‘The magic ingredient is paying attention’
For those born without the natural gift of phenomenal recall, there are tricks and techniques that train the brain into a better memory muscle.
According to Gail Robinson, professor of clinical neuropsychology at the Queensland Brain Institute, “the magic ingredient is paying attention”.
“In neuropsychology, if someone has a patchy memory, we look at how good their attention is; what else are they thinking about,” she says.
“Paying attention is a different skill from memory. And it’s absolutely a skill you can develop. That part is nurture. It requires focus, being selective on the information you retain, and encoding that. Deep focus is key – and social media feeds are killing that skill.”
Anastasia Woolmer, 44, is living proof that memory can be improved. A two-time Australian Memory Champion and the first female to win this title in Australia, she achieved this goal after only five months of self-training.
“It was astounding to me,” she says. “You go your whole life thinking what you’re born with is it. I’d forget names at small dinner parties. I think impostor syndrome is common. It felt liberating: if I set my mind to something, I can learn it really quickly and gain confidence.”
Woolmer was inspired by Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer, which suggests brain training, rather than naturally gifted people, account for most USA Memory Championship finalists.
The memory techniques, known as mnemonics, use imagery to aid encoding and retrieval. Another, the memory palace, dates back to the fifth century BC and “places” abstract things on to actual objects, narrativising memory.
In Woolmer’s case, she used her dance background to remember the first 1,000 digits of pi. “I attached a movement for every number sequence from 000 to 999,” she says.
“So 100 digits of pi is just a short contemporary dance story of around 35 movements. It’s just scaffolding new information on to things already easy for me to remember.”
Woolmer is now training to beat the Australian record for pi figure recall (10,533 digits). “I could beat that in a week of learning,”she confidently says.
Improve your memory. Learn faster. Think quicker. Make good decisions quicker. Improve your memory and be a better person. YOU CAN DO IT!!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment