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The second tip I am going to give you is DO NOT LEARN ANYTHING BY ROTE –
that is saying the same thing over and over. That is an old way of learning and will
not help you. In the same way, don’t worry that if you don’t repeat what you have
already learned then you will forget it – you won’t. Not for short periods anyway, and
I will show you how to create a long term memory towards the end of the course.
So where do memory tricks come from? Back in the mists of time the Greeks would
hold competitions with one another – the person who could remember the most
would win. To do this they would remember their information by imagining it in
certain places around a room or the city/town in which they lived. We will use this
technique later. I will start by explaining pegging.
Pegging is like taking a coat and hanging it on a recognisable ‘peg’ which is already
in your memory – that peg itself has a way of remembering it. Don’t worry, it’s not
hard, and although at first you think that you are learning more than originally, you
need only need learn each system once for it to be used over and over again.
Reputedly, pegging first came about when a doctor was involved in an disaster at
sea. He was in the dining room at the time as were many of the passengers with
whom he was acquainted, some 100 or so. The ships documents were lost and it
was important to find out just who was missing,
What had happened was not that he had found a way of creating memories – our
earlier exercise of a past experience should I hope have shown you that you have
a powerful memory already. He had infact stumbled on the crucial element which
is ACCESSING those memories – and that requires order.
Imagine two filing systems. The one is what many of us do - a pile in a cupboard
some place which is a mixture of bills and letters, documents and junk mail. The
other is a neat filing cabinet organised carfefully into bills, letter documents, junk -
each file in date order. One day you urgently need a dated bill to prove that the
gas supplier owes you a rebate. Which do you think will be the easiest place to
find the bill? All it took was a little effort to create a filing system but it saved
hours of hunting. And the same goes for memory – if you do not create a way of
easily accessing the particular memory it will become lost with all the other
memories that you have, perhaps irretrievably.
This is one of the major blocks to people starting to memorize information, they
are put off by the fact that firstly they have to set up their mental filing system.
Where as if they were to take the time and trouble they would realize that they
could recall huge amounts of information.
Although all memory systems rely on pegging, there are a number of systems I
will be telling you about:
Number rhyme
Number shape
Body parts
Letter shape
Story
Journey
Place
Mind-map town
I will also give you some tips on how to get short term memory into long term
memory.
The remainder of this course will deal with specific ideas about memorizing the
important things of life such as telephone numbers, addresses, dates of history,
text contents (for example studying or learning a piece of drama or a story)
directions and where you left the car keys!