The Power of Forgetting (25 page)

Acrostics can be more complex than just making words from initials, and they can be a form of encryption. Using letters to hide a message, as in acrostic ciphers, was popular during the Renaissance. Various methods of enciphering were used, such as selecting letters other than initials based on a repeating pattern (equidistant letter sequences) or concealing the message by starting at the end of the text and working backward. Acrostics have also made their way into modern culture as an easy, sneaky way to deliver insults and political jabs at adversaries. In October 2009 the office of Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California at the time, sent a letter to the state assembly that contained an acrostic. The initial letters of each line spelled an obscene exclamation starting with the letter
F
. A spokesman for the governor called the incident coincidental. In January 2010 the CEO of Sun Microsystems sent an e-mail to his employees after the company had been successfully acquired by Oracle Corporation. The initial letters of the first seven paragraphs spelled
“Beat IBM.” Coincidence? Probably not. Cleverness, more likely!

Acrostics can function as more than just a useful memory strategy. They can come in handy for organizing your thoughts to begin with—before they even become part of your memory. Anytime you have to create a lengthy story or sequence of substitute words or memorize a long list of items and you find that the peg system won’t work for you, acrostics can be your strategy. Acrostics are also great for framing and organizing reminders in general, whether it’s your to-do list, a checklist of items you need to pack, or a record of your weekly appointments and obligations. For example:

As with all of the mnemonic devices described in this book, there are virtually no limits to the types of acrostics you can create. The only rule you need to follow is making sure your creation has meaning to you. Note that your acrostic automatically establishes order, which is helpful when you need to rely on it to remember a certain sequence. Take, for instance, a list of tasks that must be done at work in a certain
order if they’re going to be accomplished on time: (1) e-mail boss, (2) prepare marketing campaign update for lunch meeting, (3) make doctor’s appointment, (4) pay credit card bill, and (5) schedule dinner with Susan. You can create your own acrostic here by taking the first letter of the key idea in each task. BLABS (as in a person who blabs) could be your word here.
B
stands for boss,
L
stands for lunch,
A
stands for appointment,
B
stands for bill, and the final
S
stands for Susan. You won’t mix up the two
B
’s because you know that your boss gets priority!

The key is to use acrostics when they come naturally to you and make sense to you. It does you no good to force them when they are difficult to create (and thus remember). But they do offer a brilliant way to organize your thoughts when they are easy to make. You can also employ them when you’re trying to organize the chief sections of a long speech. Just as we created mental pictures out of lengthier chunks of material from the sample speech on
this page
, you can imagine an acrostic to generate the chief thought that needs to be conveyed in each sequential section. Try this right now. Go back to FDR’s speech and see if you can create an acrostic using the main ideas expressed in each section. I encourage you to go online as well and share your acrostic at
www.MikeByster.com
. Let’s see who comes up with the wittiest one!

At the World Memory Championships, top competitors memorize the order of twenty shuffled decks of cards in an hour and more than five hundred random digits in fifteen
minutes, among other feats. Such amazing mental stunts take more than a quick mind and solid memory. They take exceptional organizational skills. Think you have what it takes, too? Believe it or not, almost everybody has the capacity to perform such incredible feats. But you will need more than just the collection of organizational strategies you have already learned in this book up to this point. You will need to weave together many strategies and techniques to create your own memory palace, an idea that’s been around for centuries. Being able to go on wild expeditions in your mind that you control yourself, picture by picture, staircase by staircase, is key. This skill is useful for far more than just memory competitions and trivia. It can provide the mental bandwidth you need to pack more information inside your head while expanding your processing speed, mental sharpness, and overall brainpower. Let me explain.

A memory palace is an imaginary place where you can go to recall information. What you basically do is envision a large building (a “palace”) in your mind and mentally decorate that building, filling it up from the inside out in ways that help you store information you need to remember. So, for instance, if I’m trying to memorize the signers of the Declaration of Independence, I might go to a parlor in my memory palace where all of the signers are sitting around the table. Or I could have a kitchen where my refrigerator is adorned with important telephone numbers. But memory palaces needn’t be based on palaces per se. They can be based on a trusty route you take to work or a single room where you are most comfortable, such as your bedroom, or a favorite garden. The only rules you have to follow in building this fictional setting are to make it relevant to yourself and your
life and to make it totally
bizarre
. You have to give yourself the freedom to fill your personal space with eccentric objects, situations, people, and even characters. Case in point: In one of my mind’s bedrooms, I can “see” Harry holding little baby Bobbie, causing Nancy one fantastic nightmare (the first ten elements of the periodic table, as you’ll recall).

With time and practice, anyone can build a memory palace, and again, your palace can reap a wide spectrum of benefits for you that go beyond a memory champ’s achievements. You can use your palace at work to mentally stage your presentation at the next board meeting. You can use it at school to recall a year’s worth of knowledge for a final exam or in an athletic setting to store critical information about plays or strategies. And you can use it in more personal ways as well, such as remembering important information like birthdays, anniversaries, your social calendar, and appointments. For instance, you could organize a year’s worth of birthday dates by picturing a twelve-story building, with each floor designated as a month. January is the first floor, and your twelfth floor represents December. Within each floor you have mental pictures that signify the people and corresponding dates of their individual birthdays.

By now it should come as no surprise to you that the reason memory palaces are so effective is that they hinge on their creator’s personal input. That is, they are “built” out of what’s already familiar and comfortable. None of the presidents of the United States may be familiar to you, but place those presidents in your own living room a certain way and suddenly you can get to know Mr. Monroe and Mr. Garfield from a whole new perspective. Just as being in a comfortable and familiar place can boost your confidence and take
the stress out of having to perform, taking abstract, lengthy, or complicated concepts, facts, and ideas with you to those familiar places can help you organize them and make them memorable, transforming hard-to-remember vital facts into easy-to-retrieve information and details. And as I’ve been suggesting over and over again, anytime you can add a bit of absurdity to your imagined scene you create a stronger, more organized memory. So see if you can use your wild imagination and have, say, Mr. Monroe sitting on your toilet reading
Men’s Health
magazine; get Mr. Garfield to ride your orange cat, aptly named Garfield. I once had a student who mentally placed each president in a specific spot in his bedroom so that whenever he had to recall the presidents he could “look around” his room in his mind’s eye.

Lots of Web sites will teach you how to build a memory palace. Most of them follow similar instructions, such as:

You may even want to draw your memory palace on paper the first time you do this exercise. See if that works for you. Memory palaces aren’t for everyone, and they can take time and practice to get used to. But for some of us they can be astonishingly effective. You just might surprise yourself.

From pegs to memory palaces, there are myriad ways to organize your thoughts. The seven I’ve given you in this chapter are just a small sampling; you can probably find other ways to sort and analyze incoming thoughts by employing your imagination and thinking outside the box. See if you can come up with your own unique methods in addition to the ones I’ve described, or simply use your own ideas and personal strategies to modify what you’ve learned in this chapter. You’ll find that certain techniques work better for certain types of material. The goal is to train your brain to utilize the ideal system at a moment’s notice so you don’t have to exert too much effort in first choosing a tool and then applying it.

If you want to test out all seven of my organizing tactics in one fell swoop, pick a topic you know nothing or very little about but wish to learn more about, and gather information on it from various sources. For example, maybe you’d like to know more about the Enlightenment period or about enology (the science of winemaking), or perhaps it’s the history of Pop Art and Andy Warhol that’s got you curious. You don’t have to go further than the Internet to collect your material—aim for a solid ten pages or so of content. Then try to organize all that content using every single strategy presented in this
chapter, starting with the peg system. Notice which types of data in your collection can easily be matched with a peg system but not, say, an acrostic.

You needn’t try to do this all in your head. Until you get really good at matching content with the best organizing technique, it helps to write out notes as you work through the process. Get a highlighter and pen and watch what emerges on paper as you play with the content and drum up stories, cross out irrelevant details, highlight facts, and identify patterns or letters that can become acrostics or other mnemonics. For an added challenge, pretend that you have to give a speech on your subject matter. What would you emphasize? How would you organize your presentation from beginning to end? How could you make it engaging and memorable to your audience?

We organize our thoughts all day long simply in order to think clearly, but rarely do we organize our thoughts on a level that would allow us to give lengthy live talks or to learn by heart an entire topic so we can recite facts and recall even the smallest details at our next dinner party. Yet when we become expert mental organizers, we can perform these impressive feats and break free from the pack. We can also nourish our brainpower and create more space for more information. Remember, an organized brain is a roomy brain. The more swiftly you can organize your thoughts, the more information you can take in quickly—and the more information you can learn.

Ready to flex your organizing skills some more? Below is a series of three exercises that will challenge your brain on every level. See if you can employ some of the strategies outlined in this chapter as you work through each exercise.
Not only will these exercises help you cement those techniques in your mind, but by proactively using them you’ll be learning which ones come more naturally and easily to you, so you’ll then be able to figure out which ones work best for you.

At first, these exercises may not seem to relate to the types of challenges you’ll likely face in the real world, but doing these exercises is the equivalent of flexing certain “muscles” in your brain that you call upon every day in situations that demand you solve problems or quickly process incoming information. Lifting barbells in the gym to strengthen your arms isn’t something you find yourself doing in the real world, but the results of flexing those muscles with the help of a weight will go a long way to prepare you for lifting all kinds of things and to support your body’s healthy biochemistry in general. The same is true of exercises like those below; they have hidden benefits that you won’t necessarily recognize until you’re faced with a challenge at work or in a social environment and your brain can automatically think quickly and support your performance.

Organizing items is a very simple game, but it’s mentally empowering because it helps you improve your focus, mental capacity, mind organization, and memory. When the game is played at the expert level, it becomes very intense and takes a tremendous amount of concentration. The game can be played with two or more people and is usually best played around a nice-sized table, such as the kitchen or dining room table. Some household items are the only equipment you’ll
need: a stopwatch, a pencil and paper, and maybe a sheet or beach towel. Here’s how to play.