The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Good memory is a superpower.
2. Special techniques can make remembering large amounts of information easy.
3. Memory is a skill that can be improved through regular practice.

Impressions

Solid book. Lots of great memory techniques, although they are pretty mainstream, so I didn’t get much from the book. The author includes a lot of self-help advice too, which was interesting to read. Lots of actionable tips and tricks.

Who Should Read It?

Especially helpful for students but the techniques can be applied to anyone's lives.

Top 3 Quotes

• Understanding doesn’t create use: Only when you can instantly recall what you have understood, and practice using your remembered understanding, do you achieve mastery.
• Learning is not a destination; it is a continuous process.
• Remember that your imagination is like the pen and the system is the paper.

Summary, Notes & Quotes

Only if you can remember information can you live it.

Understanding doesn’t create use: Only when you can instantly recall what you have understood, and practice using your remembered understanding, do you achieve mastery.

Memory determines the quality of your decisions and, therefore, your entire life.

Learning is the ability to acquire new information, and memory holds that information in place over time.

Where your attention goes, your energy flows.

If you believe your limits, your life will be very limited.

A belief is a sense of being certain; what you believe, you become.

Your beliefs are the stories about yourself that you have accepted to be true … so you can decide to change the stories.

Concentration is made up of many small choices practiced consistently.

Busyness may make you feel good and make you think you are productive, but if you look back at the end of the day, you’ll realize you haven’t done anything worthwhile.

You have to learn to be here, now.

Conflict pulls your mind in many directions; it is the opposite of concentration.

Peace and concentration are the same thing.

Take control of your inner voice.

Start to catch yourself doing more things right.

When you multitask, you actually switch between tasks, semi-attending to each one. It’s not very effective.

We are training our brains to have an attention deficit.

Sharpen your intellect by making it a habit to do one thing at a time.

Know what you want.

A clear purpose is important because clarity dissolves resistance.

The more specific your purpose, the more information you will get.

Your level of interest sets the direction of your attention and, therefore, your level of focus.

Your mind never wanders; it moves toward more interesting things.

To remember new information, find your interests and then find links or connections between your interests and the new information.

“If you want to cure boredom, be curious. If you’re curious, nothing is a chore; it’s automatic—you want to study. Cultivate curiosity, and life becomes an unending study of joy.”

Eliminate worry.

You don’t worry because you care; you worry because that is what you have learned to do. Worry is a creative mental process.

Learn to practice peace, because if you have no attention you have no retention.

Most people swing from one emotional extreme to the other. Concentration is about learning how to stay centred.

Photographic memory is a myth. All perfect memory takes conscious effort.

Memory is a creative, not photographic, process.

Sound is very limited because it doesn’t attach easily to other memories. A sound is also sequential; to remember information by sound, you have to start at the beginning and work your way through it. When you see information as an image in your mind, however, you can jump in and out of it; this improves your understanding, too.

Hear a piece of information and three days later you’ll remember 10 percent of it. Add a picture and you’ll remember 65 percent.

You can learn to enhance your memory imagination system by making your mind movies exciting and “sticky.”

There are only five ways to get anything into your brain, and those are through your senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.

Make your images illogical. Have fun; create some exaggerated images to improve your memory.

Give your mental pictures action.

Make your mental images as vivid and colourful as you can, not boring, flat, or black and white.

You can weave, crash, stick, or wrap things together to help you remember them. Make things talk, sing, and dance.

The process of imagination is a fun and creative process. The more enjoyment you can put into it, the better.

This is not the way that I naturally think; this is how I have taught myself to think, because it works.

The greatest secret to having a powerful memory is bringing information to life with your endless imagination.

Organizing new information is key to retention and retrieval.

Create mental images of the information you are trying to memorise and space them around your car.

The car list works because your whole car is in your long-term memory (LTM). LTM offers you a place to store the new information; that is, the locations in the car become “storage compartments” for short-term memories (STMs). All the memory methods in this book work with this formula: LTM + STM = MTM

The secret to accelerated learning is superior organization.

When visualizing something to memorize it, always use as few pictures as possible to remember as much as possible.

The “body method” is similar to the car method, but this time we will use parts of our body to store the new information.

The body method was originally invented by the ancient Greeks.

The second peg method, the shape system, converts numbers into concrete shapes. It works in the same way as the rhyming peg method, only this time the pegs are shaped like the number.

One-bun Two–shoe Three–tree Four–door Five–hive Six–sticks Seven–heave Eight–gate Nine–vine Ten–hen

Memory is the residue of thought.

The mental journey (mind palace) technique:

1. Prepare in your mind an organized location, such as a house layout, a shopping mall, or the route you take from your house to the mall.
2. Create markers or places in this location or along the route, as we did with the body and car lists. Use an easy-to-follow order.
3. Using the SEE principles, make a clear image of the information that you want to remember.
4. Place each item you are trying to remember on one of the marked locations.

Unfortunately, rote learning and constant repetition are frustrating and can create an aversion to learning.

Markers should be near each other, but nicely spaced out so that each item you want to remember is placed in a unique memory file in your mind.

The important thing is that you practice. The more you practice, the better you will become.

We learn only by association.

You can remember thousands of words or concepts by connecting linked ideas to a short mental journey.

You can also use this method to memorise paragraphs of information. First, condense everything into a list of key words, and then convert those lists into meaningful link stories.

There is no such thing as a good or bad memory for names, there is only good or bad strategy.

In order to remember a name, pay attention and really listen to it because if you don’t hear it you will not remember.

If you hear the name, repeat it back to the person; this will improve your recall. If you don’t hear the name, ask the person to say it again. If it is a difficult name, ask them to spell it, too.

We are normally so worried about being interesting that we forget to be interested.

Create an image for the name in your mind so you can recreate it later.

We only remember what we think about.

Comparison Connection - Connect the person to a name that you already know. Next, compare the two people in your mind.

Face Connection - With this method, you make a link between the name and an outstanding feature in the person’s appearance.

Janice sounds like “chain ice.” You then make the connection and think of a chain of ice flying out of her blue eyes.

To make the name stick in your long-term memory you have to continue using it.

Review the name. Create a names folder in your diary, on your computer, or on your cell phone of people that you would like to remember; include the name of the place where you met the person.

To remember numbers you need to give them more meaning.

Associate each digit with a sound and use this to create words.

1. Zero is the s, z, or soft c (as in “dice”) sound. It sounds like the hissing of a wheel (which looks like a zero):
2. One represents the t or d sound
3. Two is the n sound
4. Three is the m sound
5. Four is the r sound
6. Five is the l sound
7. Six is the j, sh, soft ch, or soft g sound
8. Seven is the k and hard c sound
9. Eight is the f or v sound
10. Nine is b or p, which look like the mirror and upside-down image of nine

In the beginning you have to work hard to encode the information, but then it becomes easy.

This method is also great because you don’t have to worry about spelling—it works on sounds.

Interest level is measured by how much you remember.

Turning information into art grabs your attention; your mind won’t let go of it.

Link the pictures in a story and it will create an even stronger connection. The more deeply you think about any information, the more you will remember it.

These pictures are all short mental reminders or triggers to help you recall the main content. By looking, linking, and locking in the image you will make the memory link stronger and easier to recall.

If you wanted to remember the entire periodic table, you could create a few pictures and it would be simple to achieve.

Mind Mapping is a “Swiss Army Knife for the brain.” It is not only a method for expanding your memory, but a way to improve your thinking skills. Mind Mapping can be used for memorizing, learning, presenting, communicating, organizing, planning, negotiating, and all types of thinking.

Mind Maps are entertaining; they are fun and make use of your creative brain. If you stick with them, you will take your mind to a new level; you will improve your creativity, elevate your planning power, develop more of your brain, and increase your powers of memory and observation. You can use Mind Maps for a whole range of learning; they can be used very effectively to summarize large amounts of information, and to get the gist of what is being communicated.

Remembering Written Information Word for Word

Remembering information verbatim can help you in presentations, negotiations, or meetings.

You can use it to hold on to information so you can call upon it when you need a bit of inspiration. It is also helpful in exams to remember definitions of key concepts. Remembering and reciting poems is also a great way to train your mind and improve your presentation ability. And many religious texts refer to the importance of holding verses in your heart, so that you can live the lessons being taught.

The first element of the memory method is to find the key words that will help you remember the rest of the text.

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

The next step is to create images out of them and place them in one of the systems that you have learned in this book.

Remember that your imagination is like the pen and the system is the paper.

Many people are afraid of public speaking. I believe that has a lot to do with the fear of forgetting information.

Memory power is presentation power.

You can eliminate the fear of forgetting by using memory methods like the journey, body, car, peg list, drawing your own pictures, or making Mind Maps.

Although you do not learn the information word-for-word with rote memorization, you clearly remember the structure.

Great presenters know that audiences tend to remember:

F—First things L—Last things O—Outstanding information O—Own links R—Repeated information

Therefore, they make their introductions and conclusions powerful and outstanding.

Familiarity breeds forgetfulness.

Start to catch your memory doing things right and you will start to see improvements.

When you put items down, like your car keys, bring yourself back to the present moment. Ask yourself questions like, When am I going to use this next? or say to yourself, I am putting the keys on the table. Or you could imagine that your keys are blowing up the table.

Most things in life can be solved with more responsibility, imagination, and awareness.

Memorising a deck of cards

First, you must create a picture for each card. Use the first letter of the suit of the cards plus the sound associated with its number to make a word.

You can associate each card with a person you know or you can make all the diamond cards celebrities, all the heart cards your family, spade cards people you work with, and the club cards your friends.

Imagine a king bashing down the door and entering your house. He finds some ham and duck to eat in your fridge. With that silly story you remembered five cards.

It will take practice to automatically turn each card into an image, but with time it will become second nature.

Never learn just to pass an exam. What is the purpose of doing well in an exam and not knowing what you have learned two weeks later? Learning is not a destination; it is a continuous process.

Before you study anything, make sure you have a strong PIC (purpose, interest, and curiosity) in mind.

When studying, it is also important to take breaks, as your mind can remain focused for only so long before you become unproductive and tense.

Take a break every 35 to 40 minutes;

Get an overview and analyse the material that you have to cover. Mark out all the information that you need to remember.

Make sure you learn to distinguish between what you’re capable of right now and what you’ll be capable of with practice. If you choose to believe that you can’t grow beyond your current limits you will live a limited life.

Habits begin as offhanded remarks, ideas, and images. And then, layer upon layer, through practice, they grow from cobwebs into cables that shackle or strengthen our lives. Denis Waitley

There has never ever been an undisciplined world champion.

Self-discipline is not self-deprivation. It is about raising your standards, going for and being more.

People don’t do it because they think that the future will be a better place than the present without doing anything to make it better.

If your daily actions are not moving you in the direction of what you want, then you will never get what you want.

David Campbell said, “Discipline is remembering what you want.”

The more reasons you have to do something, the better your inner movie will be, and the more energy you will create to do it.

If your excuses are high and your reasons are low you will have no discipline to start. If your reasons are high and your excuses are low, you will have lots of motives, and motive in action creates motivation.

Change happens only when you make a true decision to change. A true decision means you will not allow for any other possibility.

Schedule a time in the day for memory training and practice—whether you feel like it or not.

The only way you get to be good at anything is through self-discipline. Remember: Life only rewards action!

Review to Renew.

It has been estimated that two years after leaving school, the average person remembers only three weeks’ worth of lessons.

Any training is a waste of time if there is not a process of review!

People who use the memory methods and systems often feel that they could never forget the information they learned using them. But while the methods help to store memories quickly for a medium term, to make sure that the information remains in your mind, you need to review and recite it.

Memorizing should be a pleasure; it should be like a game.

Reviewing when using the memory methods doesn’t require a lot of time.

The first review should be done backward. Reviewing images backward helps you remember them more effectively. If you learn concepts in reverse you create a new impression in your mind that makes information more outstanding and the memory much stronger.

Review after an hour, then a day, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 21 days, 28 days, 2 months, 3 months, and then it should be in your memory forever.

The more that you connect to that information, the stronger it becomes.

The perfect way to learn is to make lots of firsts and lasts: take breaks, make your information outstanding, make your own links (using memory methods), and then review to keep it ready in your mind for new learning.

Always use the power of review to put a lid on your learning and prevent it from escaping.

If you’re hoping to harvest a life of great deeds, remember you first have to plant some great seeds. Denis Waitley

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