Remember Everything

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Phones and laptops, organizers and tablets, computers and electronic notebooks - each of us today necessarily has a gadget at hand, or even more, that stores all the information we need, from important phones and dates to a list of urgent things. As a result, we are less and less referring to our own memory, entrusting data storage to gadgets. And, as you know, organs that are not used atrophy. As a result, diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all kinds of dementia and other brain diseases are on the rise worldwide. Many experts are inclined to believe that this is the result of the fact that we are less and less using the capabilities of the brain, which leads to a general deterioration in its condition

Why it is important to constantly train your memory, how it can be done and what success can be achieved in the art of memorization, Valentin KIM, a teacher at the Institute for Advanced Training of Industrial Personnel of Ukraine and the head of the Memory Development Center, told the readers of the Academy of Sciences

- Valentin Vladimirovich, do we really lose the ability to memorize by trusting important information to electronic devices?

- These are the tendencies. Even 20-30 years ago, each person remembered important phone numbers, dates of birth, addresses and postal codes. Each of them had some kind of notebooks, but even without reminders, people could find themselves somewhere on a visit, taking the opportunity to call from a landline phone and congratulate loved ones, for example, happy birthday. Today many people cannot even remember their own phone number. When meeting, exchanging numbers, people often say - dictate your phone number, I will call you back and you will fix my number. They say so simply because they do not remember their number. More and more we save any information on carriers and lose the ability to remember it, because memory, if not used, decreases, atrophies. Moreover, not only memory becomes worse, but also all thought processes. According to many studies, modern man has a worse reaction and memory than people had 100-150 years ago.

- Does memory impairment really lead to early brain aging?

- There are no serious academic studies that would confirm or deny this theory. But many experts believe that in our electronic age, when we stop straining our memory, it deteriorates and this affects the brain processes in general. A direct analogy is that a person who leads a sedentary lifestyle begins to suffer from diseases associated not only with the state of the muscles, but also with the functioning of internal organs. The human body is a closed system and one process depends on another. Therefore, the improvement of one process, one of the functions, has a positive effect on others as well. And we really have recently begun to pay less attention to keeping ourselves in good shape. Including keeping your cognitive processes in good shape. Memory, attention, thinking, development of creativity. The development of memory improves the general condition of a person - I believe. - You give lectures for intelligence officers, for bodyguards. What do people of such professions learn to memorize?

- For the security services and employees of the internal affairs bodies, I have developed a program for memorizing faces. I teach students to memorize their appearance by key features that do not change with age, and that cannot be changed through disguise. I show the students of the course photographs of people in childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age, and pay attention to those signs that do not change with age, and those that change constantly. For example, people have ears and noses growing all their lives. And the size of the eyes does not change. That is why the children's eyes are so attractive, proportionally children's eyes take up more space on the face. Directly on the course, I teach bodyguards to pay attention to the shape of the eyes, the structure of the skull, the shape of the face. Those who have attended my course gain the ability to tenaciously memorize a person's appearance and recognize people, regardless of whether they have grown a beard or put on glasses.

- Can you share with your readers some techniques for memorizing information?

- When I give master classes, I usually always talk about the Cetseron Method. This is the basic technique with which acquaintance with the art of memorization begins. It is believed that this method was developed by Cetseron himself. In the United States, this technique is called the "memory palace". The essence of this method of memorization is that in order to memorize key information, a person creates key locations, in other words, a directory, a data storage system.

If we imagine our memory, the memory of an ordinary person, then this is just a closet where everything is dumped and at random. Therefore, in order to get some information, the owner of the closet is forced to rummage through this whole pile. A person who owns certain memorization techniques seems to create convenient shelves and drawers where he puts all the necessary things. And therefore, it is convenient and quick for him to get it all - and reproduce the necessary information.

According to Cicero's method, we must imagine our room, where we know well the arrangement of things. For example, to the right of the entrance you have a bedside table, then a wardrobe, then a chair, and so on. Then, you take a list of words to remember and mentally place those words on objects in your room. For example, if you need to memorize the word teapot, you imagine the teapot on your nightstand. Next comes the word faucet - you mentally put the faucet in the closet and so on. As a result, when a person needs to reproduce the words he memorizes, he simply imagines himself in his room and simply collects images of the words he memorized from the locations in which they are located. An ordinary person without training can memorize a list of 12-16 words. The method of Cicero allows you to memorize chains of 20-40 or more words.

The practical significance of the method is, of course, not in the ability to memorize words that no one needs. This method can be used to memorize a to-do list - by presenting each item on the list as an image, and placing these images in locations, you will not forget anything. Use this method to memorize a shopping list. It is very convenient. Also, this method is great for memorizing speeches when you need to learn speech, for example. Just break the talk into paragraphs, and for each paragraph, come up with an image, and then place the images by location. Cicero, by the way, became famous precisely because he could memorize very long speeches and never forgot where he stopped if he was interrupted.

The advantage of this method is that it is quite easy to master and after several trainings a person starts to use it automatically.

- Tell us about the methods of memorizing foreign words?

- For the study of foreign words there is a method of phonetic associations, when we memorize foreign words by consonance. For example, we need to memorize the English word lesson - lesson. We imagine what this word can mean exactly by sound. We break it down into two words - this is a forest and a dream. Then we imagine a dream in the forest and connect it directly with the meaning of this word - a lesson. One can imagine that there are desks in the forest and the students sleep on them. And when we hear the word lesson, we immediately see this picture. This is how we start thinking in a foreign language without having to first translate the word into Russian. This makes memorizing words much easier. The same method is perfect for memorizing surnames. For example, you need to remember the last name Mikhelson. Using the method of phonetic associations, select images and link them to this person. For example, the surname Mikhelson can be broken down into several words - mikh - spruce - dream. Michael sleeps on the fir, or under the fir. Imagine this person sleeping under a tree, or standing under a tree on which a bear sleeps. It sounds funny, but it works. The more interesting and unusual the association itself, the better it is remembered.

- Are there simple ways that a person could improve their memory?

- There are a number of exercises that will help keep your memory "in good shape." They need to be done every day to keep the memory "working". For example, I advise everyone to remember the day before going to bed, and remember not in general, but in detail, every half hour of the past day. For example, you woke up at 7 in the morning, at half past seven you had breakfast with scrambled eggs, at 8 in the morning you left the house and forgot your car keys, you had to return … and so on all day. This exercise teaches a person not only to remember everything, but also to extract information from memory, and at the same time makes us more attentive to everything that happens around us, increases the awareness of our actions.

I also recommend giving up the calculator and doing all the simplest mathematical operations in your head. It is also useful to go to the store without a shopping list - this is, of course, an "extreme" method of training memory, but if you squeeze your will, sooner or later you will stop forgetting about necessary purchases and making unnecessary purchases.

There is another way. If you have heard a new word, learned about an interesting event - try to study it thoroughly, from all sides. Find new information related data. Thus, you will study it from all sides, link it with the phenomena and facts already known to you, and more firmly fix it in your memory. Our memory remembers not only facts, but also the connections between them.

- Are these exercises suitable for any age?

- Using these methods, each person can improve their memory. Recently, as an expert, I attended the registration of the Ukrainian Guinness record. Pensioner Voron Nikolay Nikolaevich recited poetry for 6 hours. This man is 71 years old. I talked to him, he said that he once read in a newspaper that our politician Tigipko in his youth knew all of Eugene Onegin by heart. Well, in youth it is much easier to learn a poem than in old age, and Nikolai Nikolaevich decided to surpass the minister. Every day he memorized some fragment of a poem and thus learned all of Eugene Onegin, and Kotlyarevsky's Aeneid, and a lot of other poems. A person in old age has managed to develop memory and significantly increase its volume. At the same time, according to him, he also received a number of pleasant bonuses - his general well-being, attention improved, it became easier to memorize any information and, surprisingly, the general background of his mood improved.

Published in the newspaper "Argumenty nedeli", 16.10.2013