Enjoy Your Memory

I was watching an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation (yes, I'm a trekie), and I was thinking about how much the scientific and engineering staff knew about advanced physics, computers and engineering, and how much the doctors knew about so many terrestrial and alien diseases and anatomies. It struck me how much we will have to learn in the future if we are going to be able to use the advances in technology to our benefit.

The next day I was teaching some people the basics of word-processing for basic office skills, and some of the people were really struggling. What struck me was how little some people already know, but also how little some people can learn at the moment. Many people seem unable to learn, or at least unable to learn quickly.

It struck me that whilst many people find it hard to learn, they want to learn, we seem to be driven to learn new things. Our memories are wonderful things, what if we learned to enjoy using our memories and learned to use them far more effectively than we do now?

Lots of people find it hard to remember things, they lose the car keys, they can't remember what to buy without a written list, they don't know what to say in a meeting because they forgot to write it down, they forget the way to a friends house, or forget the friends name.

Have you ever noticed, though, how effectively some people can remember the list of all the things they're no good at remembering?

I'm sure you've heard people tell you how hard it is to remember things, this page is all about making it fun and easy and enjoyable to remember things, that's why it's called Enjoy Your Memory.

In The Beginning

My brother is a juggler, he spent a long time learning to juggle, but it was worth it because he enjoys it so much. A friend of mine also set out to learn to juggle. He would take out his juggling balls every morning and throw them in the air. He would flap his arms around and miss all the balls.

He would do this another couple of times and then pack up saying "Nope, haven't learned to juggle yet". He did this each morning, as though he expected to do it one morning and suddenly find that the skill had appeared overnight, without him having to do anything.

Many people start off using their memories with this approach - "Because I can't juggle I can't learn to juggle." Your current memory abilities are where we start, they have no bearing on how far you can improve them.

You wouldn't get very far saying "I can't come to work, I'm still at home", home is where you start, you can still travel to other places. You might not experience those other places until you get there, but you can get there.

Learning to do something you haven't done before can be a pleasant surprise. It's like when you've struggled to get the top off a bottle or a jar and it just won't budge. You give it one last try, and it works!

Or when someone passes their driving test, they look back and think "why did I think I couldn't do it, if I knew then how easy it was going to be, I'd have enjoyed the lessons more".

Talking of visiting different places, I'd like to tell you about two time travellers, who both sought to use time travel to solve present day problems.

The first time traveller would find problem in this time, something that wasn't working. So he'd get in his time machine and travel back to the past, and he'd search throughout history until he found an instance where the same problem had been encountered before and was completely messed up. Armed with this new knowledge that someone in the past had screwed up this problem he would come back to the present and say how this problem had always been screwed up in the past and how it would therefore always be screwed up in the future.

The second time traveller would also find a problem in the present, something that required a solution, and he would go off to future and search throughout future history until he found an instance of the same problem where it was solved successfully. So he'd come back, and bring back the solutions to the here and now, and say how wonderful it can be if we work to make it wonderful.

They each did it by choice, they chose to be miserable or chose to be resourceful.

Present Memory

So what sort of memory abilities do people typically want? The ability to remember peoples names, their bank balance, shopping lists, how to use computers, procedures for things at work, the route to friends' homes in other cities, and many others.

Try these questions, see if you can answer them - what's your name? Where do you live? When is your birthday? What colour is your front door?

You can answer these, your unconscious mind simply hands you the answer. Ever tried to remember an actor in a film and it comes back later? Your unconscious mind hands you the answer.

But what is the unconscious? A better term for it might be the "other than conscious", it's simply everything that we aren't conscious of, such as the pressure on the soles of your feet, the feeling in your ears, the memories of last Christmas. All these pieces of information and all the processes which are going on to manipulate this information are there, but we aren't normally aware of them.

The unconscious takes care of all the remembering and recall that we need to do. When you strained to remember the name, that's conscious action, and isn't particularly effective in memory.

What we will learn on this page is how to enjoy having the unconscious hand us the answers whenever we want them, to go off and bring back the solutions.

So let's take a magical trip into your future, this is a fun exercise, a simple flight of fantasy and imagination. A quick word about visualisation. Someone told me the other day that he was no good at visualisation, because when he opened his eyes the images he was visualising weren't there. He was expecting to hallucinate full colour images which were more real than reality. For most of us visualisation is not like that (if it was how would you tell the difference between visualisation and the real world?), visualisation can be just having a sense of the images being there, seeing them even though they aren't really visible.

When you visualise, whatever happens - whether it's a voice in your head describing the scene, or a potential image in your minds eye, or just a feeling that there's a picture somewhere even though you can't see it - is right for your.

The exercises described on this page are to be done, just reading them is no use. Many people read exercise and diet books, the only people who get fit and lose weight are the people who do the exercises and follow the diet.

Now imagine getting into a time machine and taking a trip into the future. What would it be like to go off into the future, just imagine taking this trip out into your future.

When you arrive you can see someone quickly and easily remembering things, you can see how easy it is for them, how much fun it is for them, see how enjoyable it is for them to use their memory. As you look closer at them you can see that it's you, you're the one who's having fun doing it.

Get a really good idea of what it's like, and now you can step into their position and see it from their point of view, what it is like to be enjoying using your memory, enjoying doing it, having fun doing it.

And with this feeling of fun get back into the time machine and come back to the here and now and bring back the feeling of fun and enjoyment using your memory.

Learning About Learning

A question that has long fascinated me is "why do so many people find it so hard to use their memories?" It fascinated me because I could never remember things. Now I have an excellent memory and it's getting even better, I simply learned to remember. I also have a better understanding of how people have problems remembering things.

I remember in school trying to learn French. The teacher would ask us a question, if we got it right we got to take a sweet. If we got it wrong then she would scowl at us and ignore us on the next question. We got no feedback on what we did wrong or what we should have done right, but those of us who got questions wrong soon learned one simple lesson, learning is unpleasant.

In English and spelling tests we were told how many things we had wrong and what things we weren't good at. But we did learn that learning is unpleasant.

There was often someone in the class who exceptionally clever, and they were teased and bullied for it. Many people learned from someone else's' example, having a good memory is unpleasant.

Then we were told that learning is hard work, you've got to work long and hard to get anywhere. Learning is unpleasant. Practice that a few thousand times over the time in school (and many children spend twelve years in school) and it kind of sticks in your mind.

I remember seeing on television, an old man and his young son. The son was a huge bloke, yet when the little old man raised his hand the huge son flinched, why?

Have you ever seen the film Star Trek The Motion Picture? Anyway - the Star Trek crew come across a huge artificial lifeform, it's an enormous living machine. At its core is the Voyager space probe, sent out to explore the solar system. Over the centuries this living machine has built itself around Voyager, which is still carrying on its original mission, this little, primitive satellite at the core of this massive, all powerful machine.

To change the course of the machine they didn't destroy the machine or Voyager, they reprogrammed Voyager, so the whole entity carried on a different mission, one which didn't threaten to destroy the Earth.

The young son's behaviour is like this, the response he learned as a small child (to flinch when his Dad raised his hand) is still there, deep inside, carry out its original purpose, to avoid a clout around the ear. Years of logic and reason don't replace the original response, they just build up around it.

To stop flinching the son could learn a new response, if he did the right things and reprogrammed this automatic response he could stop flinching and do something more resourceful.

In the same way all those things we learned at school about learning and memory are still there. We might consciously forget the original instances, but the response is still there, think learning think unpleasant - no wonder some people find it so hard to enjoy their memory.

Making Memory F U N

Stand up, stand as though you were having an enormous amount of fun, in fact think about the funniest TV programme you've seen or the funniest book you've read.

Now imagine a circle, a magic circle, a fun circle. You can have fun inside this circle.

Step in and really enjoy it. Now step out. Step in. Step out. Step in, and get a really good idea of just how much fun it is to be in this circle.

Now imagine beyond that circle is another circle, a circle of excellence, a circle where you can do excellent things. Imagine this circle, what colour is it? What size is it? How much space is there inside this excellent circle?

Now keep your ideas of the circle of excellence, we'll come back to it in a moment.

What have these circles got to do with memory? Ever seen Linford Christie stop in the middle of a sprint race and start doing push ups? Of course not! But he does them, in training, and these exercises are part of memory training, they help exercise the memory and improve our memory skills, even though they aren't actually memory techniques themselves.

So now let's talk about how the memory works, and it does work, usually without our noticing. You're understanding what I'm saying without going and consciously thinking about the meaning of every single word, the unconscious does it all for you, so how does it do it?

Our memories work by association, like word association games, or daydreaming, or our tune, or smells, the things we tend to forget (the things we find it hard to recall) are the things with no connections.

It's like getting hold of someone on the telephone, you need their number. Even if you know them, and you know you know them, you still can't reach them on the phone unless you have their number, the way to reach them.

Because some people learn to associate learning with unpleasant feelings, who wants to go and retrieve unpleasant feelings? So things become harder to recall, all we have to do to remember something is to associate it with something good and pleasant, something that we can easily remember.

We actually have two forms of memory, short term memory and long term memory. Our long term is knowledge, it's stuff that's in there for good, you can't forget knowledge, like what's your name? Where do you live? When is your birthday? What colour is your front door?

If we associate things to items in long term memory, we can always retrieve the items from long term memory, and if the association is strong enough we will remember the thing. And the whole process is managed by the unconscious, all we have to do is decide to use it.

So what's in our long term memory which we can use and will always be able to remember - our body! So this is called the body parts list.

There are ten parts to the body parts list - toes, knees, thighs, bottom, spare tyre, shoulders, collar, face, crown (top of the head), ceiling.

To really learn to have fun using the body parts list, step into your fun circle, and when you're getting into the fun step into the circle of excellence.

Learning the list is very straightforward - using the list below shout out each item in turn and point to it and wiggle it around. Go through the list three times - and the more you laugh the better!

Toes Knees Thighs Bottom Spare tyre Shoulders Collar Face Crown Ceiling (okay I know the ceiling isn't strictly part of the body and that you may not be able to wiggle the ceiling!)

Step out of the circle and sit down. Now you have the list, it was already in your long term memory, now you have brought it into conscious awareness as well, so you can decide you use it.

The last step is to use it to remember things, so let's remember a shopping list. Suppose we need to remember the following list of items - vitamin tablets, bacon, vodka, toilet paper, chocolate, green peppers, tomato ketchup, cheese cake, rice, pizza.

But how do we associate each one with a part on the body parts list. To be truly memorable each connection should be FREAMS. Funny, Ridiculous, Exaggerated, Action, Movement, Sexual (if possible). Have a picture of the connection between the thing and the part on the body parts list, a distinctive sound, and the good feeling that comes from the circle of excellence.

Now, into the circle of excellence and here we go:

Vitamin tablets connect with toes, imagine kicking around a giant vitamin tablet as though it was a football, what sound would that make, make it a purple tablet which is glowing because of all the vitamins and energy inside it.

Bacon to connect with your knees. Imagine your knees being tied together with huge strips of bacon, again put a sound to it, make it as big and silly and ridiculous as possible. See the action and see the movement.

Next we need to associate vodka with thighs. Perhaps you could imagine someone lovingly rubbing huge amounts of vodka into your naked thighs!!!

Toilet paper and bottom. Use your imagination! (But this connection is getting very close to being ordinary and obvious, to make it memorable make it bigger and ridiculous, with action and movement and sound.

Chocolate and spare tyre (even if you haven't got a spare tyre!). Perhaps an image of putting on a chocolate belt which is soft and sticky.

Green peppers to shoulders, walking around balancing an enormous green pepper on each shoulder and each one is shouting rude jokes into your ears!

You sneeze tomato ketchup onto your collar!

Cheese cake and face, again it would be easy to make this too obvious, so really amp up the silliness and the sound and the image.

It's raining huge gains of rice onto your crown (the top of your head), making that sound that only rice makes.

You're hungry and ready to eat a pizza, but first you're trying to scrape it off the ceiling.

Practice each of these images three times, or any other images you can come up with, making them as silly and ridiculous and fun and active and moving as possible. Where you can, put in a huge helping of sex - it really improves the recall (I wonder why!?!!)

You'll find that this list has stuck, you could now go shopping and easily remember the entire list, without having to write anything down and without forgetting anything.

This list can be used for shopping lists, lists of things to do, lists of topics to cover in a training course or parts of a machine to check when repairing it.

Have fun with this list, use it where ever and whenever you need to, it's fun, the more you use it the even more fun it becomes, you build up new abilities around it, it stays inside at the core, working away, with your unconscious so that you can Enjoy Your Memory.

Oh, there's one thing I forgot to tell you about the circle of excellence, it will go where you go, like your shadow, always there to step on when you need it.

Have fun.

I'd love to hear how you get on with these memory exercises, so e-mail me with your success stories.