Remember to Remember: Improve Your Recall, Memorize Anything, and Never Forget a Name

93 Pages·2015·0.66 MB·English

by  Fite

Remember to Remember
Improve Your Recall, Memorize
Anything, and Never Forget a Name

Ken Fite
May 2015
Copyright © 2015 Ken Fite
All rights reserved worldwide.
Contents
Introduction
What is memory?
An average memory
Savants
Do musicians have a superior memory?
The man who can’t remember
Short-term memory
The woman who can’t forget
Long-term memory
Can we trust our memory?
The three phases of memory
Why do we forget?
Rick Perry’s retrieval failure
False memories
9/11 and flashbulb memories
President Bush’s flashbulb memory
The power of misinformation
Memory tricks.
The memory palace
The peg system
Mnemonics
How to remember names
How to memorize numbers
How to memorize vocabulary
How to memorize quotes
Improving memory naturally.
Mind mapping and outlining
Improve your memory by doodling
Remember what you read by using the block method
How to remember without cramming
Learn things in context by reading a lot
Exercise and memory
Food and memory
Sleep and memory
Conclusion
Before you go
Introduction
You’ve been lied to. You’ve been told your entire life that your memory is fixed,
that it cannot be improved. It’s not true. Only about a third of our memory
abilities are based on genetics. That means that we have some control over the
other two thirds and we can improve our ability to remember if we want to.
Having a good memory isn’t a matter of retention, but rather a matter of
attention. Our minds are supercomputers, capable of much more than we realize.
Our belief system, how we think, is the software that our minds run on – if we
believe that we have a bad memory then we’ll have a difficult time remembering
things because that’s how we’ve programmed our minds to work. When we
believe that we can’t improve in any area of our lives, we often can’t. When we
think negatively, our bodies release catabolic stress hormones that can affect our
ability to recall information. When we go around saying that we have a bad
memory, it starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We need to change that. It’s time to update your software.
We often talk about people who have great memories as if they’re born with a
special ability to remember. The truth is that great memories are learned and
anyone can learn how to improve their memory. This should be a skill taught in
school. In the classroom, we’re taught what to learn but not how to learn. To
make matters worse, we’re prepared by school for a world that doesn’t exist
anymore. There’s no need to remember things because you can just Google what
you need to know. We’ve let our guard down and deferred to technology to carry
the burden of knowledge. The result is a reliance on “the cloud” to act like an
external brain to store information and remember things for us. We’ve traded
wisdom for convenience.
If you can improve your memory, you can improve your life. Imagine being able
to remember where you parked your car or where you left your keys when
you’re running late. Better yet, imagine being able to remember the name of the
person you just met thirty seconds ago. Now imagine being able to remember
their name when you run into them at the grocery store six months later. Could
that change your life?
The problem isn’t that we forget things. The problem is that we don’t remember
in the first place. That’s the thesis of this book – that we must pay close attention
to things as they happen if we want to be able to remember in the future. We
remember when we pay attention. We pay attention when we’re engaged. We’re
engaged when we look at new information and we make sense of it by
connecting it to other memories and knowledge that we already have and we
determine why that new information we’re looking at should matter to us. You
can’t answer questions on a test if you never learned the material prior to taking
the test. You can’t learn by osmosis. But if you reviewed the material, connected
it to previous knowledge you already have to make it meaningful and then
rehearsed the information, you’ll do better on a test. That’s how memory works.
Unless you pay attention and make a clear recording of whatever it is you want
to remember in the moment, as it happens, what you playback later won’t be
clear either.
What I’ll share with you in this book are just shortcuts. Hacks, if you will. Tricks
to improve your chances of retaining information just long enough for it to
transfer from short-term memory to long-term memory. What you’ll find is that
these hacks are designed to help you pay better attention at the time you need to
memorize information to increase your chances of recall later.
I first became interested in memory after getting frustrated with myself for not
being able to recall things that I felt I should be able to remember. I would read
books and days after I would finish them, I wasn’t able to explain what the book
was about other than high-level information. I would understand the gist, but I
didn’t have any specific wisdom or teachings that I could not only remember,
but apply to my life. This upset me, because as much as I enjoyed reading, I felt
that if I couldn’t remember what I had read, I was essentially reading for
entertainment instead of for learning.
I wrote this book after researching how I could improve my overall memory. In
this book, I’ll share with you everything that I learned from my research,
including the foods that you can eat that help lift the mental fog that so many of
us experience. I’ll discuss the importance of sleep and the optimal amount you
need to perform at your best. We’ll explore how memories are formed and when
we should be aware of false memories that you tell yourself and others tell you.
I’ll also give you hacks that you can start using today to help remember
information better. I write books that show how incorporating small habits into
your daily routine can lead to an improved life. If these kinds of books help you,
join my new release list where I let all of my subscribers know whenever I
release a new book so they can download a copy on their Kindle for FREE. I’ll
also let you know whenever my back catalogue of books are FREE to download
as I run promotions all throughout the year: KenFite.com/FREE.

What is memory?
I want you to imagine something for me. I want you to picture yourself standing
in the bathroom in your home. You look over to the shower and you see a
monkey scrubbing himself with a banana. He notices you and screams as he
throws the banana at you. Then you walk out of the bathroom and into your
bedroom and as you do, you see something scurry across the floor. It runs under
your bed and drops a carrot from its mouth. You wait a few seconds and you see
a rabbit stick its head out from under the bed, grab the carrot with its teeth, and
drag it underneath the bed. You make your way out of your bedroom and into
the hallway where you see a toddler holding a can of soda. The kid looks up at
you, laughs, and dumps the soda all over the carpet. You walk past the mess and
head to the kitchen so you can get some towels to clean up the soda when you
hear a large group of people talking. You round the corner and as you walk into
the kitchen, you see a room full of chefs having a chili cook-off. There are pots
and pans everywhere. You walk past the kitchen and out the front door and find
your best friend holding the biggest ice cream cone you’ve ever seen. It’s too
heavy for him so he asks you to help him out by holding the cone.
You’ll see why I asked you to imagine this scene shortly.
An average memory
“What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.” –
Chinese Proverb.
Every year, the United States Memory Championship takes place in New York
City. Participants in the competition perform a number of remarkable feats of
memory. They memorize random numbers, extensive lists of names, difficult
poems, and decks of cards in order, all in just a few minutes. Sometimes they’re
required to memorize multiple decks of cards in order as part of the competition.
It’s amazing.
Joshua Foer, a freelance journalist and author, attended the 2005 U.S. Memory
Championship to report on the event. During a break, Foer approached Ed
Cooke, one of the contestants who had traveled from England to New York for
the competition. Foer asked Cooke when he realized that he was a savant.
Cooke responded that he wasn’t a savant and explained that he had an average
memory just like anyone else. Cooke said that all he was doing was using a set
of techniques invented over 2,000 years ago in Greece, the same techniques used
by Cicero to memorize his speeches. Using these techniques, Ed Cooke was able
to teach himself how to improve his memory and started winning competitions
and ultimately became a Grand Master of Memory.
To qualify as a Grand Master of Memory, competitors must be able to perform a
number of memory feats. The requirements are that one must be able to
memorize a 1,000 digit number in an hour, a pack of cards in under a few
minutes, and 10 packs of cards in an hour. Ed Cooke can memorize a deck of
shuffled cards in 21 seconds. How does he do this? Cooke says that he’s
associated a person with every card in a deck. It took him an afternoon to do this
and believes it would take an average person less than a week to be able to
memorize a deck of cards in less than a minute, with practice. After creating the
initial association between cards and people, he then worked on improving his
speed at recalling that association and then worked on creating stories about the
people representing each card, to memorize the deck in order.
This is what Cooke does to take boring information (a two of clubs) and turn it
into something more interesting to him (a person that he’s familiar with). The
goal is to learn the associations like a new language. When he attempts to
memorize a pack of cards, instead of focusing on the actual cards, he focuses on
the people that the cards represent. To remember the sequence, Cooke strings
images of the people together by creating absurd stories linking them in the
order in which he needs to memorize them. Similar to how the individual cards