#MASTER MEMORY HOW TO#
#MASTER MEMORY FULL#

Mapping them to things you know about, and ideally people, brings the whole diagram to life. Let’s imagine you’re trying to understand the internal structure of a cell, and you need to get your head around all these intensely boring-sounding concepts such as cytoplasm, centrioles, mitochondria or, more encouragingly, the “golgi apparatus”. It was delete-ear-ious to his health.” Such images are of course completely silly: and that’s one reason the memories it produces are stronger, last longer and are easier to recall. “It caused Van Gogh some harm and damage when he deleted his ear. Want to remember that deleterious means “causing harm and damage”? Link the sound to the meaning with a creative image. By turning them into a little musical ditties (ideally tied to a pop tune you know and like), you can make them vastly easier and more fun to learn. Sequences are difficult to remember by themselves. Huge chunks of school learning comes in the form of little verbal sequences: whether thats “amo, amas, amat”, the colours of the rainbow, the sequence of planets, or the dreaded Haber process. Let’s take a look at some practical things you can do today to boost your memory. What our memories reveal is that our nervous system is tuned to anything that excites emotion, that’s personally interesting, that’s colourful, unusual and, above all, anything that’s personal.

#MASTER MEMORY HOW TO#

How to put these insights to practical use? The great psychologist William James once said that “the great thing in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy”.

#MASTER MEMORY FULL#

And I found that this tissue isn’t a kind of robotic storage, but is instead intensely creative, and full of humanity. I kept toying with my memory skills over seven years of study in psychology and philosophy that took me through such diverse topics as the difference between smell and colour sensations (the answer is time) and how to make someone think their hand has got bigger (employ the “ rubber hand illusion” – with a bigger glove).Īs I immersed myself in these topics, I kept finding memory in the most unexpected places, and came to the view that rather than being a storehouse in the centre of our brains, memory is much more integral: it’s a tissue that underlies our thoughts, words, feeling, and our perception of the outside world. It was more an exercise in emotion than it was in concentration. It was immediately obvious that this supercharged learning wasn’t even remotely boring or computer-like: it was intensely colourful and fun, the opposite of most rote-learning at school.

Soon, I was able to memorise 200 foreign words in an hour, or a shuffled deck of cards in a few minutes.

He goes on to describe the methods he uses, which go all the way back to the 5th-century BC in Greece, when they began to find popularity among orators, oral poets and students.įollowing the path O’Brien set out, I learned how to use my imagination to bring to life what I was learning, how to connect new information to what I already knew, and how to review and practise my memories to keep them in full health. In the book, O’Brien dangles the extraordinary and unbelievable claim that that there is nothing special about his memory: he has trained himself to be world champ through the use of techniques. I first got hooked on memory techniques when – 18 years old and in hospital with nothing to do but try to impress the nurses – a friend brought me a book by “seven-times World Memory Champion” Dominic O’Brien (I remain unable to think of a more badass epithet).

Master memory