Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! (18 page)

This, incidentally, took minutes, once I saw how.

Scan your brain and find connections between the new material and a list already in your head, and you can do the same thing with any new list you like.

The existing list—the target of the gluing-on process—can be anything appropriate to the topic. I once tried to memorize the geographic locations of about fifty major Native American peoples. This was easier than I expected; all I had to do was link each group to something memorable in their physical location.

For example, to remember that the Chickasaw Indians lived along the eastern shore of the Mississippi, near modern Memphis, I just needed to play with Memphis until it connected back with something primal and sticky. This is the thought process that followed:

Dr. King was shot there. Hmm. Memphis State, the college. That Tom Cruise movie where he played a lawyer with Gene Hackman…hmph…Graceland is in Memphis…Elvis…—and Elvis slept with every chick he saw. Done.

Like it or not, the Chickasaw Indians and Memphis are now glued together permanently.

OK, now let’s take on a real challenge. Let’s try that list of UN Secretaries-General, a series of strange names from seven different countries on four continents. In this case, every single syllable is strange, so shorthands can’t be used. This is the worst-case scenario; if you can handle this, you can remember anything.

WARNING: the following list is so dull that attempting to memorize it without safety precautions could cause injury or even brain death. If you are alone, do not proceed with the rest of this chapter. If you insist, please notify a friend as to your location and intentions, then hold the book lightly in your fingertips with your arms extended. In the event of a UN Secretaries-General-induced loss of consciousness, the book will drop to the floor, releasing your brain from its grip, possibly averting long-term damage.

We begin by cheating again, even harder. Let’s just say those entire names out loud until they start sounding like English words we recognize. If you don’t know how to pronounce one or two, no sweat. Just plow ahead and have fun. You’ll make more progress than you think, and the real purpose of mnemonics (outside of obsessive
Jeopardy!
study, anyway) is to help begin learning new data, not as an end in themselves.

Your list will differ, but here are some half-baked pronunciations that came out of my mouth:

Again, stop and appreciate the omnipresence of the human butt, no disrespect intended to the former Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister, a Fulbright scholar with a doctorate from the University of Paris.

To remember these in sequence, all we need to do is make up a story. Again: hold the book loosely in your fingertips, preferably with someone else in the room.

Let’s start with a bad-tempered
truck valet,
a bullying jerk who really likes Hummers (
dug Hummers cold
). He passes a gorgeous woman out on a date with a smart but tiny little man. Naturally, the
truck valet
who
dug Hummers cold
stops to wolf-whistle at the girl and pick a fight with—
ooh, taunt
—the scrawny guy.

However, the little guy is also a flyweight kickboxing champ. The
truck valet
soon gets the crud beaten out of him (
cured for all time
). The bully loses his lunch, then begs to leave (
heaver prays to clear off
). But the little guy finishes the job by kicking the truck valet’s nether regions high into the air (
butt rose, butt rose, golly
), then finally relaxes by sharing a delicious iced mocha with his girlfriend (
coffee, anyone?
).

So if you can remember the seven key bits of that one little story—

Truck valet

Dug hummers cold

Ooh, taunt

Cured for all time

Heaver prays to clear off

Butt rose, butt rose, golly

Coffee, anyone?

—you now know the complete list of United Nations Secretaries-General. Please put down the book, thank your assistant, and hug your loved ones. Wipe their tears. It is over.

With practice, something like this takes about ten or fifteen minutes to dream up. Granted, you don’t have it slammed into your head like the other stuff, but this is the Armageddon example. And even so, with just a little review, you can now keep that unlikely-looking list in your head, in order, as long as you live if you choose.

(There were a few blind alleys, of course. Kurt Waldheim, for example, came out variously as Good Valid Ham or Card Vault Time. These were fun to play with, but didn’t fit. No biggie. It always takes a few tries.)

Notice that the story is intentionally extra-sticky because of the use of violence, a primal fight to display male dominance for a potential sexual partner (this is the entire function of the date in the story), and even the sensory satisfactions of the taste of strong coffee and the presence of a desirable mate at the end.

You could flip the narrative a hundred ways. I chose a fairly familiar one; in fact, you’ll see this exact story in multiplexes next year as
Speed Reading Made Easy II: The Kick-Boxening.

This probably seems like a lot more work at first. Make no mistake: it absolutely
is.
A lot more. There’s an initial investment of time here that you needn’t bother with in the bang-your-forehead-while-clocks-spin approach. The time you’ll save on the far end is enormous, but that can be hard to see at first.

Worse, studying this way means you have to practice and develop a new set of skills while fighting against old habits. And if you have inhibitions—if you’re afraid someone will mock you, perhaps, if you someday admit that your knowledge of Classical Mythology is (like mine) originally rooted in a lengthy series of unrepeatable dirty jokes—you just won’t want to try this.

Some folks may even have invested so much time and effort in rote learning that they’ll feel angry at the very suggestion that there’s any other way.

Since we’re not wired to adopt strange ideas easily, some folks reading this will sniff dismissively, shake their heads, and possibly emit a series of uneasy
grrrr
noises. I probably would have, too, honestly, if I didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars riding on the need to learn whatever worked fastest and bestest.

It is not, in fact, a cheap shortcut to encode and recall information in a fashion compatible with your brain’s physical structure, any more than using a highway map is cheating when you’re trying to navigate the layout of a strange city. You’re just helping yourself find the fastest route possible.

Again, knowing a list of British Monarchs doesn’t make you even slightly expert in English history. Of course not. But having the raw material already stuffed into your brain
does
make picking up all the details and context a lot easier. Eventually, with use, the memory aids begin to fall away, and the information itself has been recorded in your head.

When I started writing this section, jotting down the names of the UN Secretaries-General was the easy part. I had to look up the story in my notebooks.

I never would have believed this a decade ago.

OK, Chuck.

I had gone to the supermarket and bought a five-subject college notebook with a blue cover, the first of four I would eventually fill. It was open to the first blank page.

I had a pen in my hand, a large supply of caffeine in the fridge, and a willingness to create as many gratuitous anatomical jokes as necessary.

I’m ready.

And so began a daily routine: up at 7:00 a.m. In the books until 7:00 p.m.

At 7:00 p.m., I would stop, grab my masking-tape buzzer, and play along with the
Jeopardy!
broadcast. Sometimes I would play along with the tape again a second time or as a break during the following day, simply practicing the timing during the afternoon, the time of day when my games would be played.

At seven-thirty back in the books. Snooze at eleven.

At no time did I ever work this hard in high school or college. Of course, at no time in high school or college did studying ever involve making up dozens of dirty jokes and scribbling down large, amateurish, slightly insane-looking drawings.

Glancing at my notebook entries for Chuck’s list of the major works of American Novelists, for example, we find:

  Piano-shaped people throwing TVs at mountains ( James Baldwin);

  Elmer Fudd shooting arrows at a dodging Bugs Bunny amid downtown buildings, while a slender green dinosaur looks on (Sinclair Lewis); and

  A near-death slalom skier in a bow tie being retrieved from a pile of sawdust after hitting it with explosive force in bright sunlight (William Faulkner).