how items are stored, you will have a jumbled memory from which it is difficult to extract even essential bits of knowledge.
On the other hand, if you are selective and careful about assigning useful tags to the items headed for the long-term memory banks, you are on the way to being able to memorize the Manhattan telephone directory!
CHAPTER 2
AND NOW FOR A LITTLE QUIZ
I know what youâre thinking. You bought this book so you could improve your memory and perform better on exams and those darned pop quizzes, and now I turn around and throw some more tests your way. I could note that âThemâs the breaks!â
Or, as one of my high school teachers used to say, I could encourage you to think of tests as your best friends (no, it wasnât the crazy biology teacher I told you about in Chapter 1). In this book, and throughout your academic career, tests will give you the measure of how far youâve comeâŚand how far youâve got to go. Follow the advice in this book and your score on similar tests in the last chapter should be 25 percent higher.
Test 1: Numbers
Look at the number directly below this paragraph for no more than 10 seconds. Then cover the page (or, better yet, close the book and put it aside) and write down as much of itâin orderâas you can.
674216899411539273
Test 2: Words and Defin...
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Contents
- Foreword Something to Remember
- Chapter 1: Start Your Memory Banks
- Chapter 2: And Now for a Little Quiz
- Chapter 3: Roy G. Biv and Friends
- Chapter 4: Reading and Remembering
- Chapter 5: One Chapter to a Better Vocabulary
- Chapter 6: Taking Notes to Remember Text
- Chapter 7: Rembring How too Spel Gud
- Chapter 8: Remembering Numbers the Mnemonic Way
- Chapter 9: Remembering Names and Faces
- Chapter 10: Let's Not Forget ADD
- Chapter 11: Test Your Progress
- Index
- About the Author
- Copyright