The Power of Forgetting (18 page)
Read The Power of Forgetting Online
Authors: Mike Byster
Whether you’re trying to pick up a new language; gain more knowledge of art, literature, world history, or politics; learn a new hobby such as cooking or playing the piano; manage your stock portfolio; or play a sport better by knowing the top strategies (“plays”) by heart, the art of association again reigns king. Being able to create associations on the spot when you receive new information also helps you commit to memory seemingly random things like appointment dates, anniversaries, birthdays, and historical data.
By now you should realize the benefits of retaining information. And as you’ve learned, the solution to most memory problems is to break things down into two steps: (1) stop and think about what it is you want to remember, which helps create that original awareness, and (2) figure out a creative way to associate that thing you’re trying to remember with your own life, or at least with something that’s memorable to you. The second step can entail using substitute words
or phrases and conjuring mental pictures in your mind’s eye that are outrageous enough to be unforgettable. Here are a few more examples:
• You want to remember that most tech companies trade on the NASDAQ. Let’s say that you’re a big fan of Apple computer products and you follow that stock closely. The word “NASDAQ” sounds close enough to “nice daiquiri,” and you can picture an apple daiquiri in your mind’s eye. This immediately associates Apple Inc. with the NASDAQ, and you can easily tell yourself that, like Apple, other tech companies trade on the NASDAQ.
• You want to remember that, as a general rule of thumb, the ideal cooking time for fresh fish is ten minutes per inch of thickness. When the fishmonger tells you this in the supermarket, you say to yourself: “Ten finches in a pear tree.” Clearly, the two key pieces of information to remember are “ten minutes” and “one inch.” The word “finch” popped into your head because it rhymes with “inch,” and “ten finches in a pear tree” brings to mind that holiday tune “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” even though you’ve substituted finches for partridges, and there are ten of them rather than just one. Assuming the jingle works for you, you won’t be asking yourself later on, when you’re in the kitchen cooking the fish, whether it was twenty minutes or ten. If you need a way to remember that it’s ten minutes per one inch and not per two, then you can add another image, such as a baby finch that is just one inch tall.
• You need to remember that the first breakthrough in antibiotics came with the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928. The key pieces of information
are “antibiotics,” “Fleming,” and “1928.” You drum up the following: “My phlegm in February is awful.” This somewhat disgusting phrase gives you a mental picture of suffering from a cold in winter and dealing with congestion. The word “Fleming” sounds close enough to “phlegm,” and since February has twenty-eight days in it (excluding leap years), you can figure out “1928.” From the word “awful,” which begins with the letter
a
, you can get “antibiotics.” Or you could come up with another word, such as “antisocial”—which would make the statement even funnier! Now, what if you want to remember that vaccines predated antibiotics? (Although the earliest reports of vaccines seem to have originated from India and China in the seventeenth century, as recorded in ayurvedic texts, they were more officially developed by Louis Pasteur during the nineteenth century to combat anthrax and rabies.) People sometimes mix up which came first, vaccines or antibiotics. And unfortunately it doesn’t help that the letter
a
for “antibiotics” is the first letter in the alphabet but is not the first letter of the first invention here (vaccines). While you can mentally try to tell yourself that the order is reversed, another possible strategy is to say to yourself something like “Vaccines have a vast history” or “Antibiotics are a newer invention.”
• You cannot forget that your boss’s birthday is on September 30. His name is Seth, and you can associate “September” with “Seth” easily, as the two words share the same first two letters. But to implant this particular date in your mind, you need to go further. September 30 is the last day of the month, and you can’t stand the fact that your boss is always late to staff meetings. He’s always the
last one to show up, so when you’re trying to commit this date to memory, picture your boss being late to his own birthday party—as well as the last one to leave.
As I hope these examples demonstrate, anything is possible! This is just a tiny sampling from hundreds if not thousands of ways to make facts stick to your brain. And these examples represent only three areas where you can apply this strategy. I’ve used them simply to show you one way to make an association. They are examples for you to use to test yourself; I hope you go on to create your own associations in any subject area where you need to retain factual material. Include any information you like, and don’t limit yourself to the obvious. A tree has nothing to do with cooking, but in the context of an association it can work. It doesn’t matter how difficult or abstruse the content or information seems to be. I can’t reiterate this enough: So long as you can construct a meaningful association, anything goes!
Now, it’s one thing to extinguish absentmindedness, memorize phone numbers and faces, and think for yourself along the way. But what about seriously more complex tasks? What if your son is told to memorize the periodic table of elements, every single capital in the Union, or all of the Constitution’s amendments (including the Bill of Rights)? What if your boss tells you to present the same speech that he gave at last year’s company retreat to a new group of hires? How will you get in front of a podium and rattle off his words of wisdom without a Teleprompter (and without relying on reading)? Now that we’ve covered the fine art of association—creating sentences and stories to help you recall lots of information—you need a booster shot, because sometimes you need a little more than that to retain complex,
in-depth information—knowledge, really. The lessons you’ve learned in this chapter provide a strong foundation for being able to accomplish these tasks effortlessly, but the skills you’ll gain in the next chapters will really help you accomplish more than you ever thought possible. To start, you need to push yourself outside of your box. Then you’ll need more tools to organize your thoughts and occasionally forget. But before we move on, one last word …
In the play
Hamlet
, Polonius prepares his son, Laertes, for travel abroad with a speech (act I, scene 3, lines 55–81) in which he directs Laertes to commit a “few precepts to memory.” Among these precepts is the now-familiar adage “Neither a borrower nor a lender be” (line 75) and the dictum “This above all: to thine own self be true” (line 78).
This is a useful dictum to bear in mind throughout life, whether you’re a fictional character in a play or a real person in the flesh. Everyone learns differently, and I hope by now I’ve impressed upon you the importance of making everything you encounter in the world relevant to yourself somehow. Experiment with what works for you and don’t feel like you have to use what’s given to you. How you use the strategies has to be up to you. And if I had to create a bottom line here, it would simply be this: Think for yourself! Only then can you maximize your mental capacity, find the associations that will work for you, solve problems quickly and effectively, and turn on your sharpest, smartest you.
This chapter presented a lot of strategies rather than straightforward exercises and games. See if you can apply these techniques starting today, including the challenge of avoiding the use of devices and forms of technology to remember names, faces, phone numbers, and so on. Tap your imagination and engage your inner storytelling ability; try to create your own mnemonics, sentences, and phrases to retain and recall information. I encourage you to reread this chapter whenever absentmindedness finds its way back.
I may have implied that there’s a permanent “cure” for absentmindedness, but it requires booster shots on occasion! This might be a chapter you’ll want to reread every couple of months to refresh your memory on its numerous strategies.
PROBLEMS IN THIS CHAPTER
Numbers and words
82253 (table)
27323 (bread)
7428873 (picture)
24453736 (children)
2886662453 (automobile)
4277924784329! (Happy birthday!)
47328646378446525453 (Great minds think alike.)
Skill 4:Thinking Outside the Box
What Hitler and Mother-in-Law Have in Common
It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts
.
—
HARRY S. TRUMAN
In
chapter 4
I mentioned that I had a hard time distinguishing my right boot from my left boot as a kid. The story doesn’t end there. Between first and second grade, it was determined (officially, by no less than a licensed psychologist who tested me outside of school) that I was developmentally delayed in what are called gross motor and motor planning skills, which means I had a hard time understanding the space around me. No wonder I’d repeatedly break my pencil pressing down on paper, strain to tie my shoelaces, button my sweater all wrong, and be totally uncoordinated and clumsy on the playground. To this day I have problems with spatial stuff, which also explains why I can struggle with some IQ
tests that are filled with too many questions about visual geometry and spatial patterns. On a more practical level, I’m not very handy around the house, and my wife won’t ask me to screw in a lightbulb.
I like to tell people, kids especially, about my “developmental challenges” because my own life proves that such a label doesn’t necessarily affect one’s ability to adapt and succeed. Success also doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whether or not you can develop a fast and furious brain to rival the best and brightest minds.
Full disclosure: The following is an excerpt from my “report card” from a psychologist who tested my developmental skills when I was seven years old. Check out the note about my ability to teach myself ways around my “handicap.”
Like many capable children, Michael has done an amazing job of getting around his handicap (visual-perception and motor scores), but it is essential that parents and teachers should realize the fine job he is doing and give him full praise and recognition for his truly remarkable accomplishment. Unless he has had individual teaching of which we are not aware, Michael is, in many important respects, really “self-taught.”
That said, official diagnoses like that can be hard on parents. Sure, I was gifted in some areas, but to learn that I was
“way below grade level” in other important developmental areas could not have been easy for my parents to swallow. Luckily, they took the news in stride and decided against taking any specific action. They decided to keep me right where I was and to find ways to make up for my “delay” until my body caught up. They wanted to make sure that I felt like a typical kid, that I was “normal”—whatever that is!—rather than send me to a special school.
It took me ten times longer than any of my friends to learn how to ride a bicycle. For a week I would arrive home all bloody and bruised from my determined attempts. But I kept trying. Just as my mother helped me with my boots, she was good at helping me adapt and find different ways to do other things. When I wanted to play ice hockey, she encouraged me to stick with playing goalie, knowing that I’d be much better equipped to guard that small space than to have an entire rink in which to maneuver. She’s the one who also taught me to pull my sweaters down and match the bottoms together so I could see how all the holes and buttons aligned.
Play to your strengths and work on your weaknesses. Don’t do yourself an injustice by abandoning areas you find challenging. Learn as much as you can and know that you can improve in every area—and this book will help you gain the confidence and capabilities to do so. If you struggled in formal schooling and think you’re a bad learner today as an adult, with no hope of improving your brain’s mental capacity, think again. Traditional schooling often
forces us to learn within the same box as everyone else, but once we begin thinking and solving problems outside that box (especially if it’s not working for us), we can experience unprecedented success. We also can take maximum advantage of the power of forgetting.
My developmental delays made it essential for me to do things a tad differently and approach problems or tasks from an unusual angle or perspective. From the time I was a young child, my mother always encouraged me to think “outside the box” and offered me new ways to tackle daily problems. Since my father was good with numbers, everyone assumed I was most like him. Actually, I was a product of both of them, and I couldn’t have gotten to where I am today without that perfect combination. Although my dad could calculate 53 times 7 in his head in seconds, he had no understanding of the mental process involved in the calculation. My mother, who was not naturally gifted with numbers, taught me to take my innate ability with numbers and discover easier ways to do things. She always looked for shortcuts or simpler approaches. She also had a very good sense of humor, so she was able to make learning enjoyable. I think my ability today to blend my dad’s “science” of numbers with my mom’s “art” of making it enjoyable to learn and work the brain is what has allowed me to be so successful.
