The Power of Forgetting (22 page)

The exercises in this chapter are meant to be done only
once as you read through, but you’ll find lots of fresh exercises online that you’ve never seen before. Go to my Web site,
www.MikeByster.com
, for video demonstrations and additional resources to challenge your mental math shortcuts.

Harry Held Little Baby Bobbie, Causing Nancy One Fantastic Nightmare

Harry, Bobbie, and Nancy were just one set of friends who kept me cruising through science class as a fifth grader. Yes, these are fictional characters, but they could tell me how to begin reciting the periodic table of elements anytime. Within that one sentence—“Harry held little baby Bobbie, causing Nancy one fantastic nightmare”—live the first ten elements, from hydrogen to neon. Many more sentences and characters followed, of course, taking me to the end of the table in organized fashion. My classmates thought I was a genius, but I knew otherwise. It was just a matter of using my imagination and stringing a few fun sentences together in groups of five to ten words. Simple as that.

Today I don’t need to know the periodic table of elements
to get through my day. I encounter other types of challenges that are vastly more monumental (from my adult perspective now) to my ability to succeed, navigate challenges at work, and make a difference in the world. But I’ve used mental organizational devices since I first learned their value as a third grader decades ago, and I attribute many of my accomplishments over the years to this skill’s uncanny ability to free up mental space, accelerate my problem-solving abilities, and help me to manage an untold amount of incoming data that constantly bombards my brain.

Lauren had a breakthrough moment within weeks of learning the fine art of mental organization. An audience member of mine during a presentation a few years ago, Lauren epitomizes what mastering certain organizational strategies can do for anyone who juggles the weight of “too much information” in daily life or, in Lauren’s case, in her attempts to start a catering business that demanded she multitask to a degree that could drive anyone crazy.

Although plenty of experts have discussed the benefits of organizing one’s physical space, that goal should come second to the task of organizing one’s mental space. In fact, optimizing any physical space happens naturally once you’ve gotten your cognitive space organized. Just ask Lauren: While she was in the early stages of getting her business off the ground, which required that she manage competing demands from vendors and customers, all the while learning the ropes of being in business for herself (and hearing a lot of unsolicited advice) and overseeing a small staff, Lauren found it essential to find mental shortcuts to keep to-dos,
promises, and responsibilities in check. She also came to rely on her mental organizing skills to manage the stress that accompanied being self-employed, for a lot of people depended on her as a leader.

I think it’s fair to say that anyone who takes on such big roles in the working world has to find ways of keeping the mind well ordered and primed to handle the unexpected. But even people who aren’t at the helm of a company and who don’t have any interest in starting a business can benefit mightily from learning this skill. It has enormous benefits, from helping us remember a wide variety of things to seemingly unrelated endeavors like public speaking, prioritizing, accomplishing more at work, writing compelling and attention-grabbing articles or essays, managing a team of people, getting household chores done, collaborating with others, and solving problems in academic, professional, or personal situations. Put simply, the ability to organize the mind is what separates the high achievers from the non-achievers.

In this chapter you’ll develop your power of mental organization. You’ll learn how to sort through incoming thoughts systematically and create order out of the chaos of inbound information so that it can be stored and easily retrieved at a later date. We’ve done a lot of work with achieving higher levels of attention and mental capacity, creating associations and personal connections, and looking at things differently, but now it’s time to bring all of these skills together and maximize your ability to manage massive amounts of data in an orderly fashion. The brain craves order and systemization. It likes predictability, too—knowing what it’s dealing with so it can allocate resources and figure out the best way to handle the arriving information. Otherwise, reams of information
can quickly become tangled, indecipherable, and effectively turned to mush in the mind’s eye.

By now you should have already gotten your feet wet with strategies that entail organizing, but here I’ll focus intently on establishing proven ways to mentally catalog information, especially when it involves the receipt of a lot of data at once. In doing so, I’ll offer insights into how the brain operates when it receives a flood of information and how anyone can master techniques to immediately commit that content to memory without needing to hear it again—or even take notes! And how does the power of forgetting fit into this skill?

Being able to effortlessly organize thoughts has everything to do with the forgetting. The vast majority of the entire practice of continual mental organization has to do with ignoring and dumping the unimportant, which can clutter and clog your brain’s precious processing channels. It’s just like what happens when we organize our physical spaces: When we attack those untidy garages, closets, and cabinets, most of our efforts are spent on throwing away useless junk and outdated items. The proverbial spring cleaning is more about purging than adding. And the same is true of organizing our minds. This skill is primarily based on giving yourself permission to abandon certain thoughts and dispose of them as you would an old piece of clothing or an expired box of stale crackers.

The brain can hold a lot more than most people think, but unless you know how to register the details as they come in, your poor brain won’t be able to hold much. With proper organization, you can access the particulars you need when you need them—fast. So whether you want to remember someone’s talk that you heard during a seminar,
recite a poem, or recall all of your weekly appointments and obligations without looking them up in your “organizer,” the skills you learn in this chapter will make you your own personal organizer. No computer or notebook required. And as I stated earlier, this skill is immensely valuable and rewarding in more ways than one.

As I’ve already mentioned, it helps to symbolically think of the brain as having two “regions”—one part that memorizes information and another part that sorts and processes new information. Training these different regions to work simultaneously yet independently of each other is what will allow you to have a really fast and sharp brain. But as we’ve also seen, the brain cannot effectively accomplish two tasks at once when those two tasks entail complex functions, such as comprehending and counting. We can talk on the phone and play a video game like Tetris at the same time, but we can’t really listen to two people talking to us at the same time and focus on both conversations at once. Neither can we do more than one brainy thing at a time, such as write a witty e-mail or blog entry while our spouse stands in front of us hoping to have a lively discussion.

Some commonplace activities, such as driving and talking on a cell phone, frequently go hand in hand, but when they do, it’s likely that the brain is switching its main focus quickly between the two activities—perhaps a reason why this particular pairing has been so dangerous. What’s even more dangerous is when one of the tasks sparks too many unrelated thoughts and our frontal lobes lose track of the other task. More evidence for the hazards of distracted driving.

The human brain is pretty quick, but there are limits to how much information it can process while juggling multiple streams of data. These limitations and the process of momentarily switching back and forth from one task to another in order to “multitask” make the skill of organization all the more essential so the brain can more easily perform those mental shifts swiftly, seamlessly, and reliably. The brain is constantly striving to keep track of two tasks or two sets of information, and organization is key.

With that in mind, let’s turn now to my seven personal secrets to organizing incoming data. Some of this material will sound familiar, because I’ll be reiterating concepts you’ve already acquired. See if you can really cement these ideas in your head. Although these strategies might not initially seem at all related to organizing thoughts and information in real life, work through learning them regardless. You’ll be surprised by just how applicable these ideas are to streamlining data you encounter in everyday work and your personal life. At the end of the chapter, I’ll give you a couple of games to play that gather all of these strategies together and help to further connect the dots between these concepts and their applications in the real world.

“One is a bun, two is shoe, three is a tree, four is a door, five is a hive.…”

In the mid-1600s, a man by the name of Henry Herdson linked digits with objects that resembled them. So, for instance, the number one became a candle. This would become known as the
peg system:
items to be remembered are
pegged to—or associated with—certain images in a prearranged order. The system gets its name from the fact that the peg words act as mental “pegs” on which you can hang the information that you need to remember. There are several variations of this type of system today, another of which is the one based on
rhyming pegs
. In rhyming pegs, you remember items that rhyme with the numbers zero through ten, as in the following:

This system was introduced in England sometime around 1879 by John Sambrook. It’s easy to use, and many people already know many of the standard rhymes from the nursery rhyme “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.” To use this system, start by memorizing this list, visualizing each item as you make the rhyme. Picture the items vividly—is the bun a hot-dog bun or a hot-cross bun? Is the shoe an old battered sneaker or a black high-heeled pump? Next, draw the item. The act of drawing helps you remember the rhyme, creating a strong mental association between the numbers and the
words. By visualizing the object that each word represents as vividly as possible, you’ll fix it securely in your mind, creating a strong mental association between the number and the word that rhymes with it.

Once you’ve formed an association between the numbers and the words that rhyme with them, you’ve constructed your pegs. Practice by saying each of the peg words out loud. Then try picturing the peg words in place of the numbers as you randomly jump among the numbers: 5, 3, 1, 8. Because the words rhyme with the numbers, you don’t have to say the numbers to remember the words. If you want to remember a list, all you have to do is link each item with a peg: the first item with a bun, the second item with a shoe, and so on. To remember the list, call up each peg and you’ll automatically remember the mental image linked to that peg.

Let’s see how this could work for a short grocery list of milk, bread, eggs, and cheese—milk being item number one, bread being item number two, and so on. You could start out by visualizing a gallon of milk balancing a bun on its lid. Then imagine an old shoe squashing a loaf of bread. Then think of a tree filled with eggs. And finally, picture a wedge of cheese knocking on a door to be let in. When you get to the store and you think of one—bun—you’ll think of a milk jug, and two—shoe—will bring to mind a shoe smashing the bread. Whatever image you choose, it should be evocative, bordering on the absurd. If you can make yourself laugh with the images you create, you’re more likely to remember them.