THE SECRET OF MEMORY

By Lance King
Constant Sensory Input
All that you are aware of comes directly to you through your senses as sights, sounds,
tastes, smells and skin sensations. At any one moment our brains are receiving over one
million impulses from our nervous system but we are only paying attention to selected parts
of that raw sensory data stream. If we did not have a sifting and selecting system to decide
what to pay attention to our conscious minds would be so overwhelmed by incoming
information that we would not be able to think clearly at all. Notice right now how you are
able to read these words, to understand what they mean individually and collectively, to
compare what you are reading with what you already know, to make estimations as to where
this discussion is going at the same time as being peripherally aware of the temperature of
your surroundings, the texture of the clothes you are wearing, the pressure of the chair you
are sitting in as well as the sounds around you, the visual field around this page, the taste in
your mouth, and the smell of the air around you. You are able to ignore all of that sensory
input through the action of two specialised parts of your brain. They are called the
hippocampus and the amygdala and between them they scan all the incoming data and
select that which will receive conscious attention and that which will be ignored, absorbed
temporarily, or remembered at an unconscious level. What your mind seems to be constantly
searching for is novelty and incongruity
Did you know that there are three kinds of people in the world?
- Those that can count and those that cant.
(Didnt he say three???)
See what I mean?
As soon as something stands out, like if your seat suddenly started burning or you heard a
shot, you would notice it and it would take over your conscious attention. Constant sensory
input tends to be ignored and this is why we use novelty, surprise and just plain silliness to
remember things because it makes them stand out.

More Senses - More Memory

The other thing to notice about your sensory input is that the more senses that are involved
in a memory the easier it is to recall. Remember back to what you were doing last Christmas
day. Notice how that memory comes back. Can you bring back to mind
pictures - what the scene looked like, who was there, where you were
sounds - peoples voices, music, children, other sounds
skin sensations - whether it was a hot or cold day, windy or calm.
feelings - whether you were happy, content, excited, worried, sad. tastes and smells remember that Christmas dinner?
For most of you that will be an easy memory to recall simply because it is hooked with so
many senses - it is placed in context. Our contextual memory is our most natural and easiest
memory to use, whereas remembering things in isolation stored with only one sense requires
much more effort and is much less reliable.

Test Yourself
Try reading over the following list three times:

ball
broom
scissors
shovel
whistle
golf club
tree
soap
seagull
car
grass
comb
Now turn over this page and try writing down as many of those items as you can remember.
Check them back.
Chances are you didnt do too well and thats normal.
Now Im going to show you how to do it better - and easier.

Sink Those Memories

A good way to think about your memory is to liken it to water in a well or in a deep pond. This
is because the surface of the water is like your short term memory and the depth of the water
is like your long-term memory. Just like the surface area of the pond your short term memory
is of limited size whereas the depth of water in the pond and your long term memory are
virtually unlimited in size. When you try to remember twelve words by repetition it is like you
are floating them on the surface of your pond and the surface is soon full. Most people can
hold between five and nine items in short term memory and then only for a short time.
It would be much more effective if when you first saw those words you were able to feed
them directly into your long term memory, in effect sink them into the pond. To sink them you
have to give them more weight and the easiest way to do that is to link them all together then they will sink. The simplest linking system involves creating as many sensory
connections as possible to each item and also between the items. There are many different
ways to do this but the one I have found works best is to create a narrative or story to link the
items together and to make sure that the story is vivid and experienced in your imagination
with all your senses.
Use Your Imagination
For example, with those previous items you might imagine that you were: playing with a ball
on a netball court, dribbling along, heading towards the basket and you notice that someone
is digging up the whole basket, pole and all with a shovel. You get real close to them and
they put a tree into the hole theyve just dug, put the basket and pole in the back of their car
and drive away. Theyve left a bit of a mess behind so you pick up a broom and sweep away
the dirt whistling as you go. Some of the dirt wont come off though and so you get down on
you hands and knees and try scrub it off with soap and water. But as you scrub grass starts
to sprout and grow up around you. You pull out a pair of scissors and start cutting the grass
but it is growing so fast you take to beating it down with a golf club until it forms the shape of
a huge nest in which a seagull lands, makes itself comfortable, pulls out a comb and starts
combing its feathers.
Imagine this story vividly and then try writing out those twelve items again.
(A good idea now is to test the idea again by writing a new list of twelve items, swapping it
with someone else and making up your own vivid story to remember it.)
Ill bet you did much better that before - all because you formed vivid multisensory links to the
information by using your imagination.

No Effort

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An interesting thing to notice about using your imagination for memory is that it is a system
that requires minimum effort. Remembering by repetition, by rote, requires a lot of stress and
strain, a lot of practice and testing to get it right. Remembering by using your multisensory
imagination involves no strain and no pain. Your imagination works best when your mind is
relaxed and free to create connections between ideas.
Favourite Sensory System
Every person can make connections between ideas using all their senses but you may find
you favour one sensory system over another. If we use the most common grouping of
sensory systems they are:
visual - pictures, colours, shape, form, pattern;
auditory - sounds, tone, pitch, tempo;
kinesthetic - emotion, physical sensations, smell, taste;
and we can develop techniques in each system for shifting information from short term to
long term memory.

Short and Long Term

Short term memory is what you are using when you want to hold some information for just a
few seconds. Most people use auditory repetition, in other words saying it to themselves
inside their heads, to hold things in short term memory. Short term memory has a very
limited capacity up to nine things maximum and a short duration - up to one minute. The
key difference between short term and long term memory is the links that the brain makes
with information creating connections and giving the information more meaning or
significance. Long term memory has virtually no limit to its capacity and things stored in long
term memory can last a lifetime.
Memory Techniques
There are ways of shifting information from short term into long term memory in each
sensory system:
Visual - recognising patterns eg. in factorising algebraic equations; coding memories with
colour eg. in remembering the meaning of traffic lights; exaggerating a feature of somebodys
face or body to help recognise them; remembering a speech as a sequence of static images
like a cartoon strip; placing items to be remembered visually in places around your home or
on your body.
Auditory - using rhymes eg. if asked how many days there are in August most people will
refer back to Thirty days have September, April June . . . etc; using auditory acronyms eg.
what are the colours of the rainbow? ROYGBIV; we use both rhythm and melody to
remember the words of a song or an advertising jingle; certain tones of voice can remind us
of certain actions; we often connect specific pieces of music with specific memories eg.
theme music for movies, political rallies.
Kinesthetic - using physical repetition to remember the balance necessary to ride a bike or
ski, or the sequence of complex movements for dancing or the higher level Karta in karate;
physical pain and emotional impact will create kinesthetic links to memories; full sensory
visualisation of processes and events is a powerful way to remember history, languages involving all your body but only in your imagination.

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You may find that you have a definite preference for one type of memory system but most
people find that linking all the senses together produces the strongest, most easily recalled
memories.
Perfect Memory
One of the most remarkable example of effective multi-sensory memory was probably
Soloman Veniovitch Shereshevki, a Russian journalist in the 1920s with a perfect eidetic
memory - he was unable to ever forget anything. Shereshevski was studied for more than 20
years by the Russian neurologist A R Luria who was able to confirm his remarkable ability
with scientific testing. One good example of his extraordinary ability was when Luria gave
him a page of random two letter combinations (lb gr tk oc . . . ) to read through just once and
then eight years later asked him to recall what was on the page. Shereshevski not only got
all the letters correct he also remembered perfectly where they were when they took the test,
what they were both wearing, what the weather was like, what they had for lunch and much,
much more.

Synaesthesia
What Luria discovered about Shereshevski was that his remarkable memory was due to a
mental condition called synaesthesia. In synaesthesia the senses lose their boundaries and
begin to merge with each other. Thus a certain sound will produce in the mind a certain
colour, a sight will have sounds connected with it, smells have texture etc, The cross-linking
of two senses is thought to occur in about one child in 25,000 but drops of dramatically as
their age and socialisation increases. What was remarkable about Shereshevski was that he
had total synaesthesia, every sensory impression he received he represented mentally in
every other sense. When asked to indicate how he experienced the sound of a single note
played on a piano, Shereshevski replied
a brown strip against a dark background that had red tongue-like edges with a
sense of taste like sweet and sour borscht.
With a different note he saw
a velvet cord with fibres jutting out on all sides, the cord is tinged with
a delicate,
pleasant pink-orange hue.
Shereshevskis synaesthesia enabled him to hook every experience of his life in all his
senses which made everything very memorable to him.
Involve All Senses
Complete sensory involvement seems to be the most effective way to increase memory
power. While we dont yet know how to train the mind to be synaesthetic what we can do is
utilise our imagination to create hooks in every sense for the information that we wish to
recall. For everything that you wish to remember make sure you focus your inner attention on
creating each memory in all your senses. See it, hear it, touch it, notice how you feel about it,
taste it and smell it - use your imagination - this is the secret of memory.
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