You Can Learn to Remember: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life pdfdrive com

the art of observation
T
he ancient Greeks considered sight to be the most important of the senses in
relation to memory. They believed that the sharper our powers of observation,
the more accurate our memory of experiences. There is truth in this, although
actually the overall picture is more complex – we memorize better if we use all
our senses fully.
Nevertheless, the Greeks had a point. When we observe an object in a fully
attentive, fully conscious way (noting colour, shape, size, distinguishing
features), the etchings that are made on the brain are deeper than when we
merely receive an overall visual impression. Mostly, we just glance, or stare
using only part of our attention. For example, think of a bird with distinctive
markings, one that you regularly see. Draw a sketch of the bird showing where
the patches of colour occur. Check your drawing the next time you see the real
thing: you may be surprised at the mistakes you have made.
At a mundane level, honing our powers of observation has particular
benefits for our ability to recall, say, street directions on a repeated journey.
When describing the route to a stranger who has asked the way, it obviously
helps to be able to visualize the various landmarks. Being able to recall precise
visual details in the mind’s eye is part of a discipline of mental focus and
alertness that is sure to feed back into our mem ory training. Concentrating on
the details of how things look will inevitably make them more mem orable. This
in turn is likely to help our powers of association – which, as we have seen, are a
vital tool in the process of committing something permanently to memory.
noticing the details
EXERCISE SIX

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Honing your powers of observation is highly beneficial for memorization and
recall. Use this exercise to reduce the “perceptual filtering” that occurs when you
look at something, so that what is there is truly what you see.
1. Take a pencil and piece of paper, and choose a vase of flowers or some other
object to draw. Your level of artistic ability is completely unimportant – the sole
purpose is to learn to observe a scene and recreate that scene in the mind’s eye
in as much detail as possible.
2. Spend five minutes or so noticing as many features of the vase and flowers as
you can. Does the vase have a pattern? How many petals do the flowers have?
Are the flowers fully open? What are the veins in the leaves like? Don’t fall into
the trap of missing the obvious things (colour, shape, number, and so on) in
looking for the details.
3. Look away and draw the vase. Annotate your picture to indicate colours and
any details you cannot fully capture by drawing. Look back at the vase and
compare it with your annotated sketch. How accurate were your observations of
colour, shape and proportion? What did you miss? Repeat the exercise regularly
with a range of different objects to hone your powers of observation.