Reader’s Digestreadersdigest.co.in 155T
he average person’s brain
contains 86 billion neurons
and trillions of synapses.
All those brain cells mean
your mind can do so much
more than you think—such as these
seemingly impossible feats.1
Memorize anything
Say I asked you to memorize
this list of 10 words: ladybird,
comb, oatmeal, lawyer, coal, stamp,
knife, worm, bell, lettuce. Yo u ’d
normally have to repeat them in
your head many times before you
achieved 100 per cent recall. Even
after accomplishing the tiring feat,
a few hours later, you’d probably
remember only two to three words
from the beginning and end of the
list. That’s because of what cognitive
psychologists call the primacy and
recency effects: Information at
the beginning and end of a series
interferes with recall of information
in the middle of a series.
This difficulty stems from the
limitations of our verbal memory; the
linguistic portion of our brains, where
we store arbitrary lists of words, has
limited storage.
However, our visual brains
have vastly more storage than our
linguistic brains. Thus, when you
store information visually, as opposed
to linguistically, you can recall it
much better. And that’s the secret to
remembering the 10 words above.
Instead of repeating the words inyour head, convert them to images—
and not just any images, but extremely
vivid pictures. Then visualize your
house and mentally place the image
of each object on the list in a different
room or distinct location, such as a
closet, within the house.
For instance, place a very large
ladybird—say three feet in diameter
to make it really vivid—where the
welcome mat would lie by the
front door. Then deposit a large
orange comb on the floor just inside
the front door. Continue to place
each successive object on the list
throughout your house, preferably in
the order you would take someone on
a guided tour.
When you’re done, take another
stroll through your home and ‘see’
the objects you’ve left in different
places. You should have no trouble
visualizing each and every object—
and thus, each and every word.
You can use this same trick to
memorize strings of numbers,
letters, symbols or anything else. Just
convert what you’re memorizing into
something meaningful; for example,
the number 2 might be represented
by an image of you and your spouse.2
Move things with your mind
Tie a two- or three-foot piece of
string (or dental floss) through
the handle of a coffee cup and dangle
the cup in front of you, keeping it as
still as you can. Then, using only your
mind, will the cup to sway forwardsPhotographs by Matthew Cohen