How to Memorize Anything

My brain hurts. AHHHH

I’m learning Japanese so this is actually SO helpful right now! Thanks, Joanna!!

Read his book, “Moonwalking with Einstein!” It is fabulous, fun read. He has you memorize a grocery list – I read this book in 2011 and I still remember parts of that list.

Way too complicated for me but it was fascinating to learn his process. I guess I’ll just have to settle for my 17 memorized digits of pi that I can still remember from high school. =D

This was fascinating! A friend taught me part of the memory palace technique in order to remember things that I have to do. I’m really great about waking up in the night anxiously thinking of something I MUST DO tomorrow and getting up to write it down makes me wide awake so I can’t go back to sleep. This technique relies on placing an absurd image related to the task you must do, inside a familiar place, your house. Somehow the absurd image is easier for the mind to hold on to than the words related to a task.

So let’s say I wake up in the night and remember that I must call my grandmother for her birthday tomorrow. I’d think of walking into my house, and sitting on the front table is a huge old fashioned telephone with a wig of Grandma’s curly grey hair on top, blowing confetti through the hand set. I go to sleep and in the morning I feel like there’s something I’m forgetting. So I imagine opening the door to my house and Oh yeah, there’s the strange old fashioned phone sitting there, reminding me to call her because its her birthday. It works really well for me!

Okay, this makes me think of two things. First of all, have you seen the British series “Sherlock” with Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes? If you haven’t, you must (it’s the Sherlock Holmes stories, but set in modern-day London). Anyway, in it, Sherlock talks about his “mind palace,” so of course this video reminded me of him. Except that this guy is not as weirdly charming as Benedict Cumberbatch.

Secondly, when I was a kid, my dad bought me a set of memorization technique tapes to help me become a genius (only half kidding). The only thing I remember from those tapes now was that in order to memorize boring things, you had to make them unusual. Like, if my shopping list had bread and milk from the grocery store, then a replacement lightbulb and some wood glue from the hardware store (or whatever), I’d have to imagine something like being a loaf of bread diving into a pool of milk, resurfacing to find that I’m actually swimming inside of a light bulb, and the liquid isn’t milk after all, it’s wood glue. Something crazy like that.

It’s fascinating, I’m so often feeling like Dory in “Finding Nemo”. With technic, and work, it could pay, but as days still only have 24 hours maybe I will continue to read your blog instead and still feel sometimes “lost in translation”.

My reaction in letters: OMG. (and then) WTF!? Haha. I’m too lazy to figure out the number associations ;)

Seriously though, that was pretty crazy and pretty amazing. So funny that he considered this a sluggish performance!