May 2, 2024

No, you don’t need mutant superpowers to develop a good memory.  Just a winning technique.

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From the short article at Digg and Vox:

This video isn’t about eating healthy, staying hydrated, avoiding substance abuse, or getting enough sleep.  It’s about mnemonics – adding associations between what you need to memorize (usually boring facts/data) and more stimulating sensory memories – smells, music, emotions, spatial recognition through a location… The video focuses on taking a path through a familiar location and adding fictitious but detailed imagery, somewhat related to the data to be memorized, on a path through the “memory palace.”

When you try to memorize a list, you use “a relatively miniscule portion of the brain is being used to retain the information—the hippocampus. This portion of the brain is not really adapted to storing information in a sequential or long-term way. So imagine the power and efficiency of your brain’s ability to retain information if you could use a whole lobe of it, say 20 percent of your brain’s matter, to help you out—instead of something about the size of a lima bean. You can…” (according to Psychology Today) because by adding in visual images you bring another portion of the brain into play.  By adding an emotional feeling you bring in another part of the brain to work on the task.  The bigger the team effort, the easier to remember the list of facts – or in this case, the chapter of Moby Dick:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh9B5UJbbRg&w=829&h=493]

 

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