Previous : Next
 : Overview : About Brain Dancing : Home Page
Summary of Other Memory Distinctions
While the above four topics offer the most leverage for improving
your memory, there are a few other distinctions that play a role:
- Primacy and Recency: We tend to remember the first
and last ideas more than the ones in between. This means that
many short sessions are better than a single long one, because
you will have more firsts and lasts.
- Synesthesia: The more sensory experience you incorporate
into your memories, the more likely you are to remember them.
As Colin Rose describes in his book, Accelerated Learning,
the Russian psychologist, Professor Luria, spent 30 years studying
a man named Shereshevskii (referred to as S.), who consistently
exhibited perfect recall over long periods (several years). In
addition to having amazing visualization skills, he was also adept
in synesthesia, which is the ability to express a memory generated
in one sense in terms of another. For example, S described a tone
with a pitch of 2,000 cycles per second as looking something like
fireworks with a pink-red hue. S. continued, "The strip of
color feels rough and unpleasant, and it has an ugly taste--rather
like that of a briny pickle."
- Context: Ideas are easier to remember when they can
be associated to a specific context.
- Unusualness: Things are remembered more easily if they
stand out from the ordinary in our minds, which is why Kevin Trudeau's
Megamemory course emphasizes the use of outrageous and ludicrous
multi-sensory imagery.
Previous : Next
 : Overview : About Brain Dancing : Home Page
Copyright © 1996 by Patrick T. Magee