by Roger Seip
At the same time, do evaluate your results. That's how you're evaluated in your profession, isn't it? Do the same thing here: Trust the process, engage in what I ask you to engage in, and just see how it works. My guess is you'll impress yourself with how quickly you can boost your abilities.
Tip #2—Have fun with your brain! One of the things we know for sure is that at its best, learning is fun. There are a couple of aspects to this.
First off, think about the sense of enjoyment you feel when you learn anything new. Ever waterskied? Snowboarded? Played backgammon? Figured out how to sell something? Conquered a fear? When you started “getting it,” it felt good, right? Whether or not you liked school, your brain likes to learn new things!
Secondly, we know that your brain's stress response—fight or flight—is clearly the worst possible state for learning something new. It's very effective if you've already been trained in something and you've reached a level of unconscious competence, but for learning new skills or information, the fight or flight stress response essentially shuts that ability down immediately. The whole reason you remembered that guy's name later is that after he left your presence you took a deep breath and relaxed. While he was there and you were racking your brain, your brain was experiencing the same thing that soldiers experience in battle! Granted, it was milder (the grocery store is a less intense scene than the battlefield), but fundamentally the biochemistry and brainwave activity are the same.
In our workshops we teach that stress is the #1 killer of your mental ability. So back off on the pressure a little. If you get stuck or stumped, just take a deep breath, tell yourself “This will come to me,” and move on. Come back to it later. That's often all you need to re-fire some neurons that will get you where you want to go.
Just be open-minded about your mind. If you're anything like the hundreds of thousands of people who've experienced our live workshops, you are capable of way more than you think you are. So let's have some fun.
Your Baseline Memory Evaluation
Before we leave this chapter, let's just see where you're starting from. In a few moments, you're going to see a list of 20 items. Your job is to look the list over as slowly and carefully as you can, for no more than five minutes. Do the best job you can to commit the list to memory in that time span. You are not allowed to write the items down on scratch paper, only use your mind. When you are done, flip to the test on the next page and without looking back, write down the 20 items in order to the best of your ability. Ready? Go.
a unicorn
an electrical outlet
a tricycle
a truck
a hand
a can of beer
a hockey stick
a spider
a baseball
a dime
chopsticks
a rose
a black cat
gold
a dollar sign
a candle
a wizard
a golf green
a sauna
a dartboard
Again, take no more than five minutes to study the list. Once you're done, go to the next page and write down those 20 items, in order, without looking back at this page. Go.
How'd you do? If you're like most of our students, not so well. When we do this exercise in a live workshop, the average score is about 6 out of 20. If you did better than that, congratulations. If not, don't worry about it. Your score for the baseline evaluation is actually irrelevant, except as a baseline. There are a couple of great lessons to take away about some of your brain's natural tendencies that can be harnessed.
Tendency #1—The Rule of 7, Plus or Minus 2
Without a system, your brain can only handle a maximum of five to seven pieces of information at a time (and often it's more like three to five). If you were just trying to learn that list of 20 items through rote memory, one pattern you likely realized is that you did pretty well with the first five to seven on the list and then began to struggle. If this happened, don't worry; it doesn't mean there's something wrong with you, it just means you were operating without a system. When you do that, you're bound by your memory's inability to handle more than a handful of different pieces.
By the way, if you did get more than seven of the items, I would bet money that you were doing something other than just rote memorization. It does happen in our live workshops where some people will score ten or more on the baseline evaluation, and they are never doing it with rote memorization. They either made an acronym, created some kind of story out of the items, or noticed the pattern in the list that I'll teach you in a minute. Rest assured, without some kind of technique or system, your brain can only deal effectively with about seven items, plus or minus two.
Tendency #2—Primacy and Recency
One of the most common patterns we see on this baseline quiz is called primacy and recency. This means that with a bunch of information to remember, your brain will naturally be effective with the information at the beginning and the end, while struggling in the middle. Again, it doesn't mean you're broken—primacy and recency is just natural tendency.
Understanding these tendencies leads us to our most basic recall improvement principle: chunking. It simply means that you will automatically improve your brain's ability to recall if you will break things into bite-sized pieces. If you would have seen the baseline quiz like this:
a unicorn
an electrical outlet
a tricycle
a truck
a hand
a can of beer
a hockey stick
a spider
a baseball
a dime
chopsticks
a rose
a black cat
gold
a dollar sign
a candle
a wizard
a golf green
a sauna
a dartboard
Your performance would have improved. Why? More beginnings and more ends! Just this one concept can be a huge help for your brain. When you learn anything, take it in bite-sized chunks as much as possible. That's bite-sized chunks of information and bite-sized chunks of time. Even with this book, I recommend you read no more than one chapter at a time. When you finish a chapter, take a moment to review what was covered, in writing or at least in your mind. Take a quick stretch break, grab a drink of water, get your mind off of the book for a few minutes. Then and only then come back to reading. You'll get way more out of it.
Okay, now that we've got your baseline score and a baseline understanding of how your brain operates naturally, let's supercharge it. In the next two chapters, you're going to learn how to speak the language of your brain, mentally organize information of all kinds, and improve your recall for any number of applications. Let's go!
Reinforcement and Bonuses: This chapter has been Memory Optimized™ for your benefit. For your brief lesson and some great bonuses, visit www.planetfreedom.com/trainyourbrain with the access code in the About the Author section. Enjoy!
Chapter 2
Learn to Speak the Language of Your Memory!
Did you know that your memory has a language? We touched on it in the introduction, when we talked about “what you see is what you get.” The language of your memory (and every other function of your brain) is images. One of the other default settings of your learning capacity that can be harnessed is your brain's powerful tendency and ability to see images. The more you can visualize information, the easier it is to recall.
Some good news is that you already think in images. You may not have realized it consciously, but you do. If I asked you to recall 50 things about your living room right now, what would you do? That's right, you would just see a mental image of your living room! By doing so, you'd be able to recall tons of detail, even though you've never memorized your living room. Learn to trust that ability—we're going to start developing it right now.
Let's redo that baseline test, only with a small twist.
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1. unicorn
2. electrical outlet
3. tricycle
4. truck
5. hand
6. beer
7. hockey stick
8. spider
9. baseball
10. dime
11. chopsticks
12. roses
13. black cat
14. gold
15. dollar sign
16. candles
17. wizard
18. golf green
19. sauna
20. dartboard
Okay, two twists: We broke it up, and now we've got numbers. This “unicorn list” is the same baseline test we start all of our memory training workshops with, and here's what we find. Seeing/knowing the numbers with each item can, all by itself, create an association that's beneficial. See it? Most of the numbers do have a logical connection with the item that represents them —1 and unicorn, 3 and tricycle, 12 (a dozen) roses. In fact, the technique you're learning right now is called basic association, and it's a valid technique to begin with. Infinitely more valuable, however, is when you create a vivid image of each item in your mind. Even without a logical association (for example #15 is a stretch, #17 is really a stretch, and there is none at all for #19), the image is what your brain needs. So you'll take the test again, but first follow the simple directions. You're going to walk through the exact same 20 items, but this time you're going to see the images in your mind as vividly and clearly as you can. Let me emphasize: See the images as vividly and clearly as you can. Don't just say “ya, I got it.” Just take a few seconds with each one, then take the test on page 20. See these images in your mind, and study for no more than three minutes.
1. See a brilliant white unicorn with his 1 horn.
2. See the beige electrical outlet with its 2 slots.
3. See the red tricycle with its 3 black rubber wheels and a 3-year-old kid on it.
4. See the truck with its 4 wheels, its 4 doors, and the for sale sign in the window.
5. See your hand with its 5 fingers.
6. See that 6-pack of beer (you choose your favorite brand).
7. See the wooden hockey stick shaped like a 7.
8. See that big black spider with its 8 legs.
9. See that round baseball being tossed around by the 9 players on the field for 9 innings.
10. See that 10 cents, the thin, silver, shiny dime.
Let me just pause for a moment to let you review in your mind the images you just created, and remind you to see these images as clearly and vividly as you can. Moving on:
11. See those thin chopsticks that look like the number 11 being pulled out of their wrapper.
12. See those 12 beautiful red roses in a bouquet.
13. See that black cat on Friday the 13th.
14. Vividly see that 14-carat gold coin (or bar or nugget or ring; you choose).
15. Take the two digits of number 15 and squeeze them together into a dollar sign.
16. See 16 flaming candles on a birthday cake. Maybe even sing the song…
17. See that young wizard with the round glasses graduating from Hogwarts at age 17. (I said it was a stretch).
18. See that golf green with its perfectly cropped green grass on the 18th hole.
19. See 19 sweaty guys in that sauna. (I said there's no logical connection, but you're seeing it anyway, aren't you?)
20. See that round, light-up dartboard with the 20 scoring stripes and the number 20 on the top.
Now take a moment to review in your mind and see the images vividly and clearly. Ready? Now go to the next page and without looking back, write down the 20 items on the unicorn list. If you get stuck on one, don't freak out, just skip it and come back to it a little later. Go for it.
1. _____
2. _____
3. _____
4. _____
5. _____
6. _____
7. _____
8. _____
9. _____
10. _____
11. _____
12. _____
13. _____
14. _____
15. _____
16. _____
17. _____
18. _____
19. _____
20. _____
How did it go this time? Better, I would guess. In our live workshops, the average score the second time through jumps from about six to about 18, and most everyone gets them all. Why?
First off: True it's the second time through, which is an automatic advantage. You also do have that logical numerical connection for most of the items, which also helps. Most importantly, however, you created a vivid image for each of the items—you actually spoke the language of your memory. Just for kicks, take one more quick quiz:
Without looking back, what was:
#4?
#8?
#17?
What # was:
Sauna?
Dime?
Dollar Sign?
See? Even out of order, those images serve you well!
Two Plusses and One Big Minus of What You Just Did
There are two things in that baseline exercise that are really useful for training your brain, and one really big problem. What's useful is that, if you played along, you first started using the visual centers of your brain more purposefully, and second, you probably gained some confidence.
Both of those are really significant for your progress, more so than you probably realize right now,
The big problem is that the whole list was rigged. I am aware of that. I am also aware that life doesn't usually hand you information in a way that works quite as conveniently as when “4 just happens to be a truck” and “11 just happens to be chopsticks.” But are you aware now of just how quickly you can make progress with just a little bit of training? Does that build your confidence at least a little? It should. I mean, who knew you were such a genius?
It's true however, that because life very rarely gives you people's names, details of conversations, or any other information prepackaged with such convenient associations, you will want something that can deliver instant recall. If you can remove the need for a logical connection, you then develop the tools for remembering literally anything at any time. That's next.
The Mental File Folder System
I want you to imagine right now that you are in the office of a Fortune 500 company. You and I are standing in front of a filing cabinet that's filled with the files of every client this company has. There are literally hundreds of thousands of files, organized alphabetically by last name. Now I want you to imagine that I've asked you to get:
your file,
my file, and
some guy named Arturo Rodriguez's file.
Would you be able to find those files quickly? Of course you would—why?
Because there's a system for organizing this information.
You may have thought “because it's alphabetical,” which is also true. I said the information was organized alphabetically, but fundamentally the reason you'd be able to locate those three files (or any number of files for that matter) quickly is just that there is a system. Your brain is designed to operate on the same principal, with an organizational system in place. A huge part of why you have trouble recalling the stuff you have trouble recalling is simply that nobody's ever taught you how to organize information mentally. The opportunity here is that when you do develop an organizational system for your brain and then speak the (visual) language of your memory, you become so effective at storing and recalling information that you gain a huge competitive advantage.
Here's how we do it:
It's called the Mental File Folder System, aka the F.I.G. system. F.I.G. is an acronym (also a very helpful memory technique) that represents the three things you need to develop instant recall of anything, from names to presentations to this book to a grocery list to where you left your keys. It's awesome.
F stands for File
I stands for Image<
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G stands for Glue
Get a good clear mental image of a fig. If you don't know what a fig looks like, visualize a Fig Newton. Either one works perfectly. Let's break these down.
F is for File
The first thing necessary for instant recall is a file, which is just a place to store information. We've already discussed this concept, so what can you use as a mental file? Anything you can see. Anything you can see with your eyes, or just with your mind's eye can work as a terrific place to store information. Your home, your office, your car, your body, and so on. Literally anything that you can see can be used as a place to store information. In this book, you'll get two filing systems in place.
I is for Image
We've already discussed at length how the language of your memory is images. Just in case you're still not getting this concept, consider this. Faces are much easier to remember than names, right? How many times have you seen someone and said, “I recognize the face, but I can't recall the name”? It never goes the other way. You've never seen someone and said “Hey, you're Roger Seip, but I forgot your face!” Your brain loves images, so the more clearly and vividly you can visualize information, the easier it is to recall later.
G is for Glue
Here's where the magic happens. Once you have a file to store information and then have it in a vivid image format, you'll want to glue the image to the file so that it sticks. What makes for strong glue? Two things.