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    Living with a Phenomenal Memory: How an Ordinary Man Developed Amazing Memorization Skills
    Living with a Phenomenal Memory: How an Ordinary Man Developed Amazing Memorization Skills
    Living with a Phenomenal Memory: How an Ordinary Man Developed Amazing Memorization Skills
    Ebook154 pages3 hours

    Living with a Phenomenal Memory: How an Ordinary Man Developed Amazing Memorization Skills

    By Frank Healy

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    About this ebook

    In 1966, five-year-old Frank Healy was sick and stayed home from school. Bored and too ill to get out of bed, Frank began looking at a calendar and memorized an entire calendar year in a few days. With additional practice, he memorized everything he experienced by making mental notes throughout the day, from decades of Philadelphia weather facts to the history of space flight and a variety of other subjects.

    Healy, a life coach who specializes in improving memory, documents events that played a part in developing his superior memory skills and provides insight into his ability to recollect. He describes his techniques, how he mastered them, and what others can do, whether the information is for practical use or simply for entertainment.

    With many humorous episodes entwined within, this intriguing memoir includes puzzles, exercises, and tips for developing memory skills. You may not need to memorize the calendar or the daily weather of the past forty years, but Living with a Phenomenal Memory can help you memorize what you do need to know.

    Frank Healy is one of approximately twenty people who have been classified as having HSAM Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory. He remembers what happened every day of his life since he was five years old, including the day of the week, weather, news events, and personal experiences. His memory is similar to the character of Carrie Wells, the police detective in the show "Unforgettable". It can be seen on CBS channel 3 on Tuesdays at 10:00 P.M.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateOct 16, 2007
    ISBN9780595894062
    Living with a Phenomenal Memory: How an Ordinary Man Developed Amazing Memorization Skills
    Author

    Frank Healy

    Frank Healy is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of New Jersey. He counsels people with depression and anxiety. He has highly superior autobiographical memory, and he remembers every day of his life since he was six years old. This includes the day of the week, news, weather, and personal events. He has appeared on The Michael Smerkonish Radio Show, Be the Star You Are, NBC and CBS News Health Check, and been featured in Jersey Man magazine. Frank lives with his wife, Janet, in Dennisville, New Jersey.

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      Book preview

      Living with a Phenomenal Memory - Frank Healy

      Copyright © 2007 by Frank Healy

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

      taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

      iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

      iUniverse 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100 Lincoln, NE 68512 www.iuniverse.com 1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677)

      Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any Web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

      The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility

      for them.

      ISBN: 978-0-595-45095-4 (pbk)

      ISBN: 978-0-595-69441-9 (cloth)

      ISBN: 978-0-595-89406-2 (ebk)

      Printed in the United States of America

      To my parents, brother, sister, and extended family

      You always accepted and nourished my uniqueness

      Contents

      Preface

      Introduction

      1

      A Five Year Old Prodigy

      2

      The Early Years

      3

      How I Memorized My Work In Elementary School

      4

      How I Memorized My Work in Junior and Senior High School

      5

      The College Years

      6

      Fascination with Weather

      7

      How the Memory Skills Affected Me Socially

      8

      Where Was I?

      9

      Is There Anything to Astrology?

      10

      The Dark Side

      11

      Creative Thinking

      12

      A Means of Entertainment Who Needs American Idol?

      13

      More Mental Gymnastics

      14

      Our Brains Are Like Computer Search Engines

      15

      100 years, 112 palindromes

      16

      Quick Calculations

      17

      It Didn’t Make Me Obsessive Compulsive

      18

      Super Advanced Mental

      19

      Does All This Thinking Stress Me?

      20

      More Tips for Developing your own Skills

      Afterword

      About the Author

      Recourses

      Preface

      When I was five years old I memorized an entire year of the calendar in a few days. Over the next few years I memorized several hundred years worth of dates, daily weather facts, daily news, and scores of additional information with minimal effort. I now know which day of the week every date occurs from 1752 to 2999. I know daily weather in the Philadelphia area since 1966. I know tons of facts about the Beatles, Marx Brothers, the History of Space Flight, and a plethora of additional subjects. This book is an autobiography of what life was like having this phenomenal memory.

      My goal in writing this was to delve into the mental processes I used to memorize the information, and to convey to you, the reader the thinking in a clear and concise way as if you were memorizing the information yourself. The secondary goal is to provide you with some amusing stories about what it was like having a phenomenal memory and being an ordinary person otherwise.

      Many people who have memorized the calendar or other facts to an extraordinary degree are autistic savants. This means that they are extraordinary in their area of expertise but severely deficient in other areas. Specifically, they lack the ability to excel in social situations and to empathize with others. Some of them also have mental retardation; therefore they would not have the ability to articulate how they memorize. Since I am not autistic, and I am a Licensed Professional Counselor with a Masters in Counseling Psychology, I have the ability to understand my own mental processes, and articulate them in a book. This book is the culmination of a two-year study on how I memorize the information.

      For those of you who are enamored with titles, I will say that I have never competed in the United States, or World Memory Championships, so I am not officially a grandmaster. I am more interested in making a study of the methods I use to develop my skills. My greatest hope is that by exposing to the world how I developed my memory a contribution can be made to the fields of education and psychology, and many people will be helped to develop their own capacities. Furthermore, most people do not have a dire need to look at 100 faces and immediately memorize the names of the people who have them, or memorize 100 words in a list. However, students need to memorize information, and people need to memorize information for their work. So this book is designed to help people in their everyday concerns.

      Introduction

      Living With a Phenomenal Memory is an all around testimony on my life experience of having a memory developed to a level beyond the level that most people attain. Some chapters focus solely on the thoughts I had, and the mental processes that led to good memory skills. Perhaps unwittingly, I used some processes of Boolean algebra as well as mnemonics to memorize before I had a formal understanding of the names of the processes. Years later, when I read books and listened to tapes on the subject of memory improvement, it was a struggle to apply their techniques, since I had already created my own methods. Essentially I used my imagination and employed anything that was helpful. Some chapters detail how I memorized specific information for my own entertainment, and others detail how I memorized things for practical use. It is recommended that you read each chapter a few times until you understand the principles. Other chapters detail how I developed my skills in different stages of my life. Hopefully these chapters will, provide some entertainment to you, the reader. Some chapters include puzzles for your enjoyment. Finally, several end with a section entitled What You Can Do. It includes tips for developing your own skills if you are interested.

      Through my own experiences of teaching memory skills, I have found that there are as many things that people struggle to memorize, as there are people. Therefore, it is not possible to include every exercise that people might need for their use. I have given some examples of exercises that people will need for their use, such as schoolwork, and I have given some general tips throughout the text. The final chapter is exercises you can use to improve your memory with an entertaining birthday exercise that can help you memorize anything numerical. I have found that most general exercises can be used in a variety of circumstances to fit a variety of needs. Please see the afterword for a way to get your specific questions answered.

      1

      A Five Year Old Prodigy

      I first realized I had extraordinary memory skills when I was five and a half years old. I was home sick from school for a week, and my uncle had given me a calendar for the year 1966. Feeling too ill to be up playing with toys I lay in bed staring at the calendar and felt fascinated by it. Soon I began noticing patterns. If I knew the day of the week of every day from the first week you could calculate the rest of the month by adding 7’s. For example, if the first day of the month was a Saturday you could calculate 1, 8, 15, 22, and 29 to get the subsequent Saturdays in the month. I quickly found it easy to use rote memory and just say over and over the sequences.

      I would say in my head several times, 0ne, eight, fifteen, twenty-two, twenty-nine, and do the same with all of the sequences. Now I was able to tell any date in a month as long as I knew the first seven. For example, if I wanted to know the twenty-first day of a month I would just know when the seventh was because it is in that sequence. So if the seventh was on a Saturday I could quickly figure out seven, fourteen, twenty-one, so the 21st would be on a Saturday.

      I expanded my skills further by using more elaborative rehearsal. Elaborative rehearsal is where you make a connection of two facts, where there is no obvious connection. This is different from rote rehearsal. In rote rehearsal you say the information over and over again. Many students do this when they are studying, they will take information they need to memorize and say it enough times that they hope it will stick. Imagine that you had an assignment to learn the first ten presidents. You start using rote rehearsal by saying George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. So you repeat those names 100 times. Then you repeat the next five 100 times, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, and John Tyler. Then you repeat James Monroe, John Quincy Adams 100 times to bridge the gap. So then you try to say all 10. It sounds like drudgery. Unfortunately many students use rote rehearsal to memorize everything. Conversely, you could use elaborative rehearsal to memorize the same list by doing the following. Think of the bust of George Washington, then imagine it yelling at the Continental Congress and reshaping its head to look like John Adams in the movie 1776. Then you imagine the scene where the committee is meeting and John hands Thomas the quill pen and drafts him to write the Declaration of Independence. Then imagine Thomas Jefferson taking a break from his writing to eat some Dolly Madison ice cream, so now you know that the sequence is Washington the general, Adams the determined and tactless leader of the cause for independence, Thomas Jefferson the writer of the Declaration, and James Madison, the husband of the ice cream queen. Then you imagine when you eat the ice cream you get a real good feeling. Which, if you know some history James Monroe was the president during the Era of Good Feeling. Good feelings don’t always last. Soon we had another tactless Adams in the White house, John Quincy Adams. With his fiery Adams tongue another war breaks out. So the next president is former general Andrew Jackson. During the battle one soldier has a fan (van) instead of a gun. Then a bullet rips through the fan and it gets torn. Van Buren is the next president. Nevertheless the fan becomes a bill and it flies up in the air towards the sun, and the sun is narrowing. The next president is William (Bill) Harrison (narrow sun) Finally, the narrow sun falls down into a house and sits on the john, and the john has arms coming out and is laying piles (you decide what) on the floor, John Tyler (piler).

      This use of elaborative rehearsal might seem bizarre for someone who is not used to using it. However, if you use your imagination you can learn information much faster than the monotonous repetition and drudgery of rote rehearsal. If I had used rote rehearsal to memorize the calendars I could not have taken my range nearly as far as I did. If I had to sit there and repeat March 1, 1966 Tuesday over again I would have become bored and quit quickly. So here is how I used elaborative rehearsal. I had a favorite television program for every night of the week, what six years old does not? I began glancing at the calendar squares with a quick glance

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