If you had to guess, how many memories do you think you recall each day?
Most people answer somewhere between 100 and 10,000.
But in reality, we access several billion memories every single day.
We’ve all had the experience of suddenly recalling people or events from the past.
A single smell, sight or sound can bring about memories we thought we had forgotten.
For example, the smell of freshly baked cookies might instantly conjure up memories of grandma’s
house from when you were a kid.
In fact, the famed psychologist and neurophysiologist Professor Mark Rosenzweig has stated that
even if we exposed a human brain to ten new pieces of information every second of our
lifetime, it still wouldn’t even be half full.
If there is enough “space” in our brain to store all the memories we collect through
the years, then the key to perfect memory is the self-management of this remarkable
storage.
When the average person takes a memory test, they usually score somewhere between 20 and
60 percent.
Trained memorizers, in contrast, score between 95 to 100 percent accuracy.
So what's the difference between the average person and the professional memorizers?
Well you remember information in two main ways, as words using your verbal memory and
pictures using your visual memory.
And the secret is, that trained memorizers use their visual memory because it is extremely
powerful compared to your verbal.
Let's test the difference between the two.
I will give you a list of 10 words and we'll see how many you will remember at the end
Here we go:
Now pause the video and write down on a peace of paper or a notepad as many of the words as you
can remember.
The average person remembers anywhere from 5-7 words.
There is a limit of how many words we can remember in our short term memory.
Now let's see the difference of how many words you can remember by using your visual memory.
I will give you the word and then explain a short picture and a story for it, while
I do that vividly imagine in your head the pictures as I describe them.
Here we go:
Imagine a huge door made of steel.
Its so huge and heavy and there is a sign on it that says "Keep out!"
The door suddenly opens, there is a big brown bear wearing a black suit and the bear starts
to roar at you.
As the bear roars a piano falls down from the sky and crashes on the bears head.
While it crashes it makes weird sound as the strings break.
As the piano crashes one of its white keys flies out and hits the bears secretary, she
starts to rage as she is extremely pissed off.
In her rage the secretary picks up a green juicy watermelon from her table and throws
it out of the window.
The watermelon starts to scream as it falls down from the building.
The watermelon falls on a big, yellow, chicken and splits in half.
The yellow chicken gets soaked from the watermelon juice and its feathers turn pink as they get
soaked in the juice.
The chicken flaps its wings and tries to fly to get rid of the watermelon juice, and as
it picks up speed it hits directly into a Street Light.
The street light starts to fall and make buzzing sounds as it trembles down.
As the street light falls, it plummets down into a box of barbie dolls.
They are pink and have blonde hair, they start to fly everywhere singing the song "I'm a barbie doll"
One of the barbie dolls jumps on a pen and start to ride it as a rocket.
The Pen leaves a blue ink trailing behind as it flies into the sky.
The pen runs out of fuel, falls straight down and jams into the ground.
A Japanese samurai with full armor picks it up and starts to swing it like a sword.
A bell rings, the samurai stops playing with his sword and runs toward a big building.
It turns out the building is a school, elementary school with white walls and big windows.
A white kid comes into the school and says: "Whos weirdo now" pulls out a gun and starts
to shoot up the school.
Ok pause the video again and write down how many words you are able to recall using your
visual memory.
The secret is to recreate a picture in your mind of each image in the story.
Can you see the difference?
And also I gave you 12 words instead of 10. The average person is able to remember all
12 words usually minimum being 10.
Imagine how nice it would be to never worry about forgetting your shopping list again.
With the link system, this will be a no brainer.
The link system creates associations in the mind that link individual items in a list
in such a way that makes them easier to recall.
But what if you don’t want to make up a whole story, or you don't need to remember
a list of items.
Well then you want to use the Memory Palace.
Imagine there is a blue doormat in front of the door with a drawing of a white cat on
it.
In the middle of the door there is a red door knob shaped like a dragon.
Once you enter the room, you find a coat hanger with eight pegs on your right-hand
side.
So, if you need to remember to get a vaccine from the pharmacy, pick up your sister from
the airport and get your shirts from the cleaners you could imagine something like this:
The white cat on the doormat is being injected with the vaccine.
You see the red dragon spread its wings and welcome your sister into the house.
Inside the house, you see your freshly-pressed shirts hanging from the coat hanger by the
door.
Once you’ve furnished your room, take multiple “mind walks” in order to cement the images
in your memory.
You could also remember speeches with the Memory Palace.
You can mentally walk the street where you live and use the signs, other houses, buildings,
stores as places to put specific parts of your speech that will act like hooks to continue
the speech.
Than revise it 2-3 times by walking down the same path.
So when you present it all you need to do is just mentally walk the path in your mind
and you will never get stuck in the middle of a speech again.
There are endless ways of how you can use your visual memory.
You could easily remember people's names.
Let's say someone name is Jack.
Instead of Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack in the Titanic imagine the person that you are talking
to in the water while the Titanic sinks.
You will never forget the person's name again.
I personally use the Memory Palace at the moment, because I learn German as my 3rd language.
And I have so much fun learning the German vocabulary with the visual memory.
In my house there is a whole floor dedicated to German words.
I walk around the rooms and each table, cabinet, window, box etc is for a single letter.
The word Rock means Skirt.
So I imagine "The Rock" the actor with his big muscles wearing a girly pink skirt, and
making girly faces and sounds.
Its bizarre and now whenever I see the word Rock it reminds me of that picture, and I
know that Rock means Skirt.
Then I put the image in the place where I keep my German words that start on the letter
R. It may take 5-10 more seconds to remember the word, but trust me, the image will be
there for months, and if you revise it few more times over the course of the next few
months, it will stay there for years.
You can use the Memory Palace for all kinds of memories, you just need to be creative
with the images and make them vivid and bizarre.
At first it will be hard, but as you progress it will be much faster.
Now that you know how your memory works, I know that you won't forget to subscribe to
this channel Anyway see you next time and thanks for watching.