How to Memorize Anything (4 page)

When you purchase any home appliance, like a washing machine, a microwave, or say a computer for the first time, how do you get to know how to use it? You learn through reading its instruction manual or getting a trainer to demonstrate it. Similarly, God has given each one of us a living computer more powerful and faster than anything created in any factory, i.e, our brain. However, God didn’t give us a formal instruction manual for this powerful and wonderful machine.

This book is an effort to serve you as an instruction manual of this brain. It will enable you to first understand its mechanism and then to use it more effectively.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF TRAINED MEMORY?

A good memory is a powerful asset in everyone’s life—whether you’re a student, an executive, a homemaker, or a businessman. The better your memory, the better are your chances of excelling in your respective fields.

For students

If you are a student, think how wonderful it would be if you could remember everything that is taught in the class and recall it efficiently during the examinations.

For parents

If parents have the knowledge of how to train their memory, they can guide their children to do better in school right from their childhood. Their own memory will improve dramatically by doing so, which in turn will help them in their business or profession.

For homemakers

If you are a homemaker, imagine the euphoria of remembering all details of household expenses, bills, amount paid, shopping lists, prices of different items purchased, etc.

For teachers

You can become your students’ favourite teacher by helping them to remember their subject using memory techniques.

For business people

Business people may ask, ‘What’s the use of memory techniques for us when we have computers and secretaries to help us out?’ But think of all the benefits of having names and faces of all your clients and your business transactions at your fingertips. An accurate and retentive memory is the basis of all business success.

For marketing executives

Can you imagine the impression you can make on your boss if you were to reel out all the sales figures at a moment’s notice?

For professionals

• A doctor is almost always required to diagnose and treat a patient without having to refer to the book.
  
• Lawyers too have to remember all the laws given in law books. All the acts required for the cases are available in innumerable books. But the lawyer needs to remember all relevant laws while representing the case.
  
• Authors, psychiatrists, computer engineers, and all other professionals also have to remember a lot of relevant infor-mation in their particular fields.
  

So, no matter what your age or profession, a good memory is important for everyone. Let’s start the journey of training our memory by understanding it first and then learning the techniques and methods to use it to its optimum.

PART A

BASICS OF MEMORY

1

UNDERSTANDING MEMORY

H
ow many times have you misplaced your keys and wasted all your time looking for them?

How often have you gone to your room and opened the cupboard to take out something only to find yourself standing there wondering
why have you opened it?
And once you go back to the other room and resume your work, that’s when you recall what you wanted.

How often do you find yourself in an embarrassing situation where you happen to meet someone in the market who is known to you but you cannot recall the person’s name? It’s only later, when you are busy in some other work, that the name pops up in your head.

Things get worse when it comes to studies. I am sure as a student you too must have faced situations where, even after preparing well for an exam and revising the course in the morning, you forget everything as soon as you get the question paper in your hand. And the amazing part is that when you leave the examination hall, most of the answers come back to you and you suddenly remember everything. The result is low scores even after working extremely hard.

After such incidences, you might feel that you have a poor memory and may be concerned about improving it. Well, one of the best ways to try to improve it is to understand more about its nature and how it works.

WHAT IS MEMORY?

Memory is the process by which information about the world is stored in our brain in order to give us a sense of who we are. It tells us what we did yesterday or five years ago and it guides us on what to do tomorrow. Memories of our childhood may be triggered by a nursery rhyme or a romantic memory may come to mind when we listen to a particular song. Just imagine, what would happen if you suddenly lose your memory? Just stop and imagine for 2 minutes! You would be good for nothing. As
Plato
said about memory
—
‘
All knowledge is but remembrance’
. If you lose your memory completely, you would have to start learning everything from scratch, just like a newborn baby.

In fact, whatever we do in our life every second can be attributed to memory as all our knowledge is based on it. An example to support this: You would not be able to read this book right now if you didn’t remember the sounds of the 26 letters of the alphabet.

POTENTIAL OF HUMAN MEMORY

The human brain consists of about 100 billion neurons. Each neuron forms about 1,000 connections with other neurons, amounting to more than a trillion connections, each connection helping with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes).

For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold 3 million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage. That means, we don’t have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime.