Do you think your memory is perfect?
Your memory is phenomenal. This statement is made despite the
following counterarguments:
1 Most people remember fewer than 10 per cent of the names of
those whom they meet.
2 Most people forget more than 99 per cent of the phone
numbers given to them.
3 Memory is supposed to decline rapidly with age.
4 Many people drink, and alcohol is reputed to destroy 1000
brain cells per drink.
5 Internationally, across races, cultures, ages and education
levels, there is a common experience, and fear of, having an
inadequate or bad memory.
6 Our failures in general, and especially in remembering, are
attributed to the fact that we are 'only human', a statement that
implies that our skills are inherently inadequate.
7 You will probably fail most of the memory tests in the following
link.
Points 1, 2 and 7 will be dealt with through the remainder of the
site. You will see that it is possible, with appropriate knowledge,
to pass all the tests, and that names and phone numbers are easy to
remember - if you know how.
Your memory does decline with age, but only if it is not used.
Conversely, if it is used, it will continue to improve throughout
your lifetime.
There is no evidence to suggest that moderate drinking
destroys brain cells. This misapprehension arose because it was
found that excessive drinking, and only excessive drinking, did
indeed damage the brain.
Across cultural and international boundaries 'negative experience'
with memory can be traced not to our being 'only human' or in anyway
innately inadequate but to two simple, easily changeable factors: (1)
negative mental set and (2) lack of knowledge.
Negative Mental Set
There is a growing and informal international organisation, which
I choose to name the 'I've Got an Increasingly Bad Memory
Club'. How often do you hear people in animated and enthusiastic
conversation saying things like, 'You know, my memory's not
nearly as good as it used to be when I was younger; I'm constantly
forgetting things.' To which there is an equally enthusiastic reply:
'Yes, I know exactly what you mean; the same thing's happening to
me.. . .' And off they dodder, arms draped around each other's
shoulders, down the hill to mental oblivion. And such conversations
often take place between thirty-year-olds!
This negative, dangerous, incorrect mental set is based on lack of
proper training, and this site is designed to correct it.
Consider the younger supermemoriser to whom most people
romantically refer. If you want to check for yourself, go back to any
school at the end of a day, walk into a classroom of a group of five -
to seven-year-old children after they have gone home and ask the
teacher what has been left in the classroom (i.e., forgotten). You
will find the following items: watches, pencils, pens, sweets,
money, jackets, physical education equipment, books, coats,
glasses, erasers, toys, etc.
The only real difference between the middle-aged executive
who has forgotten to phone someone he was supposed to phone
and who has left his briefcase at the office, and the seven-year-old
child who realises on returning home that he's left at school his
watch, his pocket-money and his homework is that the sevenyear-
old does not collapse into depression, clutching his head and
exclaiming, 'Oh, Christ, I'm seven years old and my memory's
going!'
Ask yourself, 'What is the number of things I actually remember
each day?' Most people estimate somewhere between 100 and
10,000. The answer is in fact in the multiple billions. The human
memory is so excellent and runs so smoothly that most people
don't even realise that every word they speak and every word they
listen to are instantaneously produced for consideration, recalled,
recognised precisely and placed in their appropriate context. Nor
do they realise that every moment, every perception, every
thought, everything that they do throughout the entire day and
throughout their lives is a function of their memories. In fact, its
ongoing accuracy is almost perfect. The few odd things that we do
forget are like odd specks on a gigantic ocean. Ironically, the
reason why we notice so dramatically the errors that we make is
that they are so rare.
There is now increasing evidence that our memories may not
only be far better than we ever thought but may in fact be perfect.
Consider the following arguments for this case:
1 Dreams
Many people have vivid dreams of acquaintances, friends, family
and lovers of whom they have not thought for as many as twenty to
forty years. In their dreams, however, the images are perfectly clear,
all colours and details being exactly as they were in real life. This
confirms that somewhere in the brain there is a vast store of
perfect images and associations that does not change with time
and that, with the right trigger, can be recalled. Later you
will learn about Catching Your Dreams.
2 Surprise Random Recall
Practically everyone has had the experience of turning a corner
and suddenly recalling people or events from previous times in his
life. This often happens when people revisit their first school. A
single smell, touch, sight or sound can bring back a flood of
experiences thought to be forgotten. This ability of any given
sense to reproduce perfect memory images indicates that if there
were more correct 'trigger situations' much more would and could
be recollected. We know from such experiences that the brain has
retained the information.
3 The Russian 'S'
In the early part of this century a young Russian journalist (in The
Mind of a Mnemonist, by A. R. Luria, he is referred to as 'S')
attended an editorial meeting, and it was noted to the consternation
of others that he was not taking notes. When pressed to
explain, he became confused; to everyone's amazement, it became
apparent that he really did not understand why anyone should ever
take notes. The explanation that he gave for not taking notes
himself was that he could remember what the editor was saying, so
what was the point? Upon being challenged, 'S' reproduced the
entire speech, word for word, sentence for sentence, and inflection
for inflection.
For the next thirty years he was to be tested and examined by
Alexander Luria, Russia's leading psychologist and expert on
memory. Luria confirmed that ' S ' was in no way abnormal but that
his memory was indeed perfect. Luria also stated that at a very
young age 'S' had 'stumbled upon' the basic mnemonic principles
(see pages 39ff.) and that they had become part of his natural
functioning.
'S' was not unique. The history of education, medicine and psychology is dotted with similar cases of perfect memorisers. In
every instance, their brains were found to be normal, and in every
instance they had, as young children, 'discovered' the basic principles
of their memory's function.
4 Professor Rosensweig's Experiments
Professor Mark Rosensweig, a Californian psychologist and
neurophysiologist, spent years studying the individual brain cell
and its capacity for storage. As early as 1974 he stated that if we
fed in ten new items of information every second for an entire
lifetime to any normal human brain that brain would be considerably
less than half full. He emphasised that memory problems
have nothing to do with the capacity of the brain but rather
with the self-management of that apparently limitless capacity.
5 Professor Penfield 's Experiments
Professor Wilder Penfield of Canada came across his discovery of
the capacity of human memory by mistake. He was stimulating
individual brain cells with tiny electrodes for the purpose of
locating areas of the brain that were the cause of patients' epilepsy.
To his amazement he found that when he stimulated certain
individual brain cells, his patients were suddenly recalling experiences
from their past. The patients emphasised that it was not
simple memory, but that they actually were reliving the entire
experience, including smells, noises, colours, movement, tastes.
These experiences ranged from a few hours before the experimental
session to as much as forty years earlier.
Penfield suggested that hidden within each brain cell or cluster
of brain cells lies a perfect store of every event of our past and that
if we could find the right stimulus we could replay the entire film.
6 The Potential Pattern-Making Ability of Your Brain
Professor Pyotr Anokhin, the famous Pavlov's brightest student,
spent his last years investigating the potential pattern-making
capabilities of the human brain. His findings were important for
memory researchers. It seems that memory is recorded in separate
little patterns, or electromagnetic circuits, that are formed by
the brain's interconnecting cells.
Anokhin already knew that the brain contained a million million
(1,000,000,000,000) brain cells but that even this gigantic
number was going to be small in comparison with the number of
patterns that those brain cells could make among themselves.
Working with advanced electron microscopes and computers, he
came up with a staggering number. Anokhin calculated that the number of patterns, or 'degrees of freedom', throughout the brain
is, to use his own words, 'so great that writing it would take a line of
figures, in normal manuscript characters, more than ten and a half
million kilometres in length. With such a number of possibilities,
the brain is a keyboard on which hundreds of millions of different
melodies can be played.'
6 The Potential Pattern-Making Ability of Your Brain
Professor Pyotr Anokhin, the famous Pavlov's brightest student,
spent his last years investigating the potential pattern-making
capabilities of the human brain. His findings were important for
memory researchers. It seems that memory is recorded in separate
little patterns, or electromagnetic circuits, that are formed by
the brain's interconnecting cells.
Anokhin already knew that the brain contained a million million
(1,000,000,000,000) brain cells but that even this gigantic
number was going to be small in comparison with the number of
patterns that those brain cells could make among themselves.
Working with advanced electron microscopes and computers, he
came up with a staggering number. Anokhin calculated that the number of patterns, or 'degrees of freedom', throughout the brain
is, to use his own words, 'so great that writing it would take a line of
figures, in normal manuscript characters, more than ten and a half
million kilometres in length. With such a number of possibilities,
the brain is a keyboard on which hundreds of millions of different
melodies can be played.'
Your memory is the music.
7 Near-Death - Type Experiences
Many people have looked up at the surface ripples of a swimming
pool from the bottom, knowing that they were going to drown
within the next two minutes; or seen the rapidly disappearing
ledge of the mountain from which they have just fallen; or felt the
oncoming grid of the 10-ton lorry bearing down on them at 60
miles per hour. A common theme runs through the accounts that
survivors of such traumas tell. In such moments of 'final consideration'
the brain slows all things down to a standstill,
expanding a fraction of a second into a lifetime, and reviews the
total experience of the individual.
When pressed to admit that what they had really experienced
were a few highlights, the individuals concerned insisted that what
they had experienced was their entire life, including all things they
had completely forgotten until that instant of time. 'My whole life
flashed before me' has almost become a cliche that goes with the
near-death experience. Such a commonality of experience again
argues for a storage capacity of the brain that we have only just
begun to tap.
8 Photographic Memory
Photographic, or eidetic, memory is a specific phenomenon in
which people can remember, usually for a very short time, perfectly
and exactly anything they have seen. This memory usually
fades, but it can be so accurate as to enable somebody, after seeing
a picture of 1000 randomly sprayed dots on a white sheet, to
reproduce them perfectly. This suggests that in addition to the
deep, long-term storage capacity, we also have a shorter-term and
immediate photographic ability. It is argued that children often
have this ability as a natural part of their mental functioning and
that we train it away by forcing them to concentrate too much on
logic and language and too little on imagination and their other
range of mental skills.
9 The 1000 Photographs
In recent experiments people were shown 1000 photographs, one
after the other, at a pace of about one photograph per second. The psychologists then mixed 100 photographs with the original 1000,
and asked the people to select those they had not seen the first
time through. Everyone, regardless of how he described his
normal memory, was able to identify almost every photograph he
had seen - as well as each one that he had not seen previously.
They were not necessarily able to remember the order in which
the photographs had been presented, but they could definitely
remember the image - an example that confirms the common
human experience of being better able to remember a face than
the name attached to it. This particular problem is easily dealt
with by applying the Memory Techniques.
10 The Memory Techniques
The Memory Techniques, or mnemonics, were a system of
'memory codes' that enabled people to remember perfectly whatever
it was they wished to remember. Experiments with these
techniques have shown that if a person scores 9 out of 10 when
using such a technique, that same person will score 900 out of
1000, 9000 out of 10,000, 900,000 out of 1,000,000 and so on.
Similarly, one who scores perfectly out of 10 will score perfectly
out of 1,000,000. These techniques help us to delve into that
phenomenal storage capacity we have and to pull out whatever it is
that we need. The Basic Memory Principles are outlined later and the bulk of this site is devoted to explaining and outlining
the most important and useful of these systems, showing how
easily they can be learned, and how they can be applied in personal,
family, business and community life.
At this early stage, however, it should be helpful for you to test
your memory in its current state. The following page provides a
series of memory tests that will form a foundation from which you
can check your progress. If you are interested in the truth about
yourself and your performance now, as compared with what it will
be when you have completed site, perform these tests
thoroughly. Most people do rather poorly at the beginning and
almost perfectly at the end.
Back to home page to continue