10 Things I Learned In My FIRST MEMORY LESSON, With Two-Time World Memory Champion Simon Reinhard
Simon is a two-time world memory champion as well as in the Guiness Book of World Records for memorizing 92 digits in a row in less than a minute.
As part of Simon creating a memory course, he is giving me lessons and the course creators are videotaping them to turn into a course. Since this was just the first of ten lessons I feel comfortable sharing what I learned (if I remember what I learned!).
He taught me a technique to start off with and we did a sample test to see if it worked and it did.
As part of Simon creating a memory course, he is giving me lessons and the course creators are videotaping them to turn into a course. Since this was just the first of ten lessons I feel comfortable sharing what I learned (if I remember what I learned!).
He taught me a technique to start off with and we did a sample test to see if it worked and it did.
1. Decline in memory is not age related like many think.
2. Memory is useful.
3. First simple technique: recall a place you've been (or have seen) with ten locations. Make a mental path to get from one location to the other
The locations in the photograph he showed me were a tree, a garbage can, a bench, a box, a street sign, bicycles, a grate, a pipe, a car, a tree. I visualized them by pretending to what from one to the other in my head. BUT...perhaps it would've been better for me to use a location I was more familiar with.
4. The idea: when given a list of ten words, "put" a word, in order, in the ten locations.
5. How do you "put" or associate a word with a location?
Shape: so if you are memorizing the word "ball" and the location also has something round (like a bicycle has a round wheel) you can link the two.
Color: So if you are memorizing "tomato" and the location is a red stop sign, you can link them by color.
Story: I had to put the word "gold" with a park bench. So I made up a quick mini-story that the bench came from a fairy tale and it was a magic bench made out of gold.
He gave me ten words (which I still remember): horse, tree, gold, meat, brick, bicycles, suitcase, wall, cat, giant.
I then remembered them by "walking" in my mind on the path with the tree, garbage can, bench, box, and putting a word in each location.
I used stories to link them together. So the horse was tied up to the tree. And a cat was stuck in the car, etc.
6. Memorizing 40 words is as easy as memorizing 10 words.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4056179/
7. Why does it work?
“What most mnemonics do is to impose meaning and structure to material that would otherwise be meaningless and unstructured,” says Fernand Gobet (University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK), a psychologist who has studied expert memory extensively. “They do so by making associations between items to learn and items that are already stored in long-term memory. Mnemonics also force one to pay attention to relevant features of the material, and to ‘process’ the material more deeply than by simply rehearsing it. Various experiments have shown that these techniques are effective, although some of them can be hard and time consuming to learn” (5).
8. Simon noticed that after years of using this technique it has bled over into other areas of his life:
9. Don't be too linear with your locations.
This is why he is also against the "memory palace" technique. Which is a similar technique where the locations are all rooms in a palace. "The rooms and hallways all look the same so if you use a palace, it won't work so well."
10. You can use this technique to memorize over 60,000 digits in a row.
here is the article: https://www.livescience.com/50134-pi-day-memory-experts.html
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