Anthony Metivier's Blog, page 37

The Five-Fold Path To Memory Improvement

Wouldn’t it be great if you could experience memory improvement …

… almost on auto-pilot?

Here’s the good news:

Even if you don’t use elaborate memory techniques and mnemonics, the following 5 ways will help you improve your memory almost without effort.

 

1. When Darkness Falls …

 

Go to sleep with the sun.

Seriously. What have you got to do after dark anyway?

Netflix? How boring.

Drinking in bars? How destructive to your memory.

Playing Scrabble? Well … okay. That’s at least halfway good for your brain.

But the reality is that we’re killing our memory by stating up late and waking up early.

And when you kill your memory, you murder something else too:

 

You Murder Your Intelligence!

 

And as with all acts of murder, you will get caught and you will be sentenced to life in the prison of stupidity and forgetfulness.

Mark my word.

Next to getting more sleep, it’s essential to …

 

2. Keep Your Brain Moist As The Soil Of A Mighty Rain Forest

 

That’s a fancy way of saying, drink lots of water.

All too often we forget to imbibe the world’s mightiest drink.

Oddly enough, some people don’t even like it. This strange, but true fact is responsible for forgetfulness around the world.

But it doesn’t have to be you.

And if for any reason you struggle to remember to drink deep from the tap in your kitchen, the solution is simple enough. You can create a visual mnemonic by placing a big fat bottle of water on your desk. Or you can print out a picture of a bottle of water and stick it on the wall or window directly behind your computer.

In addition to this …

 

Use Every Bit Of Technology You’ve Got To Remind You

 

Smart phones …

Dumb phones …

Computer calendars …

All of these of these come equipped with programmable alerts. Most of them can be set to repeat every hour on autopilot.

It’s easy enough to ignore these alerts, however, so it helps to get theatrical. Instead of “drink water,” program in something like:

 

Drink Water Or Else All The Cats On YouTube Will Suffer One Thousand And Seven Deaths!

 

If that doesn’t get your attention, I’m not sure what else will.

Well … maybe this:

 

 

3. Funnel Words Into Your Mind Like The Wind Shapes The Desert

 

One of the beautiful things about living in Berlin is that they still have bookstores all over the place. Not only that, but you still see people reading books too.

Here’s a quick guide on how to read a book:

Buy a book. No, it doesn’t have to be a book by me.

Beginner’s Guide To Overcoming The Ugly Sister Effect

Have you ever had a fact you know like the back of your hand stick on the tip of your tongue?

 

And has your presque vu (as the French call it) ever been so bad that a completely different thought came to mind?

And not only did that other thought come to mind in place of the one you were looking for …

 

It Completely Took Over The Show!

 

Never fear, dear Memorizers. You’ve been suffering something known as “the ugly sister effect.”

It’s closely related to something mnemonists and memory champions call “ghosting.” I prefer to call it “Magnetic fossilization.”

Either way, if you’ve ever suffered either of these problems, here’s the good news:

In this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method podcast, you’re going to learn to overcome both.

 

How To Turn Your Memory Into Prince Charming

 

The Ugly Sister Effect gets its name from the Cinderella fairy tale. In many versions, every time Prince Charming tries to get hold of Cinderella for a smooching session and perhaps a little more, her ugly sisters intervene.

Not very cool of those ugly sisters, is it?

The reason the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon gets this name is because when this happens with your memory, there’s a competition going on. It’s a struggle between the cue that causes you to look for the memory in the first place and the target information encoded somewhere in your mind.

Worse, these ugly sisters are other information that comes to mind. So, for example, let’s say the song Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell comes to mind, but you keep coming up with Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust instead.

Annoying, isn’t it? Well, as great a song as Diamonds and Rust is, in this case, it’s an ugly sister.

 

Good News: There’s A Well-Known Way To Deal With This Problem …

 

… in any conversation. The method has two parts:

1) Don’t make a big deal out of it.

2) Carry on with the discussion or change topics. The target information will probably pop into mind shortly after, or at some point in the future when it’s no longer relevant.

The important thing to realize is that these …

 

Ugly Sisters Are Perfectly Normal!

 

Now, when it comes to the world of mnemonics, we use Memory Palaces to store information.

We do this by using crazy, weird and exaggerated imagery to encode the information we want to memorize. No information exists that you can’t work with using these procedures.

This fact isn’t to say that you can achieve a state of perfection in which your mind instantly creates the best possible associative imagery and snaps everything you want to memorize flawlessly into place in your Memory Palaces.

Rather, you’ll find that you need to massage different kinds of information differently. Sometimes you’ll use a Bridging Figure, other times you’ll use a cartoonish stream of images across several stations. You need to be flexible, which is why the Magnetic Memory Method is a method, rather than a system. It teaches you to respond to information in an inviting way, to cradle it, to kindly Magnetize it in a way that makes it willing to stay.

But here’s the thing:

 

Some People Want To Memorize Oodles And Oodles Of Information …

 

… but they only have a limited set of resources upon which they can base their Memory Palaces.

Well, no problem. On the How to Find Memory Palaces episode of the podcast, we talked about your endless fountain of Memory Palaces just waiting for you to claim them.

And in the episodes about virtual Memory Palaces you can find here and here, you can learn about making Memory Palaces based on nothing more than your imagination.

Or, dear Memorizers, you can experiment with reusing the same Memory Palaces over and over again.

But watch out …

 

Some Of Your Memory Palaces Might Be Haunted!

 

That’s right.

And when that happens, you might find yourself running into some Ghosts of Memory Past.

Memory champs and mnemonists call this phenomenon “ghosting.” But normal people use this term too.

For example, here’s part of a letter I received a few days ago regarding “images too vivid leaving ‘ghost images’”.

Here’s what she wrote:

There are Memory Palaces I reuse like an etch-a-sketch, such as the cars for phone numbers (I use the Dominic number system) or my office to remember a grocery list or even the walk to the local shops to remember a speech.

My problem is that the images from the last time I used that palace are often very vivid still.

I can still see Einstein on his surfboard for example (Einstein being number 15 as you know) so the next time I picture Einstein in the drivers seat I can still see him surfing then it all gets muddled up with a previous set of information.

I have tried using the alphabet or months of the year as placeholders, but the abstract letters are not as memorable as locations. Could I have your advice?

Thanks and kind regards.

Lydia

The first thing I would say is that using the alphabet raw for Memory Palaces is a good idea, but it’s going to take lots of practice. Better – or at least less abstract – would be to use playing cards.

For example, you could have an Ace of Spades Memory Palace, a 2 of Spades Memory Palace and so forth.

The linear order of the cards in this manner would serve as an organizational device similar to the alphabet. The advantage is that you can rest more on an Ace of Spades than on the letter A. This ease happens because the Ace of Spades and cards in general are more palpable.

If you’re going to monkey around with this approach, start small. Create a row of five to ten Ace of Spades and let them hover like flying carpets. Or if you prefer, lay them out on an imaginary forest path, a corridor, or whatever else feels right for you.

It will help too if you can somehow bolt these flying carpet cards to a distinct journey. So, using a process I teach in more detail in the Masterclass called the Telesynoptic Memory Palace, you can bolt the cards onto a preexisting Memory Palace station.

This procedure is more challenging than others. When you travel the journey, you now need to reconstruct both the original Memory Palace and the added feature of an Ace of Spades at every station to differentiate it from the original version of the Memory Palace.

As ever …

 

Practice Makes For Magnetic Perfection!

 

Using a deck of cards like this with your Memory Palaces is one way to deal with ghosting. But I believe that, for most of us who just want to get in with things and skip the radical experimentation, there’s an easier way.

1. Relax.

Almost all issues with memory work using mnemonics arise from tension in the body and mind.

Never, ever memorize if you haven’t spent a bit of time meditating, doing some progressive muscle relaxation and ideally, Pendulum Breathing.

Next, stop thinking about those intrusive images as ghosts or ugly sisters or any other negative term. That simply does not and cannot help.

Rather, think of them as wonderful, beautiful and thoroughly Magnetic fossils. They should be treated with love and respect at all times.

Why?

Because they’re living proof that …

 

You Can Learn And Memorize Anything Using Nothing More Than The Elegant Powers Of Your Natural Imagination!

 

3. Use those preexisting images to practice what we call in the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass, “compounding.”

So instead of rejecting these glorious proofs that your imagination is happily assisting your memory by coding and decoding information, get that associative-imagery on the side of the new information you want to memorize. In other words, work on letting the old memories support the new ones. If Einstein comes up with old information, invite him to help you with the new. 

Compounding is especially powerful if you’re using and reusing Memory Palaces for language learning. For example, when I study and memorize Spanish words and phrases, I don’t have to rely on English alone to benefit from compounding and homophonic transliteration. I can also use, for example, the German words and sounds I know.

In fact, at least in my experience, German is especially helpful for creating powerful associative-imagery for Greek.

Now, all of the magic Compounding can bring you assumes that you’ve correctly used Recall Rehearsal to get the target information from your previous pass through the Memory Palace into long-term memory.

If not, do that first before you use the power and the glory of Magnetic Memory Method compounding.

If, failing all these techniques, you still struggle with ghosting, ugly sisters, fossils or whatever you want to call them …

 

Get Down On Your Hands And Knees And Scrub Your Memory Palaces Clean As If You Were Cinderella

 

Seriously.

The same way you can use your imagination to create Memory Palaces based on real or imagined locations, you can imagine yourself with Pine-Sol or Mr. Clean and a mop. See yourself doing the work of getting your Memory Palaces fresh and clean for new uses.

Again, relax. Warm up with a bit of card memorization or the childhood memory exercises I gave you a few weeks back.

And then get busy. In fact, try everything I’ve talked about in this issue of the podcast.

Why?

Because nothing will help you more than one simple little skill. To practice it, all you have to do is …

 

Harness The Value Of Practice

 

That’s right.

Even if you struggle …

Even if you sweat …

Even if you strain …

And, yes, even if it causes you pain …

Practice is the only way to improve …

 

Even If You’re The Best Memorizer In The World!

 

There’s no turnkey, set-and-forget engine that keeps running once you learn and use memory techniques as part of your daily life.

No. What you’re doing is learning to play your memory like a musical instrument.

Leave that guitar or flute or tuba or whatever you want to play in its case for a week, a month or a year and you’re going to feel your talent slipping.

But practice every day and run your scales, arpeggios and chord studies every day with a few new challenges thrown in and you will always grow. At the very least, you’ll maintain your state and have the potential to push the limits of what you can do now.

Doesn’t that sound fair?

Of course it does.

So now that our exorcism of all those evil memory spirits and ugly sisters is through, I’m going to go watch Ghostbusters.

What are you going to do?

Further Resources

How to Keep A Memory Journal And Remember More

Reincarnation, Past Life Regression And Other Former Life Myths That Go Bump In The Night

Have You Ever Had A Past Life Experience? Do You Believe In Reincarnation? How Much Karma Do You Spread On Your Mummified Animal Crackers?

 

If so, it’s time we had a little chat.

And in this one-to-one between just you and me (sorry, no apparitions from times yore allowed), we’re going to talk about past life memories, past life regression and how regression is performed in a clinical setting.

The emphasis being on how regression is performed to give people the feeling that they’re remembering past lives. And to accomplish all this, we’re going to see how the entire notion and the culture surrounding past lives fits into the larger context of our shared psychological needs around the globe.

Oh … and I’ll even tell you about my past life experience too.

 

Warning: Reincarnation Can Make You Fat

 

A few weeks ago, we talked about The Surprising Truth About Hypnosis And Memory Improvement and some of the controversial issues surrounding the topic. For example, hypnosis can produce all kinds of memories, the quality and integrity of which vary. We looked at one of the most consequential ways that hypnotically induced memories play out: in courtroom testimony.

Like memories produced by hypnosis, past life memory is a controversial and highly unlikely topic.

At its worst, the ability to recall past lives is a sham sold in books, live or online courses and supposedly therapeutic past life regression hypnotherapy. Content creators direct these at the gullible.

For example, in Many Lives, Many Masters, Brian Weiss makes the claim that exploring past lives can cure all kinds of ailments, phobias and anxieties. He suggests focusing on clinical results and forgetting about whether past lives are real or not. Easy to say when your wallet is bursting with fees from patients seeking relief and willing to try anything.

Then there’s the dark side. On the opposite end of the scale, people have reported bringing back ugly scars from their regressions, or later becoming obese thanks to things seen in visions of the past.

But we certainly must admit that that past life regression and the memories it seems to produce may have some legitimate therapeutic value that goes beyond placebo and hypnosis. I’ll talk about my experience with descending into a previous life a little further on.

Helpful or fraught with danger, to be ethical, the hypnotherapist or “regressionist” must make it clear that the techniques induce dream­like fantasies, not realities. Past life memories, no matter how clear or intense, are mirages produced by the mind, not HDTV memories based on anything that ever actually happened.

 

How To Win A Million Dollars With Just One Of Your Past Lives!

 

And if you feel that I stand to be corrected, please let me direct me to the James Randi Foundation and the Million Dollar Challenge. They’ll be pleased to receive your evidence and reward you with a handsome sum upon reasonable validation of your material.

In any case, I see no reason to believe that past lives exist. And any value past life regression can probably acquired by other means without questionable sessions with a hypnotist. All the same, let’s look at the issue in detail and try to figure out why some people do believe in it. The reasons are fascinating, and we all stand to learn something from them.

The first thing we need to realize is that …

 

Past Lives Are Not About The Past!

 

No, no and a million times no.

Past life regression is all about the future. It’s about life after death and the fantasy that we never really die.

As I’m sure you know, your mind has a hard time conceiving of the planet without you. So at its core, past life fantasies drive forward as much as they dive backward to ease the anxiety that when we’re gone …

 

We’re Really, Really Gone!

 

In case I haven’t convinced you that past lives are really about the future, consider Karma.

Karma is an idea tied to notions of immortality and rebirth. Karma supposedly brings to the present attitudes, beliefs and actions from another time that you can “read” or interpret. Interpret these signs in just the right way, you stand to have an easier life the next time around.

Screw up, on the other hand, and continuous living is not going to work in your favor. You will suffer the consequences of being bad in this life in your next one.

Past lives and fantasies of reincarnation also fascinate societies around the world because these beliefs let people hunt for patterns.

 

People Love Patterns!

 

And there are certainly many patterns to find.

Look at literature throughout history, for example. Archetypes are everywhere, and for more on that you can check out the research and writings of the delightful Canadian scholar Northrop Frye. Here’s a decent rundown of how his theory of archetypes connects different kinds of human character with the seasons.

Patterns can make you feel transcendent because there is the oft­ cited saying that those who know the past aren’t doomed to repeat it.

But is it really true?

After all, haven’t all kinds of world leaders (both politicians and royalty) been schooled in history?

 

Can Knowledge Of The Past Really Make The Future Better?

 

Steven Pinker has some good and favorable points to make on the matter, but it’s still not at all clear that insight about the past helps anyone evade mishaps in the future. So many of the ongoing failures our leaders bomb us into should be obvious as chaps on a cowboy, but still we’re lead into quagmires our best schooled in political history should help us avoid.

Perhaps, as the Oedipus myth would have it, often evading fate causes us to construct it, something we see in memory as well. For example, trying to run away from troubling memories only adds fuel to the fire.

So recognizing past patterns gives us the illusion of choice. It gives us the feeling that if you could just recognize in yourself what you got wrong the last time, due to whatever deeply ingrained archetype, you could escape the wheel of suffering. At least for a little while.

But …

Does Choice Really Exist?

 

In Free Will, Sam Harris suggests that we can only describe the choices we make, but not explain why we make them. He gives, as an example, having given up martial arts at a certain point in his life, and then for no apparent reason, deciding to practice again. He can describe the transition in and out, but in no way can explain why he made those choices.

At best, we can only speculate about why we do the things we do and draw after­-the-­fact conclusions ­ with or without pointing to patterns and archetypes. But at the end of the day, the answers we give can never be more than compilations of possibilities based on self-­interpretation.

If Harris is right, then pointing to patterns and archetypes from previous lives is a convenient way for some people to give a “why” to the reasons they behave and make choices as they do.

In addition to creating the illusion of choice, belief in past lives also helps people satisfy the need to see the soul as something separate from the body. Even though we now know beyond doubt that the human mind is the product of the body, people ignore the science. They prefer the idea that the essence of a person can float from one body into the next. Likewise, that soul can eventually float into some version of heaven and finally find a place in eternity. Again, we see that the attempt to access past lives is really all about creating visions of a future that features far greater certainty than the present moment ever can.

 

When Philosophy And Religion Should Send You Running For Cover

 

Nearly every religion and philosophical tradition has at one point or another featured reincarnation in some shape or form.

Some books you can read include:

The Principle Upanishads
Bhagavad Gita

These Hindu books discuss the need to develop spiritual knowledge and compassion for everyone in the world. Doing so creates illumination, edification and ultimately freedom from reincarnation.

From the Buddhist tradition:

The Dhammapada. This book is particularly frustrating because it contains so many parables and much centers on the idea that the truth cannot be known. We only get to have words about the truth. In this case, it appears that the words point to ten realms in the mind of all people, including Buddhas.

These realms undergo constant change as a person lives and acts in their part of the world. So the game is not so much about avoiding the repetition of wrong actions from the past but doing good things in the present so that more good things can come.

From the Judaic tradition, the Kabbalah talks about how a single soul repeatedly visits different bodies between visits to a different world. A Kabbalist is therefore someone who can sense this other world and in effect, live in both of them at the same time. To get to this stage of actualization apparently takes 6000 years, so if you’re happy and you know it… raise your hand.

As for the Greeks, they had metempsychosis, which is the transference or transmigration of the soul into another body at the moment of death. This process was not thought to be exclusive to humans. It could happen to plants and animals too.

In more recent times, the Western world has seen Theosophy and Anthroposophy. In Theosophy, it is said that reincarnation is not immediate, but requires intervals in a place like heaven. This heaven needs to exactly match the person’s vision of the afterlife they carried with them throughout life. (Probably not a good thing for many people …)

According to Anthroposophy, there are bodies walking with no soul. For whatever reason, the bodies did not receive a reincarnated spirit of a deceased person. Instead, they are occupied by demon­like entities.

In fact, the head of Anthroposophy may well have had a demon inside his body. Reports tell us that he threatened people who did not accept his ideas with violence. This fact, in effect, makes Anthroposophy a cult.

Weird.

 

How To Regress Into A Past Life In 3 Easy Stages

 

As you know, I studied hypnosis as part of my graduate research. One of the exercises involved past life regression, and the instructors taught us how to use it in a clinical session.

Hypnotic regression comes with strict guidelines. To treat someone using the technique, you need to have a note from the client’s doctor approving the procedure. The person must be absent of mental illness and not under the influence of alcohol.

And above all, as a beginner, you should practice under the direct supervision of an experienced hypnotherapist.

To prepare for hypnotic regression, it’s important first to create what hypnotists call a “yes set.” This technique involves a series of questions for which yes is the only obvious answer.

For example, you might ask in relatively rapid order, “Are you feeling awake? Are those new shoes?” and anything else that produces a yes based on whatever the hypnotist can perceive.

The idea is that when the hypnotist asks, “Are you ready to go into a deep state of hypnosis and regress into a past life,” the client has been primed to say yes. Magicians will sometimes set the stage for compliance using similar sleight­-of­-mouth tactics as well.

The hypnotist also wants to create rapport with the client to start influencing the client’s unconscious mind before the session has even begun. The hypnotist will hold their body as the client does, try to match the client’s breathing and speech patterns and essentially mirror them. Then, with rapport established, they will slowly start changing their behaviors. The hypnotist does this to “pull” the client towards them and into to a state of relaxation and hypnosis to go along with the verbal techniques of hypnosis.

 

Monkey See, Monkey Do

 

If this sounds woo woo, it really isn’t. We’ve all yawned after seeing someone else yawn and walked into traffic against a red light simply because the person beside us started walking. You may have even found yourself leaning in during a discussion on autopilot at the same time as your date.

We mirror and influence people in many ways all the time, and it is possible to engineer or at least influence the psychological states of others through body language. Actors and musicians do it to us all the time.

Next comes the formal induction. By this point, the hypnotist will have determined which style of verbal hypnosis they want to use language patterns to help the client achieve deep states of relaxation.

These methods can include guided visualization, music, aromas and touch. The hypnotist will typically continue to mirror the clients breathing in order to “pace and lead” the progression into deeper and deeper states of relaxation.

The exact language and procedures will vary from hypnotist to hypnotist depending on the suggestibility of the client.

 

Lifestyles Of The Young And The Restless

 

They may, for example, encourage age regression by asking the client to imagine themselves at younger and younger ages. They may ultimately have clients picture themselves back in the womb and then move into the immediate previous life or even further back.

Or, the hypnotist will simply encourage the client to let images from the past arise, seemingly of their own accord.

In therapeutic hypnosis, the material produced by the client is then integrated with the present, usually to help bring insight to a current problem or heal an ailment.

The stories that come into memory from the past may be pleasant or terrifying. If the memories have good feelings associated with them, the hypnotist may attempt to transfer those good feelings to a present ailment or concern and anchor them there.

Or if the memory is unpleasant, the hypnotist may use a variety of techniques to help the client be rid of the bad memory. Ideally, this expulsion will take the ailment along with it as the memory flees the mind and body.

In all cases, imprinting is the main feature of regression, past lives, reincarnation and Karma. Therapeutic past life regression, along with the others, is meant to create detachment and distance if not outright banishment of these imprints.

At its most innocent level, the person experiences cathartic transformation. At its most sinister level, forms of this practice show up in cult­like organizations like Scientology, a cult in which they have developed procedures and technology for exorcising imprints from your soul. Scientologists also have developed elaborate terminology to describe what is essentially past life regression performed in an interrogation room with two tin cans in your hands. Operation Clambake has some detailed resources if you’d care to learn more.

 

The Story Of Automatic Jim

 

By now, you’ve probably noticed that I’m more than a touch skeptical about past lives even though its clear than hypnosis can induce experiences in which you may legitimately feel as though you’ve made contact with a previous version of yourself.

I’ve had it happen.

Following the lessons in past life regression, we heard a fantastic testimonial. One of the instructors claimed he had established contact with a Japanese past life. After establishing contact, he instantly became fluent in Japanese without studying a single character.

Mercifully, he didn’t demonstrate any of his Japanese, so we took our lunch break and then moved on to curing phobias.

Following this lesson in erasing simple household fears, I hypnotized my student partner first to help him overcome his fear of spiders. As a matter of coincidence, as soon as he opened his eyes, he spotted a spider on the wall. He immediately scooped it up and let it run up and down his arm and all over his hands.

 

It Was Miraculous!

 

Well … not really. It was a small spider, after all. But he did seem genuinely transformed and delighted by his new ability to connect so deeply with a spider he’d only just met.

When my turn arrived, I elected to deal with my fear of heights. Now, I must admit that I broke the rules ­ naughty naughty ­ because I do have a mental illness and shouldn’t have been doing the exercise at all. And my fear of heights, at least at the time, seems to me deeply connected to impulse control.

All the same, what happened next astonished me.

At some point during the induction, I flashed into a vision so real and intense, it has barely diminished in the twelve years since it happened.

As I sat in the chair listening to the sounds of Spiderman’s voice, I suddenly found myself in the cockpit of a Vietnam fighter jet. Within seconds, my vessel slammed into another jet or helicopter, and I saw billowing clouds of fire as I fell into the jungle.

And that was it.

Except that wasn’t it at all. In addition to breaking out in a sweat and needing the main instructor to break me out of a near panic, I found that I knew all kinds of information about this fighter pilot. A man I had apparently once been.

I knew his first name, his age, the girlfriend he had left behind and what kind of car he drove. I could see his neighborhood, his high school and felt all kinds of physical drives normally foreign to me. I had never been terribly fascinated with legs, for example, preferring buttocks and breasts, but all of a sudden legs were driving me crazy!

In any case, I lived in Toronto at the time and had the neurotic tendency to avoid walking over the Bloor­-Danforth aqueduct (or Prince Edward Viaduct as Wikipedia insists on calling it). The bridge near Castle Frank station terrified me as well, even though there are many beautiful trees along that part of Bloor Street to enjoy.

But on that day, all fear tossed aside, I decided to walk home instead of taking the subway. For the first time, I felt no fear. I had seen what death was like and it bemused me that my fear of heights could be connected to the violent military death of some dude named Jim.

So what did I do?

 

I Wrote The Dead Dude’s Autobiography!

 

And to do it, I used self-­hypnosis to reconnect with Jim. Sat at the keyboard and tranced out from deep breathing and the hypnotic suggestions I gave myself, I allowed my fingers to type. Seemingly of their own accord (or Jim’s), my fingers produced page after page of semi-­narrative images and situations.

Because I was in essence practicing automatic-­writing, I called the piece Automatic Jim and eventually published it in an anthology of my (terrible) poetry called Lex Talionis Schadenfreude.

Of course, it was only a matter of a few days before the terror of those two bridges came back and I started avoiding them again. They’ve since erected a suicide barrier on the Bloor­-Danforth viaduct, so when I’m in Toronto I can enjoy the view of downtown when walking across the bridge, but I often think of the reprieve that Automatic Jim gave me from this irrational fear of heights. Temporary, but powerful and unforgettable.

 

Beware The Human Imagination

 

In sum, our minds are incredibly malleable. Just as a hypnotist can prime clients by using a “yes set,” I had been primed to experience a past life regression.

I have no idea why my mind produced that particular imagery, but as an avid dream journaler, I know well just how profoundly my mind produces incredibly complete and often reasonably well-constructed narrative fantasies. Plus, plane crashes have been a recurring theme throughout my life and the imagery often very intense.

And yet … never have I pulled from a dream so many facts about a figure at once so familiar and foreign to myself.

Thus, this experience demonstrates, not that past lives exist and can be remembered, but that context and priming can induce incredible psychological experiences.

Although I’ve since outgrown much ­ though not all ­ of my fear of heights, the therapeutic effects of meeting Automatic Jim were fleeting at best. The writing my experiences with him produced certainly has some interesting imagery and lovely rhythms. But at the end of the day, it’s babble and I won’t be offered a job as poet laureate anytime soon.

 

What Would The World Be Like Without The Irrationality Produced By Human Needs?

 

The issue here is that we all have a need for meaning in our lives, particularly when it comes to our problems. We want to know why we suffer and memory is an attractive means of finding explanations. Everyone from Freud to Madame Blavatsky, to the ancient Greeks and Scientologists have used memory as cures for real and perceived ailments.

And in far too many cases, hoodwinking runs awry. For in reality, humans have managed to revolutionize the world with computers that can remember keystrokes you made twenty years ago in a relatively short period.

But the fact that no one has perfected a means of accessing past lives in thousands and thousands of years of civilization suggests that there is no past to access when it comes to the human psyche. The old recordings we have are distributed throughout the media of sculpture, writing, painting, theatre and now film, video and virtual reality.

Whatever and wherever the past is, whether in humans or our processing machines …

 

Further Resources

Download this post as a PDF

How Psychics Abuse Your Working Memory To Rip You Off

3 Memory Games You Can Play With Your Childhood

The thought of memory improvement excites you, doesn’t it?

But then you start reading all the books and watching the videos and within seconds …

Improving your memory suddenly starts to feel like a lot of hard work!

It’s understandable. Using a Memory Palace, associative-imagery and practicing Recall Rehearsal can be tough. It involves a lot of moving parts. But if you’ve gotten hold of my free Memory Improvement Kit, then you know that in reality, it’s actually pretty simple.

But if you’re not interested in beelining directly towards total memory mastery, no sweat. Here are three games and exercises you can play starting today. They will exercise your memory, move the muscles of your imagination and renew access to parts of yourself you’ve probably long forgotten.

 

Warning!

 

Before we get started, you’ll need something to write with. And what you’re about to experience could well change your life forever. (In a good way, of course.)

And when I say write, I mean “write.” Sure, you can play these memory games by writing in Evernote or whatever. But don’t. You’ll get more from them by using old-fashioned pencil and paper.

You can also use your mind on its own too. These exercises can be completed while daydreaming on a park bench or wherever you find yourself.

But with writing, the pages you fill will prove to you that your mind is a vast place with many recesses. And you’ll enjoy the exercise more when you see what emerges from the depths of your imagination.

Plus, you’ll be able to feel the weight of your memory in the paper on your hands. And that is a sensation you can’t get from any app in the world. (Though a device that gets heavier the more information  it contains could be a fun option for those who want to go on a data diet!)

 

Do These Things Now If You Want To Improve Your Memory Without Sweat, Blood Or Tears

 

1. Make a list of all the places you can remember visiting.

 

Start local and go back as far as you can remember. For example, here are some of the first places that I remember visiting:

Where my dad used to train his duck hunting dogsThe farm at Tranquille where my mom used to workA chocolate factory we visited on a field trip in Kindergarten

Immerse yourself in these memories. Think about colors, smells, textures. Recall the people you were with and call up as many people as you can.

Then you can start listing other towns and cities. Again, go as deep into the past as you can. I remember flying to Prince Rupert with my dad where he bought me cowboy boots.

 

Get All The Memory Guidance You Need From Someone Close To Home

 

Next, take these early memories and ask someone in your family to give them your version. When I press my memory for sensory detail, I remember nothing of the flight. But I do have glimpses of how the city looked, and I can smell beer on my dad’s breath.

For bonus points in your own memory play, move from the deep past up until the present. And do your best to establish a linear time line so you have a feeling for the chronology.

But at this point …

 

Don’t Worry About Exact Dates …

 

… except for seasons if your sensory memory provides them.

For example, in my first memory of watching my dad train one of the dogs, he’s wearing the white sweater my mom knit for him.

Although there was no snow on the ground on those mountain plains, white clouds were shooshing from the dog’s noise as it ran after the dummy. And I remember my dad letting me the starter pistol and how cold it felt in my hand. These details make it safe to assume it was Fall.

Once you’ve gotten your sensory details gathered, come back and add dates if you wish for an extra memory massage. For that you should learn the Major Method for memorizing numbers.

Or you can proceed the next of our memory games:

 

2. Recall the names of every classmate you can remember.

 

Again, go as deep into the past as you can.

From preschool, I remember Ryan and Clayton. Ryan moved away with his family in grade one, but I would know Clayton for many years to come. I believe the last time I saw him was grade nine, and we’ve only had a quick series of exchanges on Facebook since.

For each friend you can remember from this deepest place …

 

Fill In As Many Sensory And Narrative Details As You Can …

 

Recall their homes, their parents and your activities together.

With Ryan, I remember a white house at the top of a lawned hill with a backyard with white wood fences on either side and a chicken coup at the back. We played downstairs, and he once proudly displayed an American dollar. His mom worked for the Buy & Sell newspaper, and I distinctly remember eating tomato soup.

With Clayton, I remember much more. It would take a novella to write it all out, but I find sharp highlights in my memory. These include building blanket tents, watching Chuck Norris movies during sleepovers, going to the pool, smoking cigarettes for my first time and once getting our bikes taken by weird apple orchard farmers for trespassing.

Later our bad-ass dads, both bikers, spun by on their Harleys and sorted things out. Clayton’s bikes were always cooler than mine, but I was happy nonetheless to get mine back.

 

Amazing, Isn’t It?

 

There’s a ton of detail tumbling around in the depths of my memory. And yours too!

But the point of all these examples isn’t to wow you with the details of my life. I mean only to show how much amazing information lays dormant in your mind. Do a little spade work and when you hit a pipe, you’ll be amazed by the valuable oil that gushes out.

And your memory will get an easy workout. The exercise will expand your sense of place and time. And the more friends and classmates you list, the more you’ll enjoy the wines of those times you haven’t thought of forever.

 

3. Recall the Rules of Childhood Games

 

First, list all the games you can remember playing:

TagHopscotchHide and go seek

Although with these games, there’s not a huge amount of rules to remember, you can still pull up sounds, sensations and locations.

You may also recall different versions and hear the sounds of your playmates in your ears.

Then move on to card games and board games:

Go FishMonopolyUno

I can distinctly remember the friends of my parents visiting to play Uno. The sensory parts are easy, but it’s a workout to remember the rules. Plus, it’s inspiring to think  about how on earth I could have understood those rules at such a young age.

From there you can list video games and role playing games. I remember Pong as the coolest thing on earth,  Chuck Norris and Tron for Coleco, Pacman and Space Invaders for Atari and Contra for Nintendo.

The list goes on and on. The more you press your memory for the details and rules of each game, the more fitness your memory will receive.

 

Did You Like Learning About These Games?

 

I hope so.

Obviously, these are memory games you can come back to again and again. And it took me less than an hour to draft what you’re reading now. Just think of what you can do yourself in a cafe some afternoon using nothing more than a pen, pencil and that special thing called memory floating between your ears.

Want to learn more about how to improve your memory? Check out this FREE Memory Improvement Kit and learn how to build a Memory Palace so you can learn, memorize and recall anything at any time, anywhere and under any circumstances.

How To Keep A Journal And Remember More

How Much Would The Quality Of Your Life Skyrocket If You Could Remember More About Your Daily Life?

 

The days rush by, don’t they?

And it can be hard to remember what exactly happened. Forgetfulness about your own life is not only frustrating, but it’s downright painful.

At least … It should be.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?

You get bothered by certain things and yet …

 

You Do Absolutely Nothing To Make Changes!

 

But what if I were to tell you that there’s one simple thing you can do to remember more about your life?

And what if I told you that this one thing is also fun and will even make you more productive too?

If that sounds interesting to you, then keep reading each and every word on this page. Why? Because the simple activity I want to share with you is the kind of game changer you simply cannot afford to ignore.

 

Do You Wake Or Sleep?

 

That’s what Keats asked himself back in May of 1819 when he wrote Ode to a Nightingale. Check it out. It’s well worth memorizing.

The cool thing about Keats is that he wrote letters. Lots of them.

No email.

No fax.

Heck, Keats didn’t even have a laser jet printer.

But he still wrote.

Every single freakin’ day.

And then he got tuberculosis and died.

But here’s the thing:

 

It’s Scientifically Proven That If You Write Every Day You Will Remember More About Your Life!

 

Not only that, but by writing every day about your daily activities, your experience of time expands.

In other words, you not only remember more, but you feel like you have had more time on a daily basis in which to remember more.

Pretty cool, right?

Well, I don’t know if it’ll be cool for you or not, so …

 

You Absolutely Have To Try It!

 

Seriously, just do it. Here are 3.5 amazing ways to give writing about your daily life a try.

 

Journal When You Get Up Every Morning

 

You know how fitness freaks talk about keeping their running shoes beside their beds so they don’t forget to get fit first thing every morning?

You can do the same thing every morning with your journaling.

Seriously. Go out and buy the fattest journal you can find and the hugest pencil or pen. Plop those puppies on the floor where you normally place your feet when you get out of bed and just try ignoring them every morning.

When I’ve done this, I take the journal with me to the washroom. And yes, even as a man, I sit down for this even if I’m engaging only duty number one.

(Hey, if you can kill two birds with one wet stone, why not?)

For bonus points, write down any dreams you remember as well. This practice also expands your sense of time because dream journaling expands your awareness of how time passes while you sleep.

Trust me.

Just Try It

 

There’s an entire course about remembering your dreams in the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass if you need more help.

But even if you don’t go through all that training, here’s the thing:

If you just commit to writing down your dreams, you’ll be amazed by what will happen in your life.

And if you can’t remember any dreams, don’t worry. Write that down. It’s as simple as one sentence: “I didn’t remember any dreams.”

Believe it or not, that simple exercise will help you remember dreams, no matter how skeptical you might be.

But I know, I know. You might be thinking, “What If I’m not a morning person?”

No problemo.

Here’s …

 

The Amazing Secret Of Writing Magical “Remember More” Spells Before You Turn Into Pumpkin

 

I don’t know about you, but I have rules about when I go to bed that I try to keep, almost religiously. It helps me keep the blues away, burn more fat, build more muscle and, of course, remember more dreams.

And if you want to remember more about what happened during your day, put that plump journal square on your pillow. That way you won’t be able to ignore it come bed time.

Next, set a timer for five minutes (or even less) and write down everything you remember about your day.

 

Don’t Overthink This Activity!

 

Just write whatever comes to mind starting with breakfast.

And don’t judge yourself. Nothing you write is stupid or insignificant. That little voice in your mind that’s always trying to wreck everything will tell you the entire exercise is dumb, but put a gag on it.

Trust me. That jerk doesn’t have a clue what he, she (or it) is talking about.

For bonus points, put the journal where your feet hit the floor first thing in the morning and then write down your dreams when you get up.

And yes, you should even make note of it when you can’t remember any dreams at all. We know that even one simple sentence acknowledging that you can’t remember any dreams can (and most likely will) trigger dream recall.

If none of these suggestions appeal to you, try this technique on for size:

 

The Miraculous Memory ­Improving Wonders Of Having An Accountability Partner

 

Sarah Peterson from Unsettle.org is my accountability partner. We write each other 3-­4 times a week, sometimes more. We do this exchange for two purposes:

1) To tell each other what we’ve been up to. This practice automatically helps us remember more of what we’ve been doing with our days.

2) To tell each other what we’re going to do next. Each simple report on what’s coming up for us in our businesses massively increases the chances that we’ll actually follow through.

And when you follow through, the effects are magical. Stuff gets done.

Pretty sweet, right?

 

You Bet It Is. Sweeter Than Candy Wrapped In Magnetic Memory Silver!

 

So here’s your homework:

Ask a friend who you know is keen on getting more out of life to be your accountability partner.

Don’t overthink this process. Just whip out an email to the first person that comes to mind.

And if you need a quick template to kick your butt into motion, here’s a template for you;

“Hey [insert name],

I was just listening to the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast and Anthony was talking about how having an accountability partner can help you remember more about our life and even be more productive on a daily basis.

I know that you’re trying to achieve [insert goal] and you know I’d love to [insert goal]. How would you feel about emailing each other every day or every couple of days to check in and see where we’re both at.

Let me know and I’ll send you his podcast with more info on how it works and we’ll get our accountability party started.

Sincerely,

[Your name]

 

Pretty easy, right?

 

Well, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can get in contact with Sarah here and she’ll give you her side of the story and some cool free stuff that will make you even more productive too.

I never tell Sarah about any of the dreams I remember, but now that I’m putting this lesson in remembering more about your life together, maybe I should …

In any case …

Just make sure to ask permission before you start spilling the contents of your unconscious mind into your accountability emails. You don’t want to freak your partner out or distract from the matter at hand: remembering more about your daily activities and becoming more productive in a targeted manner.

And if all of these ideas still don’t appeal because you’re simply not into writing (but still want memory improvement), here’s …

 

How To Supercharge Your Memory By Keeping An Audio Or Video Journal

 

It’s pretty easy. Here’s what you do:

1. Get a device that records video and/or audio

2. Press record

3. Let it all out.

And to show you how it’s done, I’ve made made that quick example video for you on the day I wrote this post. Just scroll up to the top and watch it from beginning to end. I show you how to keep a journal and improve your memory in three ways by giving you an example of this third way.

No need to share these recordings like I’ve done on a YouTube channel or podcast, but heck, why not? You never know: It might go viral and you’ll wind being the next internet celebrity, win new friends and positively influence people.

Stranger things have happened.

 

So here’s the ultimate question:

 

Are you down with one of these daily journaling techniques?

If so, just get started. I guarantee that you’ll remember more about your life and, yes, be more productive.

And if all that weren’t enough, I invite you to learn how to improve your memory even more by claiming this free Memory Improvement Kit. It’ll show you how to create and use a Memory Palace so you can learn, memorize and recall anything in a way that is simple, easy, elegant and fun.

Till next time …

Keep Magnetic!

The Simple Reading Technique That Prepares Your Memory For Anything

How Would You Like A Quote That Will Change Your Life – And Your Memory – For The Better?

 

If the answer is yes, then pay attention to every word of this quote and my commentary on it.

But prepare yourself …

This quote may well contain the most important set of thoughts you will ever read.

“To young writers I give only two secrets that really exist… all the other hints of Rosetta Stones are jiggery-pokery. The two secrets are these:

First, the most important book you can ever read, not only to prepare you as a writer, but to prepare you for life, is not the Bible or some handbook on syntax. It is the complete canon of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The Holmes mysteries are nailed to the fixed point of logic and rational observation. They teach that ratiocination, and a denial of paralogia, go straight to the heart of Pasteur’s admonition that “Chance favors the prepared mind.” The more you know, the more unflinchingly you deny casual beliefs and Accepted Wisdom when it flies in the face of reality, the more carefully you observe the world and its people around you, the better chance you have of writing something meaningful and well-crafted.

From Doyle’s stories an awakened intelligence can learn a system of rational behavior coupled with an ability to bring the process of deductive logic to bear on even the smallest measure of day-to-day existence. It works in life, and it works in art. We call it the writer’s eye. And that, melded to talent and composure, is what one can find in the work of every fine writer.

The second secret, what they never tell you, is that yes, anyone can become a writer…. The trick is not to become a writer, it is to stay a writer. Day after day, year after year, book after book. And for that, you must keep working, even when it seems beyond you. In the words-to-live-by of Thomas Carlyle, “Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a Product, produce it in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou has in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might. Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.”

All that, and learn the accurate meaning of “viable,” do not pronounce it noo-kew-ler, understand the difference between “in a moment” and “momentarily,” and don’t say “hopefully” when you mean “it is to be hoped” or “one hopes.” Because, for one last quotation, as Molly Haskell has written: “language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.”

This quote comes from Harlan Ellison. It has got so much packed into it – and that’s not even to mention the quotes inside the quote.

 

Why Reading Properly Is The Ultimate Cure To Ignorance

 

Here’s a secret:

A lot of people read.

Except that they aren’t really reading.

What does it mean to read a book?

I talk about this in the podcast episode How To Memorize A Textbook. So if you haven’t checked it out, give it a listen.

In brief, it shoes you how to memorize the right parts of a book, not every page. A lot of people think they need to memorize an entire book, but it isn’t true.

There’s a circular question that’s been going round for thousands of years: Is it better to learn and memorize thousands of books to get a broad education? Or is it better to know just a few books better than most people ever will?

 

The Answer Is Pretty Simple!

 

The best book that you ever read, the most important book you can ever read is the book that you actually read.

Of course, it’s up to you which book you read. You don’t have to take Ellison’s advice that it must be Sherlock Holmes.

Ellison asks us to see a life lesson in Holmes: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

And that’s really what Holmes is all about. After all, using Memory Palaces or Mind Palaces is the ultimate preparation.

At the same time, it’s not really that Holmes has some super intellect or that he uses Memory Palaces or that he is more intelligent than anyone else. It’s just that he has a prepared mind.

And this leads us back to this idea of reading a thousand books or reading one book.

 

Memorize! Memorize! Memorize!

 

Do you remember the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast episode How to Tap the Mind of a Ten‑Year-Old Memory Palace Master?

In it, I interviewed Alicia Crosby, the 10‑year-old who used Memory Palaces to memorize all of the Shakespeare plays in historical order by title.

Not the actual content of the plays, mind you, but the title of every play – which is still an extraordinary feat.

On the interview, we also heard from her father. Together, they were talking motorcycle rides and making Memory Palaces along the way. These Memory Palaces were filled with beautiful stations found along the way.

All done at speed.

And that’s a beautiful thing. But (and with respect to my speedreading friends) …

 

Reading At Speed Is Not Always The Best Way To Invite Information Into Your Mind!

 

During the interview, I told a story from Kafka.

In that story, a young man has to travel to a different city to get to work. Day in and day out, he takes the train.

Then one day he misses the train, so he has to take a bicycle.

When he gets to the town, he sees this old man who is sitting on a bench.

He says to the old man, “My, I have never noticed so much about this journey, but now that I’ve taken a bicycle, wow, this is amazing. I noticed so much detail. I became aware of so many things that were never evident to me before.”

The old man says, “Yeah, well just wait and see what you discover when you walk next time.”

 

There’s No Shame In Slowing Down

 

This story from Kafka is about slowing down. It is about actively noticing the world around you. And being prepared to do so.

This man on the bike – he wasn’t prepared at all. In fact, as he was constantly taking the train, life was passing him by. All the different details whizzed past so that he never had a chance to memorize anything because he was just not paying attention to anything.

But slowing things down by taking the bike, made so many details evident.

And for the kicker ending, as the old man suggests, walking makes the details of the world even more evident.

 

The World Becomes Eye-Catching When You Walk “Psychogeographically”

 

Have you ever read Will Self?

If not, check out his book Psychogeography.

Psychogeography is the idea that you can walk to an airport, for example, get on a plane and then walk to your hotel.

According to self, your body will not know that you haven’t walked to New York.

For example, Self talks about flying from Heathrow in London to JFK in New York and how going by foot to the airport and then walking from the airport to his hotel tricked his body into thinking he walked the whole way.

Now, to the extent that Self’s procedure actually tricks your mind, I don’t know, but the term “psychogeography” certainly is an appropriate because when you walk, you can notice more things.

And the more things you notice, the more things you can notice. Just like with learning, the more you can learn, the more you can learn because you have more of a basis upon which to ground more learning.

Fantastic, right?

Good.

 

Then Just Do It

 

And then take another look at the Thomas Carlyle quote Harlan Ellison gives us.

In it, Carlyle is saying, “Produce! Produce!”

Do something.

Do it.

And whatever you have before you to do, do it with your entire mind, and with your entire body. Do it with your entire soul. Get in there and do it.

Do it in a way that is whole and complete, in a way that has a beginning and a middle and an end.

Why?

Because as Carlyle says, “the Night cometh,” and nobody can work in the night.

What is night in this quote?

 

Night Is Death

 

Look, most of us work with half our butt hanging out of our pants.

We’re not fully involved in our work.

We are half involved in it.

We’re a quarter involved in it.

Maybe we’re even just 10 percent involved in it (or less).

That’s no good.

Worse …

 

It’s No Way To Live!

 

And so that’s why being prepared with memory techniques and Memory Palaces is one of the best things you can do for yourself.

Why?

Because you are able to focus on information in a completely different way, at a much deeper level, at a 100 percent level.

Don’t you think that’s much better than passively trying to get information into your memory?

Or do you prefer hoping or praying or wishing on a cloud that what you need to learn will osmosisize itself into your brain?

 

Here’s The Ugly Truth …

 

It ain’t gonna happen!

Or at least, it’s not going to happen in any way that is nearly as miraculous, magical and almost as instantaneously as when you use memory techniques.

 

And When You’ve Got The Right Memory Techniques Working For You …

 

You can do things with your whole might like Carlyle advises.

You can do every completely when you’re using memory techniques because of the very nature of this learning practice changes the information.

As Wayne Dyer often quotes, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.

And it’s true.

When you look at a foreign language word and use memory techniques, it looks completely different than when you don’t use them.

Why?

Because when you don’t use memory techniques, you take the word as a whole.

But when you use something like the Magnetic Memory Method, you breaking the word apart.

You start thinking creatively. For example, what happens if I attach this part of the word to Al Pacino?

What about if I attach this other part of the word to Homer Simpson?

And what if I have them doing something together to help me remember the meaning of the word?

 

Doing This Makes Learning Tastier Than Candy!

 

The learning process becomes like liquorish in a candy store. You just can’t help but suck on every last jawbreaker and you don’t want to chew it and you don’t want to swallow it because it tastes so good and you want to hold that wonderful taste of knowledge in your mouth much longer.

So you hold it in your mind much longer.

You become interested in the information in a completely different way.

The information becomes part of the theatre in your mind.

The information becomes a character.

The information becomes real.

 

But You Have To Give It 100% Of Your Attention

 

Not 25% percent of your attention.

Not scribbles on an index card attention.

Not passive spaced repetition software attention.

 

You’ve Got To Give It The Attention Of Your Entire Soul

 

And more than that, your whole mind, your whole imagination, your whole being.

So get out there.

Get prepared with a dedicated memory strategy and at least one solid Memory Palace and never forget:

“Chance favors the prepared mind.”

Further Resources

Grab my FREE Memory Improvement Kit

Read this book:

How Psychics Abuse Your Working Memory To Rip You Off

You’d like to have psychic powers, wouldn’t you?

 

Go on. Admit it. Life would be easier if you could read the mind of your friends and lovers. And you could be rich overnight by divining the insights of the best stock pickers alive.

But the reality is that psychic powers do not exist. Or at least, there’s no meaningful evidence to suggest that they do.

Yet the question is, why do so many people believe in psychic powers? Why are tarot readings and crystal divinations and all kinds of claptrap so attractive to so many people.

Perhaps some of the answer to these questions involves working memory. So in this episode of the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast, let’s talk about how.

 

What is working memory?

 

Working memory is the system that is responsible for holding and processing new and already stored information – for a short time.

Having working memory is important  for reasoning, comprehension, learning and memory updating.

As a term, working memory is generally used synonymously with short term memory. Yet, the two concepts are distinct and should be distinguished from one another.

Whereas working memory is a theoretical framework that refers to structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information, short-term memory refers to the short-term storage of information, and does not entail the manipulation or organization of material held in memory.

Given these facts about working memory, it seems clear that it plays a roll in why people believe the psychics and their readings.

Here’s why …

 

First off, psychics overwhelm their clients with questions. By asking them to access so much about their past, it can be difficult, if not impossible to remember the questions the psychic asked.

As a result, the person sitting for the psychic reading will only remember the hits and not the misses. “Hits,” just to define this term, is the word used to describe any time a psychic gets something right. “Misses” refers to any time the psychic gets something wrong.

As we’ll see, talented psychics use language as a tool for increasing the recall of hits and obliterating our memory of the misses.

Magicians know how to use this effect as well. For example, they use what is commonly called misdirection. But in reality, they use …

 

Focused Attention

 

By using focused attention, you are not misdirected but rather directed to pay attention on the wrong things. The audience then remembers only the big moves the magician makes, and should they have spotted the small moves in which the dirty work is done, the cognitive overload of the big moves erases the memory of anything else.

In fact, the most rewarding compliment a magician can hear is, “but he didn’t do anything.” In these cases, the big moves have been so natural or ordinary that they have no meaning for working memory to grasp onto.

But “misdirection” isn’t the best word for this technique. A better term would be focused attention. To “misdirect” is to draw attention away from something. But sleight of hand works best when concentration is so focused on innocent movements that it cannot pay attention to the dirty ones.

Psychics use the exact same process, but in this case, instead of calling it sleight of hand, we should call it …

 

Sleight Of Mouth

 

Psychics often hide their moves by asking questions that for most people will generate “yes” answers.

Drawing from Ian Rowland’s excellent The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading, here are some of those questions. Follow along and think about how many of these questions would generate a yes from you.

Have you recently come across some old photographs, some in albums, some that still need to be properly arranged?Have you recently thrown out some medical supplies that had gone out of date or expired?Have you recently thrown out or donated some old books, toys or clothing?Is there a note on your fridge or by the phone that is no longer relevant but you haven’t yet thrown away?Are there any stuck drawers or drawers that don’t slide properly in your home?Do you have keys that you cannot remember what locks they belong to?Do you own a broken watch or clock you’ve been meaning to get fixed?Have you ever had an accident or near-accident involving water?Is the number 2 in your address or does someone significant in your life have the number 2?Do you have a scar on your elbow or knee?Is there a blue car or truck parked across the street from your home or work?Do you carry photos of a loved one in your wallet or purse?Is there a set of earrings that you’ve lost one half of? (For a man, the psychic can ask the same question about the jewelry collection of a girlfriend or wife.)

And so on.

Chances are that you probably answers yes to a significant number of these questions. All of them rely on accessing your long term temporal memory and often your spatial memory.

Whether you say yes or no, the psychic will quickly overload your short term working memory by saying “yes and” or “no but,” a tactic identified by the great magician and mentalist Kenton Knepper.

To illustrate how this works …

 

Imagine the following psychic reading …

 

Psychic: Have you or someone in you family recently experienced an illness?

Client: Yes …

Psychic: Yes and they needed to take some medicine for that?

Client: No …

Psychic: No, but they did eventually get well on their own.

By stringing together a long series of questions linked by “yes and” plus “no but” statements, the psychic creates the illusion of always being right. In reality, the psychic is right about general aspects of life that almost certainly must be true.

They can heighten this effect by gauging the age of the client. For example, if the client is young, the psychic might not ask them about illness in the family. But the older the client is, the more likely they or a family member has experienced an illness.

By asking questions that cause the client to access the general past and then helping the client link their answers to “yes and”/”no but” statements, the psychic completely overloads and distorts the client’s working memory.

The client will not only think that the psychic knew an overwhelming amount of info about them. The client will distort the experience and remember things that never happened during the psychic reading.

Magicians also create this distortion effect. I’ve seen it many times. For example, years later people will ask me to repeat magic tricks I once performed for them. But the trick they describe bears little resemblance to the trick I actually performed. Due to the powers of focused attention and the words I used during the trick, working memory becomes the enemy of reality and long term memory is tricked into remembering miracles better than even the best magicians are capable of creating.
 

Psychics do not have super powers.

Rather, they are masters of memory (just not in the way we would normally use that term). Psychics overwhelm working memory by distorting the present with leading questions and tricky language that creates paths toward their desired results.

They use our memory against us to exploit our desire for certainty in life and create false impressions that encourage us to take out our wallets again and again for more of the same.

 

How to Defeat Psychics At Their Own Game

 

The way to test a psychic is to use the very same tools against them and overwhelm their working memory.

For example, if a psychic gets a hit, you can answer with “yes and” or “no but.” Like this:

Psychic: Have you experienced an accident involving water, either in the recent past or when you were younger?

Client: No, but I did fall off my bike and scarred my knee in the center of the city with no water around. Didn’t you know that?

Or:

Psychic: Am I sensing it right that you or someone close to you had the number 1 or 3 in you address?

You: Yes, we both do, and I also have 4 and 6 in my postal code as does everyone in my neighborhood. Why don’t you know that?

By using the “yes and” and “no but” principle to your advantage, you will overload the psychics own working memory with tracking their own errors.
They will start to seem like a bad lawyer who can’t track any of the details going on in the courtroom and soon lose the case.

And so, now you know how your working memory can be used against you and how you can use working memory against them in your defense. So get out there and have a blast and see how you can’t extend your new knowledge to other areas of life where advertisements, politicians and teachers are also using working memory against you to distort your perceptions and even control entire aspects of your
life.

Further Reading

The Surprising Truth About Hypnosis And Memory Improvement

Laugh And Cry Your Way To Memory Improvement

How To Use Your Emotions To Memorize More Instead Of Letting Them Take Over Your Life And Make A Big Fat Mess Of Everything

 

You’re an emotional person, aren’t you?

Those uncontrollable feelings well up from time to time, perhaps even taking over the show. In other words, emotions replace the you that you know with someone quite different.

At least, that’s one way of looking at it. Emotions are different versions of ourselves. The self that becomes overwhelmed by laughter is different than the self who drowns in sorrow and misery.

But then eventually you find your way back. You become you once again.

 

The Only Problem Is That You Don’t Become You!

 

 

Strong emotional states change you, and I’ll bet you remember at least a couple of times that you’ve been changed so strongly by an emotional state that you’ve had no means of going back. You’re as chemically changed as toast is to bread.

The question is, to what extent is this change due to memory? Has the experience of emotion changed you as such, or does it impact your memory so much that you literally remember to be a different person.

Certainly, post traumatic stress disorder provides some examples of people affected by memories so strongly that constant recall of the traumatic event causes that new version of the person to hold fast.

But that state does have to be renewed. Even if the person feels that the memories are coming back of their own accord, they must at some level be participating in the reconstruction.

And such events don’t mean that trauma has improved memory in that instant so much so that the person remembers everything in sparkling detail. Traumatic memory in no way ensures accuracy and it can also lead to the repression of memory.

 

The Return Of The Repressed

 

Repression and suppression of memory is really intense because it is essentially an attempt to obliterate memories from the mind. But as Sigmund Freud made himself famous for saying, what we repress returns, usually in the form of a monster.

Post-Freud, we have some interesting research about the suppression of memory. For example, test subjects asked to repress feelings of disgust while watching a horror movie remembered far less about the story and with much less accuracy than those not asked to repress their feelings.

And plane crash survivors who remain calm have been said to remember more than people overwhelmed by hysterics.

I’ve experienced this memory effect myself following a near miss trying to land in Toronto. I was going there from New York to sit for a field exam when the plane suddenly pulled up and circled over the city. We late learned that another plane had still been on the runway ahead of us, and thank goodness the pilot pulled us out of there in time enough to avoid a fiery collision.

Although I didn’t go crazy in terms of screaming or crying out, my inner life went nuts, something that affected my memory for days and days after. While sitting for the exam, for the first time I felt a real disruption in accessing my Memory Palaces and mnemonics. All the more so because one person on the committee was in the warpath and doing her best to see me fail.

But luckily, I had relaxation on my side and calmed myself. I reminded myself of the combined power of memory and relaxation and without suppressing or repressing the feelings of terror I remembered from the previous days’s adventure in the sky, I managed to handle that remembered stress and the current stress at the same time.

And this is interesting because I could have broken down into tears or hysterics in that examination room because I was so fragile. But according to some theories, memories and the emotions tied to them don’t force us to act in particular ways. But these emotional memories do influence our actions.

And that’s good news because with the exception of hungry lions and tigers and bears (like during that examination), most everything that influences us, we can influence back.

 

Control:The One Advantage You Can Use When Your Emotions Get Really Crazy

 

Emotions and memories share one major characteristic: they are both highly manipulable.

Think of emotions and memory like blinking and breathing. Both blinking and breathing happen on autopilot. We don’t have to think about them in the least in order for them to happen.

But we can think about them and control them – at least for a while. You can choose to have a staring contest, you can keep you eyes closed even though you are not sleeping or you can flutter your eye lids at anyone you fancy. You can do this entirely at will.

Likewise, you can influence your breathing. You can hold your breath, cause yourself to gasp and deliberately sync inhalations with exhalations as you walk or jog.

And so it is with memory. You can deliberately call up memories of your childhood. You can say, “I want to think about grade one” and deliberately call up – or try to call up – the name of your teacher.

Along with this deliberate action, emotions might also arise. And it makes for a good memory exercise.

 

Try This Amazing Exercise

 

Want to experience memory improvement? Try this:

Think of every teacher you can remember and explore at least one emotion associated with them.

When I did this, I was amazed by how many teachers I can recall by name. From grades one to twelve, the names of only three teachers evade me, not counting substitute teachers, of course.

And for each teacher I can remember an emotion. In some cases, the emotions are similar: frustration at being told what to do. In other cases, it is fondness, or the feeling of being liked by the teacher. And in yet other cases, yes, I can remember even the emotion of lust, even at a young age.

It’s a fascinating exercise, one that will teach you much about the depth and breadth of your memory. Even if you bump up against limitations, that’s okay. Explore them. Feel the borders. Give them a gentle push without trying to force them to extend.

Massage the name out if the woodwork, so to speak, by seeing yourself in the classroom, bringing up all the nuances and details of the atmosphere. Bask in what you can recall and more is much more likely to come then if you give up in frustration.

 

And If You Come Up Totally Blank …

 

…give it a rest. Come back to it. Maybe something will percolate.

And if the memory of bad emotions come up, massage them too. Explore how you can use your imagination to eliminate their power. You can change their shape, remove their color, turn them into a funny cartoon. You can manipulate those feelings in any way you want.

And because the negative feelings you’ll drum up from high school are probably tame, you’ll get good practice manipulating the really dramatic emotions that life will throw at you later. Because the only thing we know emotional states is that they will come. We cannot predict what they will or why they’ll happen. But even so, we can be prepared for them.

So take notes and remember to do these exercises to help you develop emotional control, starting with remembering all the teachers you can and at least one emotion you associate with each.

Then manipulate that emotion. Practice working it out and not so much eliminating it or trying to force it out of memory, but transforming it the way you can turn bread into toast, in a way that it can never return to its original negative state.

Practice this and you’ll soon be able to work with any emotion that comes up in real time with ease. That will help you remember more because you’re not repressing the unpredictable but letting it be.

Further Resources:

Do You Remember Enough To Write An Accurate Book About Your Life?

The Surprising Truth About Hypnosis and Memory Improvement

How Cool Would It Be If You Could Hypnotize Your Way To A Better Memory?

 

Well, good luck. As you’re about to learn, there’s no scientific basis or reason to believe that hypnosis can cause memory improvement.

But to look at this issue, it will be helpful to focus on one area where hypnosis has been used in the attempt to improve memory: court cases.

So our question is, can hypnosis really improve the memory of witnesses? Read every word of this post if you want to learn several key ways that you can still make strides with your memory improvement goals even if hypnosis turns out to be a dud when it comes to enhanced memory.

 

Would You Believe That Hypnosis For Memory Improvement Goes This Far Back?

 

Hypnosis in the courts has a long history. If we can focus solely on America, I’ve read that hypnosis to improve the memories of witnesses was first rejected in 1897 by the Supreme Court of California.

After that, there’s a dark spot until after World War II. Given all that happened during this war, officials wanted reliable ways to enhance the recall of witnesses.

But despite all kinds of testing, to this date, no meaningful evidence supports hypnosis as a reliable means of improving memory. Especially not for providing testimony in a court of law.

Let’s break this issue down into parts so we can get both a broad and specific perspective.

 

This Is The Truth About Memory And Hypnosis The TV Shows Don’t Want You To Know About

 

First off, hypnosis of this kind sets itself up for failure.

Why?

Because you can’t improve something that mostly doesn’t exist.

Think about it. You’re walking down the street and you see a crime. You weren’t expecting anything would happen, but then something does happen. The memories you do form are based on information that you have learned incidentally.

For example, I was riding my bike last Sunday to the Mauerpark. There’s a wonderful Flea Market and I was going to look for some cool postcards to send new members of the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass. I usually find something cool there, often old cards with interesting buildings are memorable art that helps stimulate creativity.

Anyhow, I was stopped at a light when all of a sudden two guys ran into the street in front of a car. They asked a group of maybe three people, “This one?” and the group of people said yes.

 

Rage-Fuelled Vengeance On The Streets Of Berlin!

 

Then the two guys approached the doors of the car. One went to the passenger side, the other to the driver’s side. I think the car was blue, but I don’t quite remember. It may have had four doors.

What I do remember is that the guys opened the doors and started yelling.

The driver and the passenger were clearly in shock and didn’t know what to do. Finally, the passenger pulled out a wallet and in a Russian accent, the guy standing in the street said, “Give it me!” He ripped the wallet out of the guy’s hand and slammed the door. As the other guy slammed the driver’s door, the colliding air created a puff of ash from the ashtray. After the two men got back onto the sidewalk, the light turned green and the car sped off.

 

Which Of These These Facts Prove That Hypnosis Has No Chance When It Comes To Improving Memory?

 

What I’ve done just now is to recall an event that I “learned” incidentally.

As I’m telling it to you, there are oodles of things I’m not telling you because there aren’t enough words in the universe to explain:

* The urgent voice in the back of my head telling me to get the hell out of there.

* The fact that the two guys in the car were either Turkish or Syrian.

* The hot girl on the bike in front of me with people who may or may not have been her brother and father.

* My thoughts following the event, such as the concern that someone could have been shot, questions about the crime rate in Berlin and other images and concepts rolling around in my mind.

Shortly thereafter, I forgot about the whole thing until it came time to put together this podcast. In fact, I had already outlined the entire episode before this event happen, and only when I started writing it did I remember this event.

And if I were asked to give testimony about it, my testimony would be deeply flawed because I wasn’t expecting such an event to happen. As Harry Lorayne points out in all his books, you cannot remember what you haven’t paid attention to in the first place.

That’s why I couldn’t tell you:

* Anything about the clothes any of the people were wearing (except for the clothes on the girl on the bike, because I was definitely paying attention to those).

The hair color of the Russian guys.The color of the wallet.The exact color or make of the car.The exact time of day.The name of the intersecting street (though I could take you to it if necessary).

* … and there is probably so much more useful information that the cops might need to know if they were to put together a case.

And in this case, the large amount that I do remember possible has to do with shock, the novelty of the event, the ease with which the event could be made into a linear story and the fact that I have a trained memory. But just as each of these things could support the idea that I’ve remembered things well, each point could also prove me to be a poor witness.

Why?

Because …

 

Shock Must Be One Of The Most Amnesia-Inducing Conditions In The World!

 

In any case, if a prosecutor wanted to use hypnosis on me, he would be making a couple of assumptions about memory.

First, hypnosis for eyewitness testimony assumes that memory is like a video recorder. One of the reasons enhanced memory is not normally accepted in a court of law is that we know memory does not store information for playback.

Rather, memories are reconstructed. Not only that, but memories are a reconstructed pastiche of many things.

For example, memory takes place only the present. You can only ask a person to recall information in their present moment. They cannot recall the information the past and they cannot recall it in the future. Memory only takes place in the present.

For that reason, every time you reconstruct a memory, you are affected by context. You are also affected by language.

Remember how I said that there are too many words for the truth to exist (as such) just a few minutes ago?

It’s true. There are so many words to choose from and so many possible combinations, unless you memorized what you were saying as you said it …

You could never repeat the same memory twice. Your report would always be slightly different.

 

There Are More Villains Of Forgetfulness Waiting To Snatch Your Memories Away …

 

And each time you retold your memories, you might be:

Tired and hungryTelling it to a different personImpatientAngryLess certain than the time before about your accuracyMore certain than the time before … and much, much more

And all this depends on how much of the target information survived your short term memory and made it into long term memory.

And as massive as long term memory is, it is useful only to the extent that you can reconstruct useful and reliable material from it.

Are you interested in diving deeper into this issue?

You are?

Good. Then let’s go.

When we talk about memories moving around in the mind and recall as something that happens only in a certain kind of time (the present), we need to look at the three stages of memory.

 

The People Who Understand The Following Three Phases Will End Up Having A Better Memory

 

These are:

1. Acquisition
2. Retention
3. Retrieval

Acquisition involves encoding information for retention. The quality of the encoding relies upon the attention you’ve paid to the information and to what extent you’ve intentionally memorized it. As I mentioned, everything I recalled from the automobile situation last Sunday was learned incidentally. I made no special attempt to memorize anything and what I do remember was selected by my long term memory from a field of other thoughts, shock and the additional thoughts I added later.

The retention stage involves storing the memories. But this isn’t like storing old baseball mits in a box at the back of your shed. As Dr. Gary Small told us in an interview with him here on the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast a few weeks back, memories move around in the brain as they age.

This movement effects the quality of recall, both positively and negatively. It also changes the context of the information and how it will be recalled in new contexts during the reconstruction phase.

We’ve gone through this a bit already with my story from last Sunday, but let’s look at how the memory of witnesses can be affected during all of these stages:

Acquisition is influenced by:

* Age
* Level of rest
* Physical fitness
* Emotional states
* Confidence
* Stress
* Mood
* Attitude

You also have the factor of expectation. Again, if you haven’t expected to remember something, the something you are able to recall will most likely be of low quality.

Another factor involves the characteristics of the material:

* Is it an object?
* Is it a person?
* How many objects or people were involved?
* Are there any moving parts?
* How big or small are these objects or people?

We also have to account for the length of exposure to the the information. Did it take place in an instant, or did the witness have more time to study the event?

Finally, we have the addition of information between the instances of the event and the instances of recall.

 

The Most Comforting Memories You’ll Ever Have Are The Ones You’ve Completely Bent Out Of Shape

 

For example, imagine that you saw The Dark Knight at the movie theatre. You tell a bunch of friends about the movie and you balance your report by giving all the characters equal time.

Then you learn that Heath Ledger died. The next time you tell someone about the film, you’re much more likely to focus on the Joker parts of the film because the additional information about the film will not only change your memory of the film, but also how you talk about it. And each time you talk about a memory, you add more information to it, which changes it even more. You are in effect playing the telephone game with yourself.

Not only that, but you may not have really thought much about Heath Ledger as an actor, but by paying attention to him differently based on the new information, you may suddenly find that you’ve become a fan.

 

How To Influence Someone’s Memory Simply By Choosing Your Words Carefully

 

To look at this differently, you’ve probably heard about the scientific studies where they show people films of car crashes.

When they ask people “how fast the cars were going before they collided,” they answer differently than when they ask people how fast the cars were going before they crashed or smashed into one another.

The way the mind hears the question conditions the answer. And questions count as new information.

So if I say to you, “How did you like the Joker in Batman,” you will select a different answer from your memory than if I ask you, “How did you like Heath Ledger’s final performance as the Joker in Batman?”

 

The Nearly-Miraculous Ways Interrogators Can Control Everything About Your Memory – Even If You’re The Good Guy!

 

So far we’ve covered some of the basic issues surrounding memory and hypnosis. Now let’s look more at the reconstruction of memories during interrogation and on the stand.

Investigators and prosecutors ask witnesses to reconstruct their memories in different ways.

The first is free narrative. The interrogator opens up free narrative by asking open-ended questions. For example, they might say, “tell me what you remember about the incident.”

The research shows that this kind of witness testimony produces surprisingly few errors. But the witnesses also often leave huge gaps.

Next we have controlled narrative. In this case, the interrogator ask for detailed descriptions of the event. They might ask, for example, “what was the assailant wearing?” to guide the witness towards specifics. This kind of testimony may indeed produce more detail, but the accuracy of the detail goes down.

Finally, we have forced choice. These are specific questions for which the witness can only give a limited number of answers. These are yes or no questions or either-or questions. “Was the car red or black?” is a question that requires a specific answer.

Although this kind of questioning provides the highest amount of detail, it produces the least amount of accuracy. When you press people to choose, you cut their ability to describe.

 

You Can Force Anyone To Remember Anything You Wish By Using This Memory-Shaping Technique …

 

Forced choice also leads people to give the answer they think the interrogator wants. And questions like these do indeed force certain assumptions. For example, a question like, “did you see the gun?” implies that there was a gun.

Moreover, the question puts the image of a gun into the imagination of the witness. As we talked about, the addition of new information can cause – and usually does cause – memories to change every time we reconstruct them.

 

Spell-Binding Questions That You’ll Want To Ask Yourself Before Giving Testimony Under Hypnosis In A Court Of Law

 

With these problems in mind, when we factor in hypnosis-aided testimony need to answer several questions. These questions include:

1) Does hypnosis create confidence? In other words, do witnesses become more convinced of the truth because hypnosis convinces them that their memories are more real.

Most of us know from our own lives how this works. Once we are convinced that we’ve experienced something a certain way, it becomes impossible to change back. We cannot go back to questioning the validity of our memory.

2) Does hypnosis help “destroy evidence?” In other words, if hypnosis makes a person more confident in their memory and the introduction of new information changes how they remember, where has the original evidence gone?

3) How to deal with the fact that the memories were not intentionally gathered. The witness was not instructed to learn it as if they were a student in school. These memories are typically the result of highly emotional conflict. And when the witness gives testimony, the future of someone’s life is at stake. If they mess up, an innocent person could wind up in the electric chair.

4) To what extent can the memories of witnesses be trusted even in the absence of hypnosis?

Over time, courts have suggested some solutions to some of these problems. These solutions include:

A) Leave it up to jury decision. The judge needs to point out that hypnosis assisted certain witness testimony and that they should place no more or less emphasis on the testimony as a result of the hypnosis.

B) Reject hypnosis-assisted testimony. Due to the lack of scientific evidence that hypnosis helps memory, some courts have barred all such testimony.

C) Use strict guidelines. In this case, hypnosis must be carried out by a licensed psychologist or psychiatrist trained in the practice.

Plus, the hypnotist must not be informed of the facts of the case before the session takes place. This measure is to ensure that the hypnotist cannot influence the testimony.

The hypnotist should also be independent, not someone chosen by either the prosecutor or the defence team.

Everything must be recorded on video, including from the beginning to the end of the meeting to capture any comments that may have influenced the testimony. This will also help reduce the chance of introducing post-hypnotic suggestions.

No one else should be present during the hypnotic session. Other people can unconsciously or inadvertently communicate what they expect to hear the witness say. They might also look startled, upset of disappointed by the testimony, shaping how the witness reconstructs their memories.

An expert in hypnosis must testify before the jury about the use of hypnosis to assist the witness in remembering more.

They must also explain that hypnosis is a suggestive procedure that does not ensure the validity of anything said during the testimony.

As you can imagine, there is a lot more to be said about this topic. But to sum up for now, we can now ask the ultimate question lurking behind this issues:

 

Can Hypnosis Improve Recall?

 

The answer is most likely no. Here’s why:

There’s no objective way to identify the accuracy or inaccuracy of any memory of an event. Memories are reconstructed, can only be delivered in the presence, and most studies show that memories are easily manipulated.

Also, there’s no way to tell if the memories were created by other means. For example, the witness could be lying. They might have heard someone else’s testimony or they saw something on TV. They may have revisited the scene of the crime. Worse, they might simply be unsure themselves of what exactly they saw.

Finally, when hypnosis takes place and memory does appear to be improved, it might not be hypnosis at all behind the improvement. Other factors might trigger recall, such as concentration, better rest, no longer being in shock, other forms of therapy, etc.

 

Warning!The Secret Key To The Goldmine Of Memory Is Not Here

 

IF hypnosis can be said to improve recall, it may be because:

1. People lower the level of what they would normally consider a good memory.

2. People under hypnosis may be praised for any memories they give. This may cause them to give a lot more detail, but the significance of these details may be in questions. The quantity and relatedness of the memories does not necessarily amount to quality and accuracy.

3. Repeated interrogation under hypnosis may improve more recall, but this could be the result of the witness simply giving the prosecutors what they think the prosecutors want.

So with all this said, what can we learn from these issues? How can they help us improve our own memory and reach our goals?

 

Here Are The Real Secrets You Can Learn And Apply From The Memory And Hypnosis Fiasco

 

There are several lessons here:

1. Relaxation does help us produce more detail.

2. We can change our memories by adding more detail. This fact of memory need not be negative. In fact, it is helpful when it comes to using mnemonics. The more we can associate unfamiliar information with familiar information, the easier it is to memorize.

3. We know that consequences count. Just as the stress of helping shape the future of someone’s life affects eyewitness testimony, the stress of texts, exams, speaking a foreign language, etc. shapes how well we recall information. This fact takes us back to relaxation because we can indeed train ourselves to be relaxed under pressure.

4. The importance of scientific validity when it comes to memory. Although there is no real evidence that hypnosis improves memory, we have all kinds of evidence that mnemonics do.

 

The Only Real Secret Weapon Of Memory Improvement You’ll Ever Need

 

But at the end of the day, the only science that matters is based on the experiments you perform yourself. You need to learn the techniques, apply them and track your results. Only then can you make informed decisions about how to change your approach. And only you can do the work of improving your memory. No court of law can force you to it, only your interest, your passion and your need.

So what are you waiting for?

Until next time, I hope that you never have to give eyewitness testimony. I also hope you never have to bump up against the law leading to someone else giving testimony against you.

Keep safe, keep on the right side of the law and until next time, keep Magnetic.

Further Resources

10 Memorization Not So Tricky Tricks

Memory Techniques For A Language Like No Other

How To Memorize Even The Most Difficult Words In The World

Hey everybody, this is Daniel Welsch.

And I’m here today as a special guest host for the Magnetic Memory Method podcast.

Anthony invited me to do the podcast today and it’s a great pleasure and enormous honor for me to do so.

I’ve been following Anthony’s work for about a year and I’ve been corresponding with him for nearly the same length of time and he’s been a great inspiration to me, not only in my memorizing ventures but also in my own work as a teacher and writer here in Madrid, the beautiful capital of Spain.

So when he offered me the chance to do the podcast of course I jumped at it…

So first I’m going to tell you a bit about my language learning journey. And then I’m going to tell you how I became acquainted with Doctor Metivier and his work. And finally, I’m going to take you through one of my Memory Palaces to show you exactly how I memorized some very difficult material from a language that’s like no other language in existence.

Now…  A little bit about me.

Aprende Más Inglés

You probably don’t know me, because most of the work I do is in Spanish.

But I have my own website called Aprende Más Inglés, which you can find at aprendemasingles.com. There I teach English grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation—and now, learning techniques and how to be a more effective student and person in general.

You might want to know a bit about me. Well, I was born in the US, specifically in Phoenix, Arizona, a city in the middle of the Sonoran Desert a couple of hours from the Mexican border.

Filling In Blanks On Worksheets Has Never Been One of My Passions

In school I learned Spanish but never took it too seriously. After that I ended up working in a kitchen with some guys from Mexico and found that speaking languages was a lot more fun than learning them in school.

Filling in blanks on worksheets has never been one of my passions.

When I was 21 I moved to Madrid, Spain, which is kind of a long story, and ended up, one way or another, teaching English.

And at the same time I was learning more and more Spanish. I was doing it organically, for the most part. I had some free Spanish classes, which I barely ever went to. And the rest of the time I was walking around, talking to people, reading the newspaper, watching TV, things like that.

At the same time, at work I was teaching English.

And I was kind of startled by how ineffective language learning in Spain was. Of course, back in the US it wasn’t any better, but in Spain learning English is just hugely important for a lot of people. Now that Spain is in the European Union and with the massive amount of international business and tourism that goes on, almost everybody needs to learn English.

It should almost be a strategic objective for all of Spain, to get the general level of English up to the level where they could compete with any country in Europe.

But unfortunately, the system wasn’t very effective at actually creating bilingual Spaniards. And after a few years I started to discover why.

But we’ll get back to that…

Couldn’t Speak, Or Even Worse, Refused To Speak

While I was teaching, I had a website where I was writing about grammar and vocabulary.

And in the meantime, my Spanish was getting better and better. I eventually got the highest level diploma in Spanish offered by the Instituto Cervantes, which is an international organization that teaches Spanish like the British Council teaches English.

And the thing about it was that I never felt like learning Spanish was a chore or an effort. I did the minimum possible in school, and later learned working in a kitchen with some guys from Mexico. And my Spanish really took off when I moved to Madrid and discovered that I could use it to meet girls.

Meanwhile, a lot of my students had studied for years and couldn’t speak, or even worse, refused to speak. They were terrified!

I decided that maybe more grammar wasn’t what people needed.

And after a couple of weeks on vacation in Italy, with my girlfriend at the time, I realized that everybody was going about it all wrong.

A Sort Of Exotic Dialect …

What happened in Italy is that I was in contact with a sort of exotic dialect of Italian that doesn’t sound anything like “standard” Italian. As far as I know there are no textbooks for this sort of thing.

They don’t even really have a literature in this dialect—it’s a small-town thing, and if you want to leave the town and do big things in Italy as a whole you need to learn proper Italian.

So I had been there surrounded by this dialect, and I had found that the book I had read to learn some Italian before going had been pretty useless too, since the pronunciation was so different than what I was hearing in small town central Italy.

In any case, by just listening and imitating and having fun with it, I was able to pick up enough of this dialect to have a sort of conversation pretty quickly.

With my knowledge of Spanish, my knowledge of standard Italian, and just listening, I was able to pick it up.

And on the way back to Spain, my flight was delayed, and I was stuck in an airport in Bologna or something similar and decided to write the outline for a book about language learning.

It took me several weeks to get it all on paper, once I was back in Spain, but I wanted to make it a sort of compendium of everything I had discovered about language learning, both as a teacher and a language learner, in my years of experience.

I called it 6 Claves para Aprender Inglés, which would translate to 6 Keys for Learning English, and I published it on Amazon, followed by a few blog posts.

In fact, I had very low expectations, but the book went to #1 in Education on Amazon in Spain, and eventually to #1 over all.

And one thing leading to another like it does, I decided to leave the grammar alone for awhile and start focusing on learning techniques and writing about how to be a more effective language learner.

So…

A Podcast About Memory

That brings me to how I met Anthony. I was in the park down the street, working out with my friend Jef. My friend Jef is a brilliant guy in his own right. And in between our sets of pullups he told me he was going to send me a link to a podcast about memory.

I had heard about memory palaces before, but it sounded sort of complicated. And I had never gotten into it. But I listened to Anthony, and his enthusiasm for the topic was so convincing that I sat down the next day and started memorizing.

I memorized, just as an exercise, the 50 provinces of Spain, from Álava to Zaragoza. It was surprisingly easy.

And I wrote an article about it for my website, which I sent to Anthony.

The next day, being the kind of guy he is (the on top of his email kind of guy, something which I aspire to imitate him in… some day…) he answered me and said we should do a podcast about it.

You can check out the podcast we did together, where we talk about imagination, pink elephants, Jimi Hendrix, and a lot of other things.

They Had All Used Memory Palaces …

I got some feedback from my readers—the doctors, especially, said that they had all used Memory Palaces to pass their exams back in the day. And that it had worked for them just as well as it had worked for me. So as a next step I decided to use the technique for language learning.

Well, in the course of 10 years teaching English I’ve come across a lot of people who say they have problems memorizing.

I’ve never had a big problem learning new words, because (as Anthony says) I think I automatically form associations. It’s just how my brain works. Maybe I learned it in elementary school and by now it’s just automatic.

This became especially clear when I started learning Italian—I could associate with English and Spanish and it was pretty easy, one way or another.

But I thought, I should do the experiment. For all my students who have difficulty memorizing, why not try the memory palace with some vocabulary?

And to make it more difficult, I decided to try with a language that had no associations at all.

No Associations At All

It’s easy to associate something like “estación” in Spanish with “stazione” in Italian and “station” in English because they’re all very similar words.

I wanted to test the method in a new way, on some truly difficult material.

The language I ended up choosing is Basque. If you don’t know about it, it’s a language that’s spoken in a small area of the north of Spain and the south of France.

The fact is that it’s apparently unrelated to any of the other European languages. You can take a look on Wikipedia for some of the theories, but the one I like best is that the Basque people are the original barbarians who lived on the Iberian Peninsula before anyone else, and who managed to hang on to their mountainsides and their valleys through 2000 years of invasions by a long series of other civilizations.

You really have to admire the Basques, whatever the explanation is, because while virtually all the rest of Western Europe is speaking some dialect of German (English, Dutch, and the other languages of the North) or a dialect of Latin (Spanish, French, Italian, etc) the Basques are still speaking Basque… Or as they call it, Euskera.

They’ve defended their language and identity for, like I said, 2000 years of European history, which I’m sure has been difficult at times.

An Arbitrary Sequence Of A Lot Of Ks And Xs And Ts

And it’s a language with no association to anything else. To me most Basque words just look like an arbitrary sequence of a lot of Ks and Xs and Ts, without any way to make a guess at what they mean.

Nothing like Italian or French or German or Dutch, which you can often get the gist of, either if you see it in writing or if you hear it.

So I asked a Basque friend to make up a list of words, and she gave me 30 words. And I decided on a place to build my Memory Palace: the United Nations building where I give English classes every day here in Madrid.

And I sat down to do the method. I guess you’ve heard Anthony explain the guidelines here on the podcast, so I’ll just take you through my Memory Palace, and some of the things I took into account while constructing it.

Since you’ve all listened to Anthony describing it I guess you don’t need a full explanation, but as he says:

I started in a terminal location. Actually the UN building has 9 storeys, but as a teacher I never have to go higher than the second floor. So I started in the Human Resources office on the second floor and went down from there. I put a mental image that reminded me of both the sound and the meaning of the word in each station I created along the way.

I created a mental path through the building all the way out to the streetcorner outside the door, putting mental images all along the path. From Human Resources, I went down the hall, past the other offices I’ve been in, the photocopiers, down the stairs, to the classroom where I teach, and then out again and further downstairs and out the door.

And finally, I practiced. A few times the first day, a few times the second, and a few times a few days after. And after that I generally had it.

The Most Difficult Thing Was The Set-Up

As I had found in previous experiences with the Magnetic Memory Method, the most difficult thing was the set-up. Once I had organized my list of words, list of stations, and thought of appropriate images, it was easy. I took Anthony’s advice and actually wrote it down, but it’s also possible to do it in your head, at least for me. Whatever works for you!

Now you may be wondering what sort of images I would use for a language with no associations—well, it turns out that the syllables can be associated with one thing or another. And I was able to mix English and Spanish associations with no problem.

For example: the word Entzun, which means listen. I had one of the Ents (those magical talking tree-people from Lord of the Rings). That was the first syllable. And for the second I had Kim Jong-Un, the young dictator of North Korea, who’s pretty memorable with his chubby cheeks and his military uniform and the fact that he’s supreme leader of a whole country despite being in his early 20s. So he was Un.

So I had him climbing up the tree, the Ent, and holding a hand up to his ear to listen for something in the distance. So I had Ents, I had Un, and I had the fact that he was listening to remind me of the meaning.

Another example… Eskerrik asko, which means thank you. I separated that into “scary” and “casco” (which in Spanish means helmet) and I had something like a bicycle helmet with fangs and claws flying onto a girl’s head. The girl was down on her knees praying and giving thanks for something, it doesn’t really matter what, and so I was able to remember: scary casco, eskerrik asko, thank you.

A third example, because three is a nice round number: garagardoa, which is beer. For this one, I had a doe (like a female deer) gargling a glass of beer. Gargle + doe = beer.

Forget The Association And Just Remember The Word

What I found on my journeys through the palace is another thing that Anthony suggested, that once you make the association and practice a few times, you can really forget the association and you just remember the word. You walk through the memory palace in your mind and the word is just there. It pops into your head.

Also, keep in mind I was following Anthony’s recommendation to make things violent, ridiculous, or offensive—in this case not too offensive, but I had violence in the scary bicycle helmet, and ridiculous in the gargling does, and Kim Jong-un climbing a talking tree—all things you don’t see every day, and things you’d definitely remember if you saw them.

I think that’s one of the strengths of how the memory palace works in the end—rather than spending a lot of time creating associations organically (through living in contact with the language) you create an artificial association. And then you can repeat that as much as you want until you remember the word.

Rather than spending a few weeks or months bumping into a word before you’ve created enough associations, you can do it all in a day or two if you want.

My language learning really took off when I realized I could use languages to meet girls—later I found out that there are really only two ways to get things into long term memory: with repetition and with emotion.

And the memory palace works on both of those shortcuts to memory.

Create Emotion In Your Head

As Anthony is always saying: make your images big, colorful, sexy or violent and you’ll remember them a lot easier. It’s just a way of creating emotion in your head, rather than going out and finding it externally.

Of course, finding native speakers to cause strong emotions in you can also be a lot of fun and extremely educational. But the key is balancing your study on the one hand with your contact with the language on the other.

Learning vocabulary is one thing, acquiring fluency is another. As I have said in my books many times, the only way to learn how to speak a language is to go out and speak that language.

I’ve Spent A Large Portion Of My Adult Life Butchering One Language Or Another

And that’s the last thing I’d like to leave you with here.

A lot of people have this unnecessary fear of going out and speaking. They think they’re going to make mistakes and be embarrassed and have to go live in a cave somewhere due to the shame of conjugating some verbs badly.

In reality, I’ve spent a large portion of my adult life butchering one language or another, and I’ve really never had a bad experience because of it. Most people are happy that you’re just trying.

And most native speakers aren’t even aware of their own grammar. I learned years ago that it’s perfectly useless to ask anyone other than a Spanish teacher “Why did you use the subjunctive in that sentence, rather than the indicative?”

Generally, they have no idea—they may not even be aware that they even used the subjunctive.

So when you’re speaking to a person in imperfect Spanish or German or Italian or Mandarin, chances are very good that they’re not mentally giving you a score, like it’s some sort of test.

They’re probably only aware that you’re making a valiant attempt, and they’re trying to communicate the best they can with you.

So…

Make All The Mistakes You Can

Where I’m going with this is that it’s important to go out and make all the mistakes you can. In the worst case, people will laugh at you butchering their language. And you can laugh back. And learn something from the experience.

I don’t know anybody who’s learned a language just by studying grammar until they “knew everything” and were then able to go out immediately and start speaking with no errors.

It never happens. You’ll always make mistakes—you probably even make mistakes in your native language.

The key in my mind is having an objective for your conversations besides the conversation itself—and making your success criteria reflect that goal.

Just as an example, if you’re in Korea and you’re going to the market to buy vegetables, your goal can be to buy your vegetables—not to speak perfect Korean the whole time.

That takes the pressure off… You don’t need your level to be perfect, you just need it to get the job done.

Go Out And Memorize Something!

So, go out there and memorize something! At the very least, you’ll have an interesting experience of what’s possible in your imagination… Whenever I use the Magnetic Memory Method I feel almost like I’m going on an adventure, inside my head, because I’m just so focused and I’m able to forget the outside world for a while and just live in imagination.

Nothing more to say today. I’d like to thank Anthony for handing the podcast over to me for the day. Stay magnetic! as the doctor would say.

You can find more from me at the site I linked to above if your Spanish is good enough, or you can see all my other projects at danielwelsch.com. I write about Spanish culture, American culture, food, politics, and more, on a variety of websites out there.

And if there’s one thing I’d like to leave you with today it’s this: don’t be afraid to communicate—just say what you think and what you feel you need to say, in any language. Life is short, and as Mark Twain said, “Twenty years from now you’ll be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

So go out there! Speak languages, and be awesome. Life is short to do anything besides live up to your full potential. So, enjoy it.

This is Daniel Welsch, and I hope you have a great day. Goodbye.

Further Resources

How To Train Your Memory To Memorize Any Word

Memory Strategies Of The World’s Top Language Learners