Have you ever forgotten where you've put your keys? Or even your shoes? Have you ever been introduced to a crowd of people and forgotten the name of the first person before you've even been told the name of the last? Have you ever come back from a shopping trip only to realise you hadn't bought the one thing you went out for? Have you ever forgotten where you've put your keys? Have you ever wished that you had a better memory?
Almost everyone just accepts their bad memory and learns to live with it. Some people just rely on luck to remember things. Some people repeat things to themselves over and over in the hope that it will help them remember. Then you see people who can remember the order of a pack of cards, or several packs of cards, or huge sequences of numbers. How do they do that? Were they born with a super memory?
Well, some of them were born with a natural gift for memory, that's true. But it's easily possible to improve your memory and with work it's possible to get your memory to do those impressive memory party tricks. There are some simple tricks that will help you remember all kinds of things. Lists, names, numbers, or where you've put your keys.
The main premise of most memory tricks and techniques is that you need to link something that you are trying to remember, to something that you already know. For example, you can remember your shopping list by linking the different items to part of your body. Take the following list of 9 items: Cheese, Sausages, Milk, Crisps, Vegetable Oil, Bread, Apples, Cucumber, Butter. On their own they may prove a little tricky to remember. Especially when you're in the supermarket 20 minutes later and you're getting distracted by all those great special offers. What we're going to do is link those nine items to 9 parts of your body going up from the ground: toes, knees, thigh, rear end, torso, shoulders, neck, nose, top of the head.
Visualise the following.
Take a large red edam ball and kick with your toes like a football. This piece of edam is going to be a lot harder than a football so it will probably hurt your toes and you'll be hopping around for a bit. Now take a sausage and put it behind your knee and try to hold it there. You won't be very dextrous with your knees so no doubt you'll squash it a bit and it'll get a bit manky and get your legs dirty and sticky. Now you're going to pour a pint of milk over your thighs and rub it in. Imagine how that feels, and of course, the milk is going to make you sticky and smelly. Maybe it's a bit out of date, how does that smell? Now, take a packet of crisps, your favourite flavour, now try to hold it between your butt cheeks. It'll be difficult at first and will keep falling out, so pick it back up and try to hold it for as long as you can. You'll end up crushing most of the crisps in the packet. What does that sound like? The next item on the list is vegetable oil. Imagine you are a cheesy body builder in a Mr Universe competition. Yes, you'll be rubbing that oil into your body and making it all shiny and greasy....mmmmmm. You've now got to balance a loaf of bread on each shoulder. What sort of loaves are they? Try a french stick on your left shoulder and granary tin on your right shoulder. Balance the french stick on the end, not on the side, don't cheat. That one's just gotta fall off.
Mmmmm....smell that fresh bread.
Now you've got to hold as many apples with your neck as possible. Stick a couple under your chin and press them against your chest, then try to balance another at the back of your neck while your head is bent forward. That will be the tricky one, it's just gonna keep rolling off. Sticking that cucumber up your nose is really going to hurt too. I bet that'll make your eyes water. Try to get one up each nostril. And now, balance that butter on your head. But of course, it's not going to be that easy, because it's hot and it's melting all down your face. Nice and sticky.
OK, that's all there is too it. Now, you have to recall them. So, what were you doing with your toes? You were kicking the huge round red edam and hurting your toes, so go to the cheese aisle. What were you doing with your knees? You were squeezing a sausage behind your knee, so go to the sausage aisle. What were you rubbing into your thighs? Of course, it was the milk. Now what were you trying to hold between your bum cheeks? A packet of crisps and it'll be all mashed up by now. You should have no trouble with the rest of the list.
The key points that help to remember the connections are actions and your senses. Don't just think "toes -> cheese". Do something, create an action that links toes to cheese. Now how does that feel, smell or taste? What colour is it? The cheese was red, not just any cheese. And kicking it hurt, so you were hopping around holding your foot. Don't just think "shoulders -> bread", make sure you know what you're doing with the bread, how does it smell, what shape is it. All these points help to strengthen the association in your mind between the part of the body that you already know, and the item on your shopping list that you are trying to remember.
Of course, you haven't just remembered the items, you've remembered the order too. First it was cheese, then it was sausages, then milk and so on. So, you can use similar principles for remembering the order of, say, a pack of cards.
How about remembering where you put your keys? Well, imagine your keys are actually a bomb. Wherever you put them down, the bomb goes off. So, say you put them on the coffee table....KABOOM!!! The coffee table explodes filling the room with smoke bits of coffee table flying everywhere. You dive for cover and get showered in bits of coffee table
You won't forget where you put them now.
In fact, even next week, I'll bet you'll still remember me blowing up the coffee table with my keys. There's plenty of action in an explosion, plenty to help you associate blowing up the coffee table with putting your keys there.
What I have just been describing is presented in a much better format in Kevin Trudeau's Mega Memory* course. I've given just a couple of examples but Kevin Trudeau shows you how to use and adapt these ideas for everyday life. It includes how to remember names and phone numbers and how to remember much longer lists and ordered sequences. He also explains that your memory is just like any other muscle so the more you exercise it, the better it gets. If you just accept that your memory is poor and learn to live with it, it will only get worse. But, if you give it a regular work out, it will improve just like any other muscle.
There are plenty of similar courses out there presenting similar ideas, but I like Kevin's style and I think he manages to get more of the ideas across than any of the other courses I've tried. Most of the other courses just rely on a small number or even just one of the techniques, but Kevin manages to get all of the essentials and does them well.
Kevin Trudeau also has an Advanced Mega Memory* course. This builds on the first course so you shouldn't just try to skip to the advanced course. It extends the ideas taught in Mega Memory* to help you remember huge sequences of abstract items, such as numbers or playing cards. This is the course to take if you really want to develop some new party tricks. These are tricks that anybody can learn to do with a little bit of work. It's easily possible to remember the order of a pack of cards the first time that you try these techniques, then with more practice, you'll get quicker and quicker. After a while, you could even try shuffling several packs together and remembering the order of those.
