How to Memorize Anything (28 page)

Though there are a number of other ways to strengthen your observation, if you do not transfer these principles to your day-to-day functioning and make it a habit, there will be no lasting impact on the powers of concentration.

E
XERCISES TO IMPROVE OBSERVATION AND RECOLLECTION SKILLS

1. Take a pen and a piece of paper and from your memory try to list out all the things from any one of the rooms in your house—the furniture, pictures, showpieces, books, etc. without actually going inside the room. After listing the items, go back to the room and look at everything you missed, things you saw countless time but didn’t observe. Now observe everything closely. Repeat the test and you will see that the list is now longer. Keep doing this everyday and you will get better at it. You can do this exercise with anything: people’s faces, clothes, objects, dogs etc. Basically
   anything with a lot of detail.
   
2. Give yourself some simple observation tasks everyday. For instance, if you are going to parties, observe the clothes worn by 5 people. After returning home, try to recollect the details. You may increase the number to 10 after a few days of practice.
   
3. While shopping for food items, say biscuits, try and observe how many brands of biscuits are available, what are the colours of their packaging, the difference in their prices, the flavour, etc.
   
4. Observation tests are excellent tools to both improve and track your improvements.
   
   1. Read the sentence below:
      FINISHED FILES ARE THE
      RESULTS OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC
      STUDY COMBINED WITH THE
      EXPERIENCE OF YEARS
      

      The question
      : How many times do you see the letter F in the sentence above
      ?
      Count them only once
      !
      

   2. All of the items are unique to each picture, apart from one item. Find that item:
      

See the answers at the end of the chapter.

You may practice more such puzzles for finding differences in two similar images on the website:

http://www.spotthedifference.com/

Observation is a skill that takes time to hone.
Keep practicing, even if you think you will never improve your awareness.

FOOD FOR BRAIN

Just like every organ in the body needs food for nourishment, the brain needs to be fed too.
Though the brain is relatively a small organ, weighing about 1.4 kilo, about
2 percent of the total body weight,
it uses about
20 percent of the oxygen
that is used by the entire body while at rest and eats up about a quarter of the energy produced by the body. In fact the brain is the largest consumer of the energy that our body produces. Just like petrol fills your car, glucose fills your brain. In the absence of proper supply of glucose to the brain, the ability of the brain to concentrate is affected badly and leads to short-term memory loss and fatigue.

One more culprit that can often lead to some loss of memory over the years is the generation of
free radicals
in the body. Free radicals are the toxic forms of oxygen that are created during normal cellular reactions. Small amount of free radicals in the body are a good thing, but too much of their bombardment accelerate ageing and diseases. Food containing more of antioxidants or antioxidant supplements can help to protect from the damage caused by free radicals excess.

Antioxidants can be vitamins, minerals, hormones, or enzymes. Although a certain amount is manufactured in the body as enzymes or hormones, most of the antioxidants come from fruits and vegetables.

So along with the constant supply of the glucose to the brain, it also needs good amount of antioxidants to take care of free radical damage.

Researchers have proved that certain kind of food play a significant role in the improvement of memory and keeping the brain cells active. Some of them are:

KEEPING A CHECK YOUR LIFESTYLE

Modern lifestyle has its drawbacks like poor diet, stress, lack of sleep, smoking, pollution etc. which damage fragile brain cells. Certain pharmaceutical drugs and alcohol also cause severe memory loss. The level of pollution of various kind leads to behavioural problem and learning difficulties in kids which persist in adulthood. Alzheimer’s has become so common that it is now accepted as a disease of the elderly.

Some of the things that we need to check and change in our lifestyle are discussed in this section:

A: FOOD INTAKE

Some suggestions for the proper intake of food are:

1. AVOID JUNK FOOD

Today junk food has become a part of modern lifestyle. We all know that eating junk food on a regular basis is not only harmful for our brain cells but also for our overall health. So I am not going to advise you not to eat junk food, as you already know it quite well.

Instead I would like to ask you a simple question.

Do you think if we use the petrol we use in car to run an airplane, it will fly smoothly?

Isn’t airplane fuel more refined?

Well, we can’t use normal petrol in an airplane because we know that while driving a car if some impurity comes in the petrol, at the most, the car will stop on the road. We can leave the car on the road and tow it later or call a mechanic. But we can’t take such a risk in the case of an airplane.

How do you want your life to be?
Like an airplane flying high at a good speed without any brakes or like a car that can stop anywhere? Now the choice is yours. If you want to travel in a smooth safe flight, check the quality of petrol you are putting into your vehicle, i.e. the kind of food you are giving to your body.

Here are some shocking facts about junk food to help you decide its harmful effects on the body:

• 99 percent fast food contains a taste-enhancing agent called
  MSG
  (Monosodium Glutamate),
  which is responsible for more than 90 percent diseases in our body, including cancer, heart attack, high blood pressure, tooth decay, and other diseases.
  
• Fats from junk food trigger the urge to eat more. This effect can last for several days.
  
• Aspartine
  , an artificial low calorie sweetener, commonly included in most of the fast food and soft drinks, is approximately 200 times sweeter than sugar and causes a number of mental illnesses. Neuroscience says sometimes the symptoms appear only after 90 percent of the neurons of a particular area are dead.
  
• Heavy consumption of soft drinks spills out huge amount of calcium, magnesium, and other trace mineral from our body.
  
• To neutralize the ill effects of a glass of soft drink, the human body needs 32 glasses of water intake.
  

T
AKING THE
‘J
UNK
’
OUT OF
J
UNK
F
OOD

Here are few tips on how you can include healthy food in your daily routine even while eating out.

• Choose fast-food restaurants that offer healthier choices.
  
• Opt for food and beverages that are made up mostly of ingredients that offer nutrients along with calories.
  
• Enjoy freshly squeezed orange juice instead of canned juices or soft drinks. Avoid other sweetened beverages.
  
• Buy a grilled sandwich or a whole-grain bun instead of chips with processed cheese sauce, frozen pizza rolls or French fries.
  

2. AVOID DRUGS

A number of prescriptions and over-the-counter medications can interfere with our memory. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety medicines, muscle relaxants, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, and pain medications given after surgery can have a negative impact on our brain. As you age and your metabolism slows down, medicines tend to stay in the system for longer and this can also have an adverse effect on you.