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having a better memory would mean knowing not only more about the world, but also more about myself.
“It’s all about technique and understanding how the memory works,”
“What you have to understand is that even average memories are remarkably powerful if used properly,”
“Junk food in: junk brain. Healthy food in: healthy brain,”
Buzan believes schools go about teaching all wrong. They pour vast amounts of information into students’ heads, but don’t teach them how to retain it.
“The brain is like a muscle,”
Roman orators argued that the art of memory—the proper retention and ordering of knowledge—was a vital instrument for the invention of new ideas.
In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality.
From the moment you grasp a new piece of information, your memory’s hold on it begins to slowly loosen, until finally it lets go altogether.
Is it possible we have the capacity to remember everything?
Based on those experiments, Penfield came to believe that the brain records everything to which it pays any degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent.
The brain is a mutable organ, capable—within limits—of reorganizing itself and readapting to new kinds of sensory input, a phenomenon known as neuroplasticity.
Surprisingly, when the mental athletes were learning new information, they were engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding. At first glance, this wouldn’t seem to make any sense. Why would mental athletes be conjuring images in their mind’s eye when they were trying to learn three-digit numbers? Why should they be navigating like London cabbies when they’re supposed to be remembering the shapes
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the mental athletes said they were consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys.
Same photograph. Same word. Different amount of remembering.
Miller had discovered that our ability to process information and make decisions in the world is limited by a fundamental constraint: We can only think about roughly seven things at a time.
what we already know determines what we’re able to learn.
He was using associations in his long-term memory to see the numbers differently.
Often the best move seems entirely counterintuitive.
In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.
Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we’ve seen, heard, and smelled in the past.
Our lives are structured by our memories of events.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.
Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,”
It’s thought that sleep plays a critical role in this process of consolidating our memories and drawing meaning out of them. Rats that have spent an hour running around a track apparently run through the same track in their sleep, and exhibit the same patterns of neural firings with their eyes closed as when they were learning the mazes in the first place.
The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well.
“The general idea with most memory techniques is to change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”
We can quickly learn anything with these techniques. Look, you tempted or not?”
Students were taught not just what to remember, but how to remember it.
Humans just gobble up spatial information.”
“Now, it’s very important to try to remember this image multisensorily.” The more associative hooks a new piece of information has, the more securely it gets embedded into the network of things you already know, and the more likely it is to remain in memory.
“When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”
The more abstract the word, the less memorable it is. We need to make e-mail concrete somehow.”
Mere reading is not necessarily learning—
To really learn a text, one had to memorize it.
Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing memoria rerum. In his De Oratore, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)
without special training our memories tend to only pay attention to the big picture.
It’s said that clichés are the worst sin a writer can commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential.
The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized.
Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory.
if you can turn a set of words into a jingle, they can become exceedingly difficult to knock out of your head.
virtually every word in the Odyssey and the Iliad fits into some sort of schema, or pattern, that made the poems easier to remember.
the best method for remembering poetry ad verbum is to repeat a line two or three times before trying to see it as a series of images.
he has created his own dictionary of images for each of the two hundred most common words that can’t easily be visualized. “And” is a circle (“and” rhymes with rund, which means round in German).
to visualize a similarly sounding, or punning, word in its place.
Bradwardine’s system involved breaking the word into its constituent syllables and then creating an image for each syllable based on another word that begins with that syllable.
Indeed, studies have found that if you ask someone to memorize a sentence like “Pick up a pen,” it’s much more likely to stick if the person literally picks up a pen as they’re learning the sentence.
What makes the brain such an incredible tool is not just the sheer volume of information it contains but the ease and efficiency with which it can find that information.
We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
We read and read and read, and we forget and forget and forget.
