How to Develop a Perfect Memory (27 page)

In a passage uncannily similar to Luria's account of S, Borges describes Funes's perception of 'the many faces of a dead man during a protracted wake'.

He was even surprised by the sight of himself in a mirror. Remembering faces wasn't easy for someone who could detect the minutest changes in expression, colour and feeling. It's this sort of psychological detail that makes me think Borges based his account on a real person.

Funes had also developed his own system for memorizing numbers. It

comes as no surprise to learn that he translated them into people and other memorable symbols. For example, 7017 became 'Maximo Perez'; the year

1714 became 'the train'; Napoleon meant another number (Borges doesn't

specify which — he was clearly mystified by the system); Agustin de Vedia another.

On discovering his exceptional talent, Funes set about cataloguing every memory image from his life: 70,000 of them by his calculation. In its breadth of ambition, the project is reminiscent of Renaissance attempts (Bruno and Camillo) to catalogue all human knowledge. Sadly, Funes died of a pulmonary congestion at the age of twenty-one.

V.P.

Born in Latvia (near the birthplace of S), V.P. (his case file doesn't disclose his name) had memorized 150 poems by the age of ten. He was brought up in an East European Jewish culture, where there was a strong oral tradition. Great emphasis was placed on learning things by rote. V.P. emigrated to the United States, where he worked as a store clerk, and earned a certain amount of notoriety by his ability to play seven chess games simultaneously, wearing a blindfold.

He could speak English, Latvian, German, and Russian fluently and had a

reading knowledge of all modern European languages, with the exception of Greek and Hungarian. But it would be quite wrong to describe V.P. as an

intellectual genius. He had an I.Q. of 136.

In 1972, he was the subject of a study by the psychologists E. Hunt and T.

Love, who concluded that his memory of words owed a lot to linguistic and semantic associations. He was usually able to find a word in another language that sounded similar to, or had some connection with, the word he wanted to memorize.

PROFESSOR A. C. AITKEN

A. C. Aitken was a professor of mathematics at the University of Edinburgh.

He was one of those people who could make lightning-fast, complex mathematical calculations in his head. Although he was first and foremost a mathematician, his unusual memory skills deserve a mention.

He once memorized the first 1,000 digits of pi and said it was like 'learning a Bach fugue'. It would appear that he arranged the digits in rows of fifty, each row comprising ten groups of five numbers. He would then read through them, adopting a certain rhythm.

When it came to reciting the digits, he would call out five per second, followed by a pause, and then another five digits. In this way, he would get through fifty digits every fifteen seconds.

His familiarity with numbers helped him to translate them into more memorable forms. When confronted with 1961, for example, he immediately saw 37 x 53, or 442 + 52, or 402 + 192.

LESLIE WELCH

Leslie Welch is perhaps the best-known Memory Man of all. Often referred to as a walking sports encyclopaedia, he became famous for his ability to answer almost any question on football, horse racing and cricket. He played to packed music halls in the late 1940s and 1950s, bewildering audiences wherever he went. Millions tuned into his radio shows and he was soon earning £11,000 a year. Then it all went wrong. He ended his working life as a £25-a-week

accountant for the Department of Employment.

Welch was fascinated with facts and figures. At the age of four, he was

reading Wisden's
Cricketer Almanac
and Ruff's
Guide to the Turf.
He matriculated with honours from Latimer School, Edmonton in history and

mathematics, astounding examiners with the breadth and detail of his

knowledge.

During the war, he was a tank commander with the 8th Army in the Western Desert. One evening, his Regimental Sergeant Major got into a furious

argument with another soldier about who won a Manchester derby in the

1930s. Welch intervened in his inimitable cockney way, 'Excuse me Sergeant Major, City won 3-1, goals scored by Tilson (2) and Herd. The teams were...'.

Whereupon he proceeded to rattle out both line-ups.

In 1944, he was transferred to ENSA to entertain the troops with his memo-ry skills. After being de-mobbed in 1946, he had his own radio slot, broadcast-ing to 15 million people on
Calling All Forces.
By 1952, he had a show on Radio Luxembourg called
Beat the Memory Man.
Sponsored by Bovril, the programme invited listeners to phone in on air to ask him questions. They got a guinea if he answered correctly, £25 if they caught him out.

Welch estimated that he was asked over one million questions in his life. He made eleven short films with Twentieth Century Fox, appeared in 4,000 radio programmes, 500 TV shows and eight Royal Command Performances. So

what went wrong?

In the late 1950s, bookings dried up. By 1960, he was a finance officer at the Holloway branch of the Department of Employment. On his retirement in 1972, he tried to make a come-back, landing a regular spot on Radio 2's
Late
Night Extra.
The switchboards were jammed with listeners trying to call in, but the memory man was soon forgotten. He died on 8 February 1980, aged

seventy-three.

He once gave a very revealing interview to Ian Gilchrist of the
Sunday
Express,
in which he talked at length about the abrupt end to his career.

Nodding towards his wife, Kathleen, who was sitting in the garden as they spoke, he gave this assessment of his career's untimely end.

'It was her, see. She was my biggest problem. When I started on the radio, she didn't want me to do this for a living. No, she wanted me to be at home at night. But things moved too quickly for her to stop them. The show hit straight away.

About 1957, the wife says, "Look, our two girls have married, we've got this house, just the two of us, and you're not going to leave me alone at night any more."

Well, I like my home comforts, see. I sat on my bottom for three years,

during which I finished up being seven or eight thousand pounds worse off.

The number of bookings I turned down was nobody's business. I had to

decide whether to sacrifice my home life by going around the Northern

clubs, or whether to take a safe nine-to-five job.

The wife and I are opposites in many ways. And maybe that's why we've

stayed together for Forty years. She's a worry-guts, a pessimist. She dies a thousand deaths when I'm on stage. But she's been a very dominant

influence in my life and I'm not going to sacrifice that for the sake of earning five or six hundred up North.

Anyway, have you ever been to any of these Northern clubs? People I

was once proud to work with, household names, now go up and do fifteen

minutes of sheer concentrated filth. I don't want to follow that sort of act. I still consider myself at the top. There isn't a better known speciality act in the country than yours truly.'

HARRY LORAYNE

Harry Lorayne is one of the great memory men of the twentieth century - a fine performer, actor and lecturer. Hundreds of companies, including the likes of IBM, US Steel and General Electric, have hired him to conduct seminars on mind power and memory training. And he has appeared on just about every

American TV show, including Johnny Carson's
The Tonight Show, Good

Morning America,
and
The Today Show.

Lorayne grew up in the depression years of the late 1920s and 1930s, in New York's Lower East Side. After dropping out of high school because his family had no money, he held a number of errand and clerking jobs, all of them low paid. In World War Two, he ended up working in the Army accounting office because of his aptitude for figures. There he met and married his present wife and decided to go into showbusiness at the end of the war.

Ever since the age of eight, he had been fascinated by magic. (He has

written fifteen books for other magicians and is a highly respected teacher.) He began to play small nightclubs in New York, where his exceptional skills began to be noticed. Once or twice, he introduced simple memory feats, which seemed to go down well, even better than the magic. He decided to read every book he could find on memory. After months of being holed up in the public library, he emerged with the beginnings of his own system.

'Out of knowledge, trial and error — especially error at first - I began to work on a memory system of my own. I used it myself, at first. It worked.

Those memory demonstrations went into my act. I found that they were the highlights. I began to decrease the magic until finally I was doing all memory and no magic.'

Still in his twenties, he found himself on network television. America, it seems, couldn't get enough of him, and he went on to have a phenomenal career. His books are widely read in Britain, but Lorayne as a performer is not so well known; some people might remember his appearance on Michael Parkinson's

TV chat show in the 1970s.

The walls of his office today are covered with letters from people all around the world who have benefitted from his approach to memory. One is from the Academy Award winning actress Anne Bancroft, who uses his techniques for learning scripts, another is from a prisoner of war.

'We relied on your memory systems for sanity. We applied them and learned literally thousands of foreign words, poems, speeches, mathematics,

electronics, classical music, philosophy, the list is endless. Just wanted to tell you how much your systems meant to all of us in captivity.'

TONY BUZAN

Tony Buzan is one of the leading world authorities on brain power. He lectures all around the world, advising royalty, governments, multi-nationals such as BP, Digital Equipment Corporation, General Motors and Rank Xerox, and

universities.

His most important contribution to date has been 'Mindmapping', a very

successful method of ordering information in a visual way. A subject is broken down into its component parts and displayed on a page in different colours, allowing you to see and make new connections.

Buzan has also written extensively on memory. He is chairman of the Brain Club, an international organisation designed to increase mental, physical and spiritual awareness, and he has also edited the
International Journal Of Mensa
(the High IQ Society's magazine). Born in London in 1942, he emigrated to Vancouver in 1954 and graduated from the University of Colombia in 1964

with double honours Psychology, English, Maths and General Sciences. He has lived in England since 1966. In 1991, he set up the first ever World MEMORIAD

with Raymond Keene, chess correspondent of
The Times.

28

CONCLUSION

I hope that you have enjoyed reading this book and that you are already putting some of the methods into practice. Don't try doing too much in one go; see it as a training programme. An athlete, after all, doesn't get fit overnight, and your brain is like a very sensitive and powerful muscle. A little bit of practice every day is much better than a burst of activity followed by frustration. Practice makes a perfect memory.

Apart from the basic principle of using a mental journey, there is one particular aspect of this book that I would like you to take away and use immediately in your everyday life: the DOMINIC SYSTEM. This makes the world an easier place to remember; without it you won't fully reap the benefits of a trained memory. It plays a central role in the mental diary, speeches, history, geography, cards, job interviews, appointments. Numbers are everywhere and it's worth spending time on a system that makes them accessible and

memorable.

The DOMINIC SYSTEM is a language, but you will only be

communicating with yourself. Let it adapt to your own needs and

idiosyncrasies. I have given examples to show you the basic grammar, but you must develop your own patois and vocabulary. The system makes the

unintelligible world of numbers intelligible. What makes sense to you might be garbage to me, but if it works, use it.

I said at the beginning of this book that you would be asked to create a lot of strange and bizarre images. Don't be overwhelmed by the sheer number my method requires. They are, I believe, the best way of storing information in your head, providing you use your imagination. Your memory loves images, There are few filing systems in the world that could match the brain for size or efficiency, when images are used in conjunction with a journey.

Don't forget my whole approach to memory has adapted and evolved over

time. Yours must do the same. I have showed you the basic principles. Apply them and you are well on the way to developing a perfect memory. Good luck!

NAME AND FACE EXERCISES

Let us suppose you meet this group of people for the first time. By using the techniques outlined in this book, try to memorize their names, but remember: 1. Study the face before checking the name.

2. Work on your initial impressions - do they remind you of anyone? A

friend, a relative, a celebrity? What do you think they may do for a living?

3. Let the face suggest the location. Perhaps you might expect to find Trevor Dolby in a bank or Anne Timblick in a famous coffee commercial.

4. Finally, use your imagination to connect the name to your chosen

location.