T
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 seem-
ingly impossible feats.1
Memorize Anything
Say I asked you to memorize this
list of ten words: ladybug, comb,
oatmeal, lawyer, coal, stamp, knife,
worm, bell, lettuce. You’d normally
have to repeat them in your head
many times before you achieved
100 percent recall. Even after ac-
complishing the tiring feat, a few
hours later, you’d probably remem-
ber only two to three words from the
beginning and end of the list. That’s
because of what cognitive psycholo-
gists 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 limi-
tations of our verbal memory; the lin-
guistic 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 informa-
tion visually, as opposed to linguisti-
cally, you can recall it much better.
And that’s the secret to remembering
the ten 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 differ-
ent room or distinct location, such as
a closet, within the house.
For instance, place a very large
ladybug—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 succes-
sive 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 some-
thing 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 forwardPhotographs by Matthew Cohen rd.com 117
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