Improving Your Mind and Memory In Ten Minutes Per Day
A good memory and mind is essential to success in life, and techniques for improving ones memory date back to Classical times. The essence of improving your memory is being aware of the associative nature of cognition: You will remember things that have absurd connections, or funny connections, more readily than “boring” memorization lists. This is one reason why “grunt memorization” flash cards tend to not work in the long term.
Memory enhancement techniques boil down to rigorous and thorough applications of three core principals: Imagination, Association and Location.
By spending ten minutes per day, working through these three principles, you will help “build up your memory muscles”, which have probably atrophied in the modern era of hustle and bustle, with pagers, cell phones, computers and written notes. An improved memory helps you with a lot of things – from remembering grocery lists to keeping track of who you’ve been introduced to at a party or conference.
That first principle is imagination. Imagination is, simply and directly, making the things you want to remember interesting to you. This can be as simple as setting words to a tune; people remember song lyrics and advertising jingles rapidly exactly because of this principle. You can do this directly, by building associations and fanciful images of the things you want to remember. Make them extreme images, and fanciful. Make them sexy, and colorful and funny. Things that move, explode, fall from a great height, or dance are much more memorable. Think of what you’re doing as making a brightly colored box that you’re making to store memories in. The more attention getting it is, the better for you and what you’re trying to remember.
Think of it like this: Is it easier to remember a gray box, or a giant purple dinosaur doing a backspin to Mozart? I guarantee you that second image is now stuck in your brain, as you’re imagining Barney the dinosaur doing Michael Jackson moves to the Marriage of Figaro. (And after explaining all that, you’re probably wishing you could put that mental image in a small gray box…)
The next principle is association. You need to make your mental images link from one to the other in a fluid and logical manner, that retains their absurdity. For example, if you need to remember to get milk and diapers from the store, make a mental image of a cow putting on diapers in front of a supermarket. If, after that, you also need to get formula, have the cow stand up after putting on the diapers, pick up a piece of chalk, and draw scientific diagrams (formulas) on it. Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon is an excellent tool for building associative memories, because they’re distinctive and often imply a strong chronological order. (For example, remembering to pick up supplies from Target for the first weekend of deer season? Just remember the Far Side cartoon with the deer talking, one with a target rondel on its chest, and the other saying “Damn shame of a birthmark, Fred…”) You’ve now associated the store with the logo and deer season with the cartoon.
Lastly, if you’ve got a lot of mental sequences to organize, build a “mental filing cabinet” for them – walk through a building with a distinctive space that you’ll remember, and take mental snapshots of each room. Now, put all your associated mental reference images together, one in each room. Now, if you need to recall a series of events or chores or items in a specific sequence, imagine walking through the building – for example, finding the cow putting on diapers in the nursery, and then walking to the library to draw the formulas, while looking out the window at the deer with the target emblem on its chest. You now know to go to target for your hunting supplies, and you can probably pick up the milk, diapers and formula while you’re there as well.
Just practicing these three techniques for ten minutes a day with common chores can do wonders for your daily handling of chores, appointments and errands.
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