Little wonder then that the rishis of yore said everything is an illusion. It actually is! You are definitely not experiencing the world as it is. . . but as your brain is interpreting it for you.
That’s just experiencing. Let’s come to remembering that experience. The brain has to now recreate all those connections for you. Amazingly though, the more connections there are, the easier it is for the brain to piece them together later. This is supremely counter-intuitive, but it is actually simpler for the brain to ‘remember’ something when there are more senses and multiple connections involved. It can pick up any thread, build on it and recreate. More threads mean easier recall.
The point when we meet with new information is remarkably important to remembering it. The more connections it generates, the more you are invested in it, the more emotional charge there is, the more likely you are to remember it.
Relevance
Do you remember what tsundoku is? It is a Japanese word and is the act of collecting books without reading them. If you are like most people, by now, you would have forgotten that. There wouldn’t have been enough connections inherent in that word for you to remember it. For some people, though, that’s the one thing they may remember from that list of random facts at the start of this chapter.
When I came across that word for the first time, I immediately connected it with Dinesh. He has been wanting to learn Spanish for as long as I can remember, and has collected tonnes of books on that subject. He has never managed to get through more than the first few pages in any of them. He just keeps getting more and more of those books home. I think he thinks that if there are enough books on Spanish around the house, the language will somehow seep into his system.
I have been wanting to give those books away and reduce the clutter, which has led to a few arguments between us. It is not restricted to Spanish either. He will get a random weird title on some obscure subject and keep it on his desk. Then that book will go to the bookshelf. Finally it will be relegated to the stack of books lying all around the house which I call clutter.
Just when I am about to get rid of it, he will ask for it and it will return back to his desk. He has an amazing knack of noticing when a book is not in the house any more, even if he has not touched it for five years. Give the book away and he promptly asks for it. He is an absolute tsundokist, if that’s a word.
The word tsundoku rang a loud bell in my head when I first read it, because Dinesh who I love so much and is close to me, does exactly that. It formed numerous connections in my head and I could effortlessly recall it, precisely because there are so many connections which made it relevant for me. Perhaps you know someone like that in your life, and, when you read the definition for the first time, you smiled (or frowned) at the thought of them. If they play a significant role in your life and their tsundokoing has impacted you, then you will love to have a word that describes that infuriating habit. A parade of memories in your head related to the word ensured you remembered it.
If you are not a Tamilian, or no significant person in your life is a Tamilian, or you have no interest in cats and no interest in the Tamil language whatsoever, then your brain dismisses ‘punae’ means cat in Tamil as utterly irrelevant and promptly forgets it.
This, then, is one of the keys in the process of remembering. If you want to remember something, the brain needs to be convinced that the information is relevant. Relevance is just many, many connections. The more elaborately we encode things into our brain at the point of learning, the more relevant it feels to the brain, and the better we remember it.
Memory Palace
The brain is primed to remember things that are not what it considers to be normal. When new things happen, the brain goes on hyper-alert mode, recording the experience. Unusual, funny, ridiculous and dangerous are all turn-ons for the brain. It favours colour over black and white, movement over static, and out of the ordinary over mundane. Add emotional charge and you have a memory that will remain with you for a long time.
Let’s bring all these elements together for a little bit of fun. The Memory Palace Technique for remembering things is astonishingly simple to learn and is a great party trick. If you really develop it, it can become quite useful to remember things.
Here is a list of 15 random items:
Pizza
Race cars
Book
Needle
Spectacles
Waterfall
Roller skates
Mosquitoes
Photo frame
Eiffel tower
Black hole
Unicorn
Keys
Yoga mat
Servants
Take five minutes and read this list as many times as you want. Close this book and write out as many as you can remember.
How did you do? Did you get the order correct? If I asked you what was after Mosquitoes or before Yoga mat, would you remember? Chances are you won’t.
The Memory Palace technique will enable you to remember this list almost effortlessly.
For now, our palace is just one room. For the sake of this book, it’s going to be my room at the ashram. You need to have one room in your head that you are really familiar with.
Sweep your gaze around the room and notice the objects that make it up. . . Check out the photo of my room. Going round the room I can see: an earthen water pot, a desk, a standing lamp, the pooja table, an air conditioner, book shelves, a side cabinet, a bed, a recliner, a small cabinet, a rocking recliner, clothes hooks, a toilet door, an attic and cupboards.
It’s important that you take in these ‘pegs’ as we will call them in the order they are in your chosen room. You will need to remember these pegs in their correct sequence. This is very easy considering that you are familiar with the room in the first place.
Before you go further, ensure you have my room firmly in your head, and clearly remember the order of pegs in there.
To repeat, as you sweep your gaze around my room, it is:
Earthen pot
Desk
Lamp
Pooja table
Air-conditioner
Book shelves
Side cabinet
Bed
Recliner
Small cabinet
Rocking recliner
Clothes hooks
Toilet door
Attic
Cupboard
You may want to write this list out once or twice. You need to get the order effortlessly correct before we proceed. Of course, you could do this with any other room of your choice. Make sure you have at least 15 pegs and you know exactly which order they are in.
Let’s get back to the original list. For your brain to remember it, we need to superimpose each item on each of our pegs, make it as ridiculous or funny as possible, and animate it. Let’s do this now. Read what I have written below and take your time to visualise everything. If you can add more details, and make it even funnier or stranger, that’s even better. You don’t need to spend more than 5 minutes on the entire exercise.
The earthen pot and pizza. Think of a yummy, luscious, steaming hot pizza with earthen pots as topping. As you bite into the pizza, the pots explode with different types of cheeses and sauces.
Desk and race cars. Imagine a full-on race track on the desk and little race cars zooming around and the smell of burnt rubber. These race cars can even have a collision with the hair brush on the desk!
Lamp and books. The lamp is standing in the corner, reading a book. Every time it understands something, it lights up! If it’s funny, it blinks. If it’s sad, the light goes dim.
Pooja table and needle. Lord Shiva is meditating on the table and Parvati is thinking it’s getting late for dinner, shall I poke him with this needle to wake him up?! Think of Parvati sitting beside Shiva, getting a little wet because of the Ganga flowing from His locks, with a needle in her hand and sumptuous food spread out in front of her. . . thinking if it’s okay to give the Lord of the Unive
rse a poke with that needle.
Air-conditioner and spectacles. The air-conditioner has made the temperature so cold that the spectacles have frozen solid, turned a little blue with some icicles on them.
Book shelves and waterfall. Imagine a huge waterfall cascading down the shelves and a man in a barrel just about to go over the edge.
Cabinet and roller skates. The cabinet has grown legs and has donned roller skates. It is careening all over the room, its contents spewing in all directions as it laughs and skates.
Bed and mosquitoes. The entire bed has got irritated by the ‘singing’ of the mosquitoes and is jumping all over the room trying to kill them. Imagine the bed with sheets swishing, throwing pillows with deadly aim and squashing the mosquitoes.
Recliner and photo frame. The recliner is posing, showing off its cushions and bulges for a photograph which is then framed and hung on the wall.
Small cabinet and Eiffel Tower. As soon as you open the drawer in the cabinet, an Eiffel Tower pops out and grows and grows, breaking the ceiling of the room, reaching into the skies until it touches the clouds.
Rocking recliner and black hole. A black dot appears on the rocking recliner and slowly starts growing and becoming bigger. . . Its gravitational force is so great that even light can’t escape. Everything in the room is being pulled towards that black hole that is there in the rocking recliner.
Clothes hooks and unicorn. Imagine the clothes hooks as the horn of unicorns. Those unicorns have been very naughty, eating only chocolate and pizza, and as punishment, they have to come to our reality and are allowing people to hang their clothes on their magnificent horns.
Toilet door and keys. The toilet door is locked, you desperately need to use the loo and you keep turning different keys in the lock but the door doesn’t open. The pressure is building and you want to kick the person who thought of locking the toilet door with a key, and then keeping so many keys in a bunch.
Attic and yoga mat. Open the attic and there are all these people doing all sorts of weird yoga poses on these shiny, super colourful yoga mats. The yoga mats turn green and have stars when people do a pose correctly, and turn bright red and make booing noises if people do a pose wrong.
Cupboard and domestic help. You open the cupboard and there is a domestic help inside, altering the clothes so that they become tight when you wear them again. She is horrified that you caught her doing it. This one is for you, Anjana! For everyone else, please ask Anjana about the mystery of cupboards and domestic helps!
And that’s it.
Go around the room in your mind and see how it has become easy to remember that list.
You think ‘bed’ and that ridiculous image of the bed swatting mosquitoes simply pops up. You think ‘rocking recliner’ and you will see that black hole sucking everything in the room to itself, and so on.
Just to make sure, here is a test. Write out all the things in the list in the correct order. To help you, I have written out the pegs from my room. Write the corresponding object in the list in front of them. You will see that you will have recalled every single one of them.
Earthen pot
Desk
Lamp
Pooja table
Air-conditioner
Book shelves
Side cabinet
Bed
Recliner
Small cabinet
Rocking recliner
Clothes hooks
Toilet door
Attic
Cupboard
And if I ask you, what comes after ‘unicorn’? Unicorn is clothes pegs; after clothes pegs is the toilet door; and toilet door is keys. And what’s before the ‘spectacles’? Frozen spectacles is air-conditioner and before the air-conditioner is the pooja table and on the pooja table we have Parvati wanting to poke Lord Shiva with a . . . ? Needle! See how easy it is?!
In less than 10 minutes, you have got a list of 15 random objects in your head!
What’s truly amazing about this technique is that if you get another list of 15 things and make new correlations just like I showed you earlier, these correlations that you have in your head now will just magically disappear to be replaced by the new list. You can do this again and again for as many lists as you may need to learn.
Of course, if you want to remember a specific list for a longer time, don’t use that particular room for any other list.
Finally, you can have as many rooms like this in your head; you can potentially remember hundreds of things, maybe even thousands. These rooms need not even exist in real life. They can all be a figment of your imagination. They just need to be as detailed as possible and your pegs should be in logical order. That’s when it becomes a Memory Palace.
For the record, I can manage to remember a list of around 50 things now, using three rooms.
There are many other techniques to remember objects, long strings of numbers, countries and their capitals, the periodic table, etc. See the list of resources on memory in the Bibliography.
I would like to touch upon one more aspect of memory, along with another technique which I consider one of the most useful ever. So far, we have mostly talked about remembering. How about forgetting?
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist. Through his life from the late 1800s to the early 1890s, his single biggest contribution to the world was all about forgetting. Much of what we know about forgetting is from the absolutely astounding, yet crazy work that he did.
Ebbinghaus created around 2300 nonsensical words, each a three letter consonant-vowel-consonant combination, where the consonant wasn’t repeated. These ‘words’ had to make no sense at all. DOT, for example, was not allowed because it was already a word with a meaning. Neither were MAD or SAD. Or PAP or LUL because the consonant was repeated. He felt words with meaning or repetitive consonants would be easier to remember and skew his experiment.
He then spent years memorising these three-letter nonsense ‘words’. To the sound of a metronome and with the same vocal inflection, he would repeat random words he pulled out from a box to see how many he could remember. One such session would involve up to 15,000 repetitions.
He figured out how quickly or slowly he forgot by comparing how long it took him to learn and then, after a period of time, re-learn the list. His savage persistence and tenacity gave us the Forgetting Curve. It’s an absolute triumph of the human will to push through years and years of what must have been gruelling, utterly boring work. His experiment stands without parallel and spelt out some bad news to anyone wanting to learn anything.
All About Forgetting
Hermann Ebbinghaus gave us the Forgetting Curve. Here it is, in all its glory, for you to admire.
It is an exponential curve and what it demonstrates is quite clear.
Within 20 minutes of learning anything, you are likely to forget about 40% of it. In a day, more than 70% is gone. The curve then tapers off to denote that you will retain about 20% of whatever you have learned after a month. A ghost of whatever you have learned will lurk around in some obscure corner of your brain till you die. . . Maybe you might even take some of it with you, who knows?
The strategy most of us used as students to fight this tendency of the brain was to learn, and re-learn, and re-learn yet again, and make sure we managed to get through those exams. This is called overlearning and, in the short term, it might help just a bit: it will get you through that test—we are living proof that it works. But, in the long term, it is absolutely useless. Do you remember a single fact from a test you crammed for? Do you even remember any questions from that test?
Overlearning is definitely out when it comes to lodging stuff you learn firmly in your head so it can be of use to you later in life. Working harder, as we have seen, doesn’t work. There is a sneaky way out. The great news is that it involves working as little as possible. I always knew there was a strong reason for the inherent laziness I have in my genetic make-up!
The Tes
t
You have a list of random facts like the ones at the start of the chapter. Or a set of words in a language you don’t know. You are allowed to read that list and study it for about 10 minutes. Then you go home.
Come back after a week and you have 3 options before you attempt to recall it.
Study the list for 10 minutes again.
Study the list for 5 minutes and then take a blank sheet of paper and a pen.
Study the list for 5 minutes and take 3 blank sheets of paper and a pen.
If you have chosen option 2, write out on the blank sheet of paper for 5 minutes whatever you can recall from the original list. If you chose three sheets, you could pen it down thrice.
Amazingly, spending less time with the original sheet and instead writing what you remember gives you the ability for much greater recall when you finally put pen to paper and attempt to write out the list. And if you did that three times, the recall improves even more.
Happiness Express Page 17