When you meet a new person, you introduce yourself and after literally 3 minutes you don’t remember the person’s name. Have you experienced this? That awkwardness, facilitated by the quick insertion of a replacement word, usually “you”, which makes it obvious that something is wrong with our memory and attention.

Today we will talk about how to achieve Excellent Memory incorporating 7 techniques which will help you improve your process of learning.

Forgetting, staring, making mistakes — there are certain ways to help this — mainly by taking notes and bringing a notebook with you. And what if you forget your notebook? Well, there’s the option of the phone. But there are so many distractions on the phone. It’s not a big deal to forget the name of a freshly met person, but what if the memory plays a prank on you and you forget your partner’s name and you call them by the name of your ex partner? Laugh, it happens to the best of us, and it has happened to me as well, oh I have to tell you it was a big mistake, and the man was extremely understanding. How did I get his name mixed up with my ex’s? — I don’t know! Forgetting a birthday or an anniversary is also a big deal and although it can be made a joke, that exactly ONCE in a year you can forget and THAT was THIS day, it still remains a disaster.

At a training course I took part in — the trainer used an extraordinary technique. Everyone in the course started by introducing themselves to him at the beginning, said a few words about themselves, and the trainer repeated our names and professions behind everyone. As soon the first exercise began where we were mixed in groups. Without any name badges the trainer knew the name of EVERYONE in the hall, and it was almost 20 strangers. I was in shock. How did he do it?

I base today’s thoughts on Kevin Horsley’s book Unlimited Memory, which focuses on advanced ways to quickly learn a process with an interesting strategy.

Concentration

In order to see the details, to register them in memory, you need to be concentrated. There are no distractions here. A scattered mind, bombarded with various stimuli from many different sources will certainly not be concentrated. The key to regaining concentration in the workplace is: Conflict resolution.

Whatever you are doing — for example when you are working in the office, your schedule may include meetings in the conference room, phone calls, email replies, reports, project management etc. If your work is more physical you can also have a number of activities — what others want you to do, what came out of the blue and what you do yourself. In physical work it is more difficult to clearly indicate the activities, because you could be an assembler of different products, a driver of some sorts or control a quality control manager at the end of the production line. But there will always be something or someone who needs your help and on top of this your own personal responsibilities.

These are all factors which conflict with you and your focus. Jumping between different tasks in your work breaks your focus. So treat it like a conflict of interest. It’s in your interest to focus on the main task at hand in order to maintain focus and efficiency.

This leads us smoothly to the second idea and technique, which is:

Monotasking

Scientific research has shown that because of the way our mind processes data and gives orders, there is no such thing as real multitasking. The mind only divides its attention into micro portions and jumps off the subject in microsecond intervals. Neuroscientices estimate that multitasking slows us down even by half and increases the chance of making a mistake.

You don’t have to look far for examples. Talking on the phone while driving a car causes you to push the brake pedal half a second slower in an emergency than a person who is not talking on the phone. At 100 kilometres per hour this is an extra 14 metres to stop. Not to mention the fact that these half seconds can determine whether someone will live. But this relates to a lot of situations which can happen while driving — basically every activity which engages us in an active way has similar results, whether it is a lively conversation, or drinking coffee or eating breakfast at the wheel. Listening to audio books is much better in this statistic because it is a passive activity. This is just one example with a car. Much more subtly multitasking interferes with our work. Let’s make an agreement, every job requires concentration if we want to do it qualitatively. Multitasking will bother the flight operators in the tower at the airport as much as it will bother you at lunch if you decide to eat it and continue to click on the excel tables with your other hand. To avoid multitasking and deluding yourself that we are then as effective as if we were not — here are some tips which are worthwhile trying;

• Allocate a clearly defined time to activities, e.g. I check my email only in the morning and before leaving work, I call the client only between 4 and 5. I spend my Lunch break in peace and focus only on food and temporary rest;
• Keep the goal in mind and on this basis decide what is the fastest and most efficient way to achieve it. Move other things away as far as possible. I personally have dealt with unpleasant things much better in such situations — I mean, if I have something tiring to do, I do it faster, just to get it out of my head. And although this is obviously a negative situation, my focus on the goal is maximal at such moments;
• The extended rule of focusing on the goal is such a simple scheme of three questions, which will be our third idea point today.

Ask three important questions about Purpose, Benefits and Curiosity

If the answer to them will have a positive answer, then there is a good chance that we will not multitask.

For example, you want to learn a programming language. Ask yourself some questions;

- What is the purpose? What do I want to achieve by learning the programming language?

For example, the answer might be: To learn a new profession and change to a better paid and more stable job than my current one. With this answer you can then ask yourself further questions:

- Will it benefit me? How long will it take me? What are the benefits? What is the risk of investing time and money?

These are questions of benefit, I think the answers here would depend on the situation, it is worth comparing it with your current situation.

Let yourself ask the following questions about things currently occurring in your life;

- Is this in line with my current interests and my lifestyle?

- Is what I’m learning original and difficult, or is it interesting?

- Will this benefit me in the future?

And here the answers will be very different.

After all, this kind of self-analysis helps to build confidence in the fact that what we plan to learn makes sense on several key levels. This will allow us to maintain our motivation and focus on what matters. The programming language is one of many examples, but let it be a foreign language or studying a difficult subject. Even a trainer who has developed the ability to remember the names of the trainers can answer these questions. What is the goal? To impress the participants and quickly create friendly contact with them. What are the benefits? To be perceived as a professional and mitigate conflicts, so their value as a trainer increases. And curiosity? They work with people, they want to work with them, they like working with them and they like how people like them, so they want to call them by their name as soon as possible. And we already have the motivation to have such a trainer practice names to such a degree and then impress everyone at the training.

Use your imagination to associate certain things with each other

I do this almost all the time preparing various speeches and training segments. When I have a difficult segment, with difficult terms that will be boring to tell, I try to recreate in my head a film of what I will describe. If I want to describe a process inside the company and want to remember the order of what an employee is supposed to do, I can do it in a schematic way, e.g. “So here an employee has to answer the phone, respond to complaints, switch calls to the appropriate departments, report to the boss, hold up the applicants, liquidate the information. I often come across a theory presented in such a way during training sessions, with the rest of the theory being put in quotation marks, because hardly anyone will remember all these points. However, I try to do differently, I play a film in my head and then deliver it to the group in a descriptive way, e.g.

“Imagine Mrs. Kate, sitting behind a desk, in front of her in front of her, she has a phone, a monitor, a keyboard and a notepad. The phone rings — you have to connect the departments — Kate looks at the diagram with the extension numbers and is there. Another one rings — a complaint, but the client is brawling. In order to speed up the process, Ms. Kate puts him on mute and hangs up, because she sees another phone ringing — this time a petitioner with an offer — Ms. Kate looks at the formula, does not let him finish the monologue — thank you, please send the offer to the email from the website. She hangs the phone up from the complaint, if he is still on the line, she thanks him for his patience and switches to the complaint department. The phone has stopped, so you can save a note for these calls and open the table from your boss. Thanks to Ms. Kate’s efficient operations and the prepared work place, she smooths out the flow of information and calms a lot of trouble from various departments.

Thanks to such a film I will remember everything that this person will do, and the people in training will also imagine themselves in such a situation.

You can associate words in the same way, certain moments, in psychology it is called an anchor. We anchor certain images or emotions to certain words. For this we need such a simple scheme of SEE

Senses, Exaggeration, Energy

Do you want to remember a specific word from a foreign language or what happened in the battle of waterloo?

Use your senses — the bang of muskets, the march of troops, the snare drummer who gives a marching rhythm, sweaty soldiers in their vests of a particular color, the smell of trampled grass.

Then use an exaggeration — during the battle napoleon can be very tall rather than realistically short.

Then add energy to these images — let your battle live, let the muskets shoot, dust rise, guns bang.

The key in these examples, both in passing on knowledge and in learning, is to give these stable terms some form of life. Imagine that, so you’ll never be wrong about who won at Waterloo and why. Because this film feels life-like.

Sort the information using existing paths in your head

For example, you can correlate — anchor — the order of your speech with your daily routine from when you get out of bed to go to work. The introduction is the wake up call, the development is a good breakfast and getting in the car, and then the arguments in the speech are the essence of the work, the relaxation in the speech is the lunch break and then again some arguments, finally getting in the car and going home is a nice ending.

The author puts a lot of emphasis on correlating the sequence of information with the memory of a given road, justifying that we people have a very good long-term memory connected with the routes we have traveled several times.

This also applies to specific routes at home, regular activities — all of them can be associated with a word, but this can be a useful tool to facilitate the memorization process.

Use sounds to associate numbers and dates

I had the biggest problem with this, I have strong listening tendencies, I remember the data once heard very well, all I have to do to remember it is to say it out loud myself. It was difficult for me to do Kevin’s technique, but it seems to have a deeper meaning. It consists of three stages:

• Assign the digits 0 to 9 to specific one-letter or one-syllables.
• In addition, you can also use visual associations to help yourselves — a letter’s shape can be linked with a number’s shape or a specific object can be added to it. For example, 0 will be “o” or a circle. Number 7 will be a T. It all depends on your imagination.
• Then take a number or date to remember, sign the selected letters of the number and you will get an abstract cluster of letters. Now, based on what sounds like a similarly specific word.
• Use shortcuts.

Everything in this system must be clear and understandable for you, start by assigning letters and associations to numbers sensibly — they must be unchangeable.

Repeat the knowledge

It’s obvious enough to repeat what we learned the next day, but did you know that in order to consolidate something really solidly you have to go back to that knowledge and notes a few more times? First the day after, then three days, then a week, then two weeks, then next month. And then come back to this knowledge every quarter.

Remember that it is something that supports your goals and makes sense to you — you don’t have to remember everything that day.

For me, the most important lesson about perfect memory is to revive knowledge in my head, to shape it, to build scenes, to anchor certain emotions and exaggerations to them, to make such an interactive film. I use this tool very often and it allows me to remember complicated information and communicate in an accessible way.

I invite you to leave us a comment and tell us what you think.