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    Link: Upgrade Your Memory for the 21st Century
    Link: Upgrade Your Memory for the 21st Century
    Link: Upgrade Your Memory for the 21st Century
    Ebook141 pages1 hour

    Link: Upgrade Your Memory for the 21st Century

    By Edward Porter

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    About this ebook

    At last! A book on memory techniques that is both modern and written with the everyday life in mind. Not authored by memory athletes, it doesn't contain information on how to memorize a deck of cards in thirty seconds or pi to ten thousand places. What it has instead are techniques and approaches that you can apply to your own life that will make a real difference to your ability to remember that which matters most of all, taught by someone who uses those same techniques every day.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLulu.com
    Release dateJan 4, 2015
    ISBN9781326077969
    Link: Upgrade Your Memory for the 21st Century

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      Book preview

      Link - Edward Porter

      Link: Upgrade Your Memory for the 21st Century

      Link - Upgrade Your Memory for the 21st Century

      © Copyright 2015 Edward Potter

      All rights reserved.

      ISBN: 978-1-326-07796-9

      Introduction

      The first book to mention memory techniques similar to the ones link teaches was written in the 90s BC. The anonymous work Ad Herennium is the earliest existing text that taught memory techniques in any kind of detail. That means the skills you are about to learn are over 2,100 years old! Although books and techniques have come and gone in the intervening centuries, they are all based on the same principles. If that is so, then why on Earth does the world need another book on memory technique?

      That has been the question friends and family have asked me when I have discussed this project and the reason is this. The first wave of contemporary books on memory skills was in the 1950s. These books sought to teach skills that were relevant to the common man (for in those days he still was a man) and were, on the whole, very good. Subsequently, though, the books have become more and more involved with the world of the memory athlete. It does make a kind of sense to think that if one wants to learn the best and strongest methods of memorisation that we should turn to world champions, but in reality this is as logical as modelling one's jogging routine on that of a professional marathon runner. If we’re only interested in getting our cardio in and keep our hearts healthy, it would be inappropriate and even damaging to take on the constant, arduous training of a Mo Farah. I do not say this to counter some notion of elitism in the world of memorisation. I am truly amazed and delighted that anyone can memorise a shuffled deck of playing cards in less than twenty seconds. My point merely is that people in general do not need to memorise a shuffled deck of playing cards, and the science is in, and shows that training to memorise playing cards only prepares one to memorise playing cards - it will do nothing to assist you when it comes to remembering people you are introduced to at a business conference, or which of your one hundred passwords is the right one for your Gmail account. Yet it is, by and large, the memory athlete who will author a book on memory techniques and, understandably, what they are most under pressure to reveal are the skills they use when competing, irrespective of how adaptable they are to real world situations.

      The world of memory athletics didn’t really exist back in the 50s so the temptation simply wasn’t there. These books were written with the practical in mind, but practical to their era, in a world before email, in a world where phone numbers took the form of three letters followed by four digits. These books did, indeed, teach ways of memorising decks of cards, but this was largely due to the popularity of card games such as bridge or pontoon. Even with the current rise in popularity of Texas Hold ‘Em, we are far less interested in card games than we once were. In short, those first contemporary books taught practical skills, but practical only to inhabitants of the 1950s.

      The aim of this book, then, is to try and recapture the practicality of that first wave of memory books and update them for the 21st century. We can add to that another goal. I would not want to write anything that had nothing to add to what has gone before. What you will find in this book, then, are additional pieces of advice that you may not find elsewhere, little hints and tips that I found have helped me to get the systems working, and that I hope will assist you in employing them too.

      There is a notion of the curse of knowledge, that one of the difficulties in teaching something to someone is that we tend to take our own knowledge for granted. We forget what it was like to not know something, and so miss out on the stuff that was in actuality quite fundamental to our understanding. The characteristic of the fundamental is that it becomes so ubiquitous that we forget it is there. It’s like air - we breathe it constantly, but on the whole aren’t consciously aware of its presence. Were we in some strange world where we had to teach someone how to breathe, we might instruct them to breathe in, but they would look at us in confusion as they wonder breathe in what? The curse of knowledge is just that - we forget what is important. I think that this is something else that most books on memory fall fowl of. I hope, then, that in this offering, I do not enter the same trap. I will try and keep things as simple and as ordered as possible.  If there is one thing in particular that is omitted from memory books it is a good grounding in visualisation itself. Memorisation relies on visualisation, but often authors will take the visualisation skills of their readers for granted. Yet many people struggle with this, and find to that end that many of the techniques remain forever shut off from them. Again, this is something I want to take care of, so if you do struggle with visualisation, you will find exercises in Chapter 0 to assist you.

      The techniques I teach are not mine; nor do they belong in any real sense to any of the authors that have preceded me. They are thousands of years old, but just as the way that our brains work has not changed in any great way for millennia, the techniques still work today. Indeed it is quite remarkable how contemporary the original writings still seem. It is not the techniques, then, that have changed, but the world in which we must apply them. More and more we are reliant on the wonderful inventions and gadgets that we have made for ourselves. We have relieved ourselves of the duty of memory, got out of the habit of learning important (but dry) information, such as phone or bank account numbers. I remember growing up knowing loads of phone numbers - nowadays I find it common for people not to even know their own. Everything is remembered for us by machines. But we’ve all been in situations where those machines have failed us. A strong and active memory would, in those situations, give us an edge. And with memory ability, on average, at such a low, aren’t people going to think more highly of those who do remember the names of everyone at the meeting, that don’t have to wade through pages of labour-saving phone network software in order to forward a call or find a number?

      Imagine for a moment, a castaway who washes up on a desert island somewhere. By some chance they happen to have on them a cigarette lighter that is still functional. They don't know how long they will be on the island for, and they have never started a fire from scratch before in their lives. They are, in that case, faced with a dilemma. Do they use the lighter until it runs out of fuel, and then learn how to make fire, or should they learn how to make fire from the outset, acting as though they had no lighter? To my mind it is clear that, given they don't know how long they will be on the island, and do not know how long it will take for them to learn how to make fire, they should try to learn how to make fire while there is still fuel in the lighter. The lighter is something for them to fall back on.

      That’s the correct approach, I think, to make the most of these techniques. Rather than think of your memorisation as back-up for the information on your smartphone, look at it the other way round - the smartphone is there as back-up should your own memory fail you. If you embrace that attitude, and apply the techniques that follow, you will soon be surprising yourself with how little you need to rely on the crutches that so many other people do.

      But most importantly, these techniques are fun to learn and fun to use. If you enjoy

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