How to improve your memory

Have you ever seen a series character or a movie protagonist who just has everything figured out? Be it sport, academics, and work or social life, wherever he/she goes everyone knows that that’s what you call the main character.

Well let’s just say those people are there in our lives too, and honestly, we just despise every little cell of them. But what if I told you that you can be one of them? Your reaction is pretty normal, and this book will change the way you think of yourself and the geniuses around you.

Let’s go in a flashback for a moment, imagine yourself sitting at your school when you were 10, the old classroom, the dusty benches, and the good old friends. Now imagine, it’s a test day Albert Einstein is taking the test with you.

Sounds too intimidating right? Why? Because he’s known to be a genius, and you and I are ordinary students. Barely making it, we can’t possibly take the same test and compete with him. But what if I tell you that Einstein was terrible at math and could hardly solve simple mathematical problems?

Now suddenly, doesn’t it sound less intimidating? That’s the thing about so-called geniuses, they are ordinary people with ordinary minds. What makes them different from the rest of the world is their vast experience which they gained from tremendous practice.

In almost every field, the definition of an expert is someone who has had years of experience in a respective field. That’s it.

A short summary of the book

The story starts with our writer (Joshua Foer), attending a U.S world memory championship as a journalist, meeting two prodigies at the event naming English mnemonist Ed Cooke and his lanky sidekick, the Austrian grandmaster Lukas Amsüss. Joshua asserts that he was intrigued by the capacity of participants’ brains and their sheer talent. But the two prodigies convinced him that anybody can do it.

He was skeptical when he left the U.S memory championship, asking questions like Were those people extraordinary creatures separated by their immense brain power or was it something all of us can learn from their talents?

This book is about the year he spent trying to train his memory and understand how memory works. The inner workings, natural deficiencies, and its hidden potential. It’s about how he learned through personal experience that our memories are indeed improvable, within limits, and that the skills of Ed and Lukas can be learned by all of us.

It’s also about the scientific study of expertise, and how researchers who study memory champions have discovered general principles of skill acquisition—secrets to improving at just about anything—from how mental athletes train their brains.

Centuries back, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia, since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually replaced our own natural memory with modern external memory aids (like Pen/paper, phones, iPads, computers).

Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our data on our phones, and computers had disappeared. Our world would come crumbling at once. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math, our whole life revolves around external memory aids.

“The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued”.

In May 1928, the young journalist S walked into the office of the Russian neuropsychologist A. R. Luria and politely asked to have his memory tested. He had been sent by his boss, the editor of the newspaper where he worked. Each morning, at the daily editorial meeting, his boss would dole out the day’s assignments to the roomful of reporters in a rapid stream of facts, contacts, and addresses that they would need to file their stories. All the reporters took copious notes, except one. S simply watched and listened.

One morning, fed up with the reporter’s apparent inattentiveness, the editor took S aside to lecture him about the need to take his job seriously. Did he think all that information was being read off each morning just because the editor liked to hear his own voice? Did he think he could report his stories without contacts? That he could simply reach out to people telepathically, without knowing their addresses? If he hoped to have any future in the world of newspaper journalism, he’d have to begin paying attention and jotting notes, the editor told him.

Sʹs exceptional memory wasn’t the only strange feature of his brain. He also suffered from a rare perceptual disorder known as synesthesia, which caused his senses to be bizarrely intertwined. Every sound S heard had its own color, texture, and sometimes even taste, and evoked “a whole complex of feelings.” Some words were “smooth and white,” others “as orange and sharp as arrows.”

The voice of Luria’s colleague, the famous psychologist Lev Vygotsky, was “crumbly yellow.” The cinematographer Sergei Eisenstein’s voice resembled a “flame with fibers protruding from it.”

Everyone has a great memory for something. Pick any human endeavor in which people excel, and some psychologist somewhere has written a paper about the exceptional memories possessed by experts in that field. So, again what separates the expert from an ordinary person?? Nothing they just have years of practice and experience.

“The natural memory is that memory which is embedded in our minds, born simultaneously with thought. The artificial memory is that memory which is strengthened by a kind of training and system of discipline.” In other words, natural memory is the hardware you’re born with.

Artificial memory is the software you run on your hardware. Artificial memory has two basic components: images and places. Images represent the contents of what one wishes to remember. Places are where those images are stored.

“To our memory-bound predecessors, the goal of training one’s memory

was not to become a “living book,” but rather a “living concordance,” a

walking index of everything one had read, and all the information one had

acquired. It was about more than merely possessing an internal library of

facts, quotes, and ideas; it was about building an organizational scheme

for accessing them”.

works

Memory tricks

Now comes the good part, I’m going to share what Ed called a stupid trick as he warned Joshua that “you are shortly going to go from having awed respect for people with a good memory to saying, ‘Oh, it’s all a stupid trick”.

Trick one- Elaborative Encoding

“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”

Going back to the concept of artificial memory, which contains images and places. All we need to do is form images in our heads and have a specific place for them called a “memory palace”.

Memory palaces can be anything, it can be the routes through a town or train station stops along a railway, signs of the zodiac, or even mythical creatures. They can be big or small, indoors or outdoors, real or imaginary, so long as they are intimately familiar.

“For your first memory palace, I’d like you to use the

The house you grew up in since that’s a space you’re likely to know very well,”

Here is the list of words to remember (make sure you add a supergiant magnified image of the words to each focal point in your house as you go around your childhood house)

· Garlic pickle

· Shampoo bottle

· Red chili

· Almonds

· Car keys

· Fork

· Jelly pouch

Now imagine all those things in images in your childhood home as you go through the main gate all the way to the back of your house. Trust me it works (using your childhood house is simply brilliant). This trick work wonders if you want to remember your grocery list, to-do list, numbers, or deck of cards. But it doesn’t really work on complex tasks like memorizing poetry. See trick 2 for that.

Trick two - How to memorize a poem

“The anonymous author of the Ad Herrenium suggests that the best method for remembering poetry is to repeat a line two or three times before trying to see it as a series of images”.

The challenge of memorizing poetry is its abstractness. What do you do with words like “ephemeral” or “self” that is impossible to see?

Gunther’s method of creating an image for the un-imageable is a very old one: to visualize a similarly sounding, or punning, word in its place.

The women however tend to approach the challenge in a more emotional way. an Austrian Corinna Draschl, said she can’t memorize a text unless she understands what it means (which is practically the case with most of us).

Even more than that, she has to understand the feeling of it. She said she breaks the poem into small chunks and then assigns a series of emotions to each short segment. Rather than associate words with images, she associates them with feelings.

Some of my favorite fictional characters with exceptional memory powers

Sanem from Turkish series Erkenci Kus

Sanem is a young aspiring woman who runs her father's shop as a part-timer and dreams of living in the Galapagos. She gets a part-time job as a waitress at an advertising company, and through her memory powers, she rules the company in few years time. The drama shows sanem has a photographic memory which doesn't have any scientific evidence, but she remembers everything literally in her mind as a form of image same as the trick one mentioned above.

Attorney Woo young woo from K drama Extraordinary attorney woo

Woo young woo has an IQ of 180 but is born with an autism spectrum. But that never came in her way, she memorizes law book pages at the age of 5 and proceeds to graduate as an attorney with exceptional results from one of the most prestigious institutes in Seoul South Korea. She gets recruited by one of the best law firms in Seoul and ends up making her name as a top-notch lawyer at the firm. Her secret? she knows every case file on the subject by heart and recites law articles and species of whales like her name. Her secret, a bit of both trick one and two.

Mike Ross from Suit

The OG of photographic memory, we all know him and we all love him despite his cockiness or maybe because of his cockiness. Mike aspired to go to Harvard, but couldn't take the test because of some misfortune and a criminal record. Instead, he now takes the bar exam for other students in exchange for money. One day at the lavish office of Person's law firm, he gets caught and sneaks into Harvey's office. Harvey catches him red-handed, and mike being the smart ass he is, gets himself out by a simple deal. He will memorize anything Harveysneakily tells him to in exchange for freedom. He recites the whole law text like a bible. Harvey sneekily hires him at the law firm and the rest is history. His trick?? Trick one and two combined ofcourse.

Writer’s Note

I have subconsciously followed these tricks, although no one thought me. It just came naturally to me, but the researchers believe anyone can be smart by just enhancing their memory skills and keeping them polished. The rest is just HARD WORK. Did you find this helpful??