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

particular associations with past contentment.
2. Choose three pieces in particular as the core of your memory repertoire.
Ideally, they should be pieces that you “melt into”, enjoying the harmonies of
the instruments. You could use vocal music too, so long as you do not find
yourself too distracted by the words. Each piece should be at least five minutes
long. Indian classical music can be particularly soothing, as can plainsong or
Gregorian chant. Ultimately, of course, the choice is yours. Record your three
pieces one after the other onto a single cassette.
3. Test the effectiveness of your memory music by a series of comparative
experiments – for example, memorizing lists of random numbers, or street names
from the telephone directory, or the order of playing cards in a randomly
shuffled deck. Compare the relative effectiveness of each piece with the other
two, and with silence.
the art of recall
W
e have looked in the preceding pages at of the vital factors of which we
need to be aware if we wish to strengthen our memory skills – factors that form
the basis of the specific memory techniques and systems described in the next
chapter. We have also looked at ways to encourage the right context for effective
memorization – in particular, the health aspects and (more tentatively) the use of
music. It is now apt, in this survey of key principles, to switch our emphasis to
the last stage of the memory process – recall.
The highest function of mind is its function of messenger.
D
.
H
.
LAWRENCE
1885–1930
Our brain holds far more information than we could ever access at any
given time. However, memories are useless if they remain locked in some inner
neurological recess. To have an effective memory, we need to be able to retrieve
information at will – especially information that we have consciously placed in
our mental store. Our ability to retrieve memories depends largely on how we

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organized and stored them in the first place.
If a memory was stored half-heartedly, without due concentration, or was
not revised (see
p.81
), it may have faded away. Or if it was inappropriately filed,
perhaps anchored by an ineffective association, like any misplaced article it may
be difficult to locate. The art of recall is the skill by which we can make the
appropriate link or series of links to lead us to the memories that we want to
retrieve. Recall is a strategic process. We initiate our mental search in a logical
rather than a random fashion. And yet, as we use our left brain logically to sort
through a sequence of options, our right brain works at a subliminal level (often
through emotive and sensual associations) to help us complete the recall process
successfully. For example, if we’re trying to remember the name of a town we
visited last summer, we might first try to recapture the appearance or the sound
of the name, and if these attempts fail we might try other logical approaches to
the problem – “avenues” that we believe might lead us to the answer.
So, we might bring to mind when we went, who we went with, how we
travelled there. However, logic by itself will not be effective. As we travel down
a promising avenue, we recall “creative” aspects of the event as well – the first
view of the town from the road, the smell of lemon trees, the sound of singing
crickets. Somehow, among these consciously invoked impres sions, the name
surfaces suddenly from the depths of memory – an experience with which we are
all familiar. We may not even know which cue, or combination of cues, was
responsible for this success.
Revisiting a conscious association to retrieve a memory is a not dissimilar
process. Earlier in this chapter (
p.72
) we worked out a way to remember the
name Horace Washington – by association with the poet and the city. As we
think back to this character, an image of the city of Washington, DC might be the
first thing that springs to mind, and then in a flash we might remember the
classical link (the classical poet Horace, the neoclassical architecture), which
then triggers the name itself – unfurling in the mind to the accompaniment of a
silent cry of “eureka”. Given the way in which the mem ory suddenly springs
into the light of consciousness, why, we might ask, did we have to go through
the palaver of circuitous association? The answer is that, as a name, Horace
Washington meant nothing to us: it had no intrinsic associations, and so our
chances of remembering it without artificial aids were small. But as soon as we
wove a web of associations around the name, we hitched it to deep-rooted
elements in our memory. These had already earned their keep in our memory
banks. As we cast around in our mind for the answer, they acted, in a rapid
succession of mental events, as a set of stepping stones to lead us to a point that
we had visited only once before. By way of the familiar we reached the

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unfamiliar.
Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when
stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they
flash into full stature and life with everything in place.
JOHN MUIR
1838–1914
Another aspect of recall is that the whole may be captured by means of a
fragment. For example, if we are trying to remember the name of the breeding
ground of the European and American eels, we might remember simply that
there are four eel-like letters (s’s) in the name – Sargasso Sea. Having recalled
those four s’s, which constitute a fragment of the whole name, we may find that
the rest of the name rolls out in the mind automatically.
The environment in which we learn or experience something can itself be
an
effective
retrieval
cue.
Psycholo
gists
call
this
phenomenon
“contextdependent memory”. When divers were given material to learn while
underwater, in an experiment, they were able to recall the information far more
comprehensively during their next dive than on dry land.
When a sight, sound or smell unexpectedly triggers apparently forgotten
memories, this is called “surprise random recall”. This type of unexpected
recollection indicates that many more mem ories might be rediscovered if we
could find the right triggers to bring them into our consciousness.
Most of us have experienced what it is like to search in vain for a memory,
using all the cues we can think of, only to find that the answer – perhaps the
forgotten name of a politician or the title of a movie – springs to mind much
later, when we least expect it. Faced with a difficult challenge, our brain has a
lifetime of retrieval cues and associations to sort through, and sometimes a shift
in focus, which gives our mental circuitry the time to do its rounds without
experiencing the resistance of our frustration, can be all that is needed for the
right information to turn up. When you begin memory training, try to bear in
mind that you are beginning to formalize a process that your brain has been
doing for you on its own all your life. Don’t expect to tame the beast
immediately – to master the art of recall requires patient trust, coupled with an
understanding that answers cannot be forced.

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memory with a map
discovering memory techniques
W
e looked in the previous chapter at some key principles that lie behind the
various techniques you can use to make your memory more effective –
especially imagination, association and location. It is now time to explain the
techniques themselves. Some of the approaches described over the following
pages derive from age-old methods, adapted to modern requirements; some I
have devised myself, and put into effect with gratifying success in the various
World Memory Championships; some belong to a body of modern “folk
knowledge”, based largely on common sense. Think of this chapter as a basic
toolkit. You may find some of the tools easier to use than others. There will
certainly be items in the kit that you will want to modify to your own tastes and
purposes – just as an artist might buy a set of commercial paints but add to them
his or her own special mixes for favourite effects. My hope is that there is
something here for everyone – I wish you success and revelation as you start to
tap into the latent power of your brilliant mind.