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

Memory with a map
Mnemonics
Visual pegs
Exercise nine: the memory forest 10-note keyboard
The story method
Exercise ten: making a memory chain
Exercise eleven: weaving a narrative spell
The journey method
Exercise twelve: walking the walk
Exercise thirteen: the memory house
The dominic system
The number-shape system
Mind maps
Memory in action
Matching names and faces
Exercise fourteen: what’s in a name?
Keeping a date
Exercise fifteen: using a mental diary

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Finding the right word
Exercise sixteen: crossword heaven
Making speeches
Memory and games
Exercise seventeen: memorizing cards of chance
Memory at school
Reading and retaining
Exercise eighteen: evaluate, assimilate, remember
Speed reading
Exercise nineteen: checking the sense
Quick-fix retrieval
Exercise twenty: clearing the seabed of memory
The memory palace
Living through detail
Memory massage
Dealing with life’s demands
Exercise twenty-one: The interview journey
Time travelling
Exercise twenty-two: harnessing schooldays
Releasing the past
Exercise twenty-three: disarming a memory
The world of emotions
Exercise twenty-four: rekindling the flame
Keeping the mind young
Exercise twenty-five: tracing connections
Memory of the future
Bibliography
Acknowledgments

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Introduction
“H
i, Dominic. How come you’re entering this year? I hear you’re forty-two
years old.” This was the question asked of me by a seventeenyear-old American
student on the first day of the 1999 World Memory Championships. I was told
that he had been training his memory for six hours a day for the past six months
and was in London for one reason and one reason only: to become World
Memory Champion.
Although I believe his opening question was part gamesmanship, many
people would argue that this was, in fact, a fair comment. A bright,
seventeenyear-old college student should certainly have the edge over a forty-
two-year-old codger like me. After all, isn’t the memory capacity of a human
being supposed to decline with age?
Up until 1988, if someone had asked me that question, I would certainly
have answered “yes”. In giving that answer, I would have been echoing a
popular misconception about memory – that old age and forgetfulness are
synonymous. But, in 1988, I was to witness an event that would change my life.
I watched a man called Creighton Carvello memorize a randomly shuffled deck
of playing cards in just under three minutes – a feat of memory which put his
name in the record books. I was dumbstruck. How could anyone connect 52
unconnected pieces of data together, perfectly in sequence, using nothing but
their brain, in such a short space of time? Inspired and fuelled by a burning
desire to uncover Creighton’s secret, I armed myself with a deck of cards and
began a three-month investigation into the potential of my own memory. What
followed was an object lesson in accelerated learning. A process of natural
selection took place as I threw out ideas that failed and refined techniques that
produced results. As each day passed I felt as though I was awakening a giant
within me. For the first time in my life, not just my memory, but also my powers
of concentration and imagination, were beginning to reveal a potential that I
never before realized they had. Unwittingly, I was discovering the art of memory
and memory techniques as practiced by the ancient Greeks more than two
thousand years ago.