What are the best ways to improve memory? I'm skeptical whether those memory games you get when you google improve memory really do anything.
I know getting enough sugar / cholesterol / nutrients in general is important, and I think I'm getting those. I also know sleep is important, which I'm not really getting, but what else can be done?
My memory is ridiculously bad, like I can't remember anything, even sometimes for 30 seconds. (although one time I took place in a study at my university and the study concluded I had a better memory than anyone else who took part), but all the practical things, school assignments, dates, names, etc I won't remember, even the names of songs. Even if I study these things for hours. One time a kid asked me how old I was and I actually couldn't remember if I was 22 or 23, I had to calculate it using my birth year! Maybe it's stress.
But even if it's caused my something like stress or sleep, are there exercises I can do to make my memory good enough to work even when I don't sleep and I'm stressed out?
Thanks
Memory
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Mr. PC
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Re: Memory
Dunno, I forget. 
Seriously, I think it could have something to do with stress like you suggested and/or how important it is for you to remember certain things. I can't remember lots of things just because I don't really care to remember them.
Seriously, I think it could have something to do with stress like you suggested and/or how important it is for you to remember certain things. I can't remember lots of things just because I don't really care to remember them.
Re: Memory
I've actually researched this extensively (by that I mean digging around on the internet and through books, the same way I found the best diet ever (Waidiet)!) so I'll post a bunch of info when I have time, but in short, there are three major key things to phenomenal memory, and about as many gimmicks, misconceptions, and flat out lies out there about memory improvement as there are about diets.
The most essential part of the memory equation, assuming all other areas are decent (not malnourished for instance, not suffering from a brain deformity, etc) is to make it a habit early on. You can think of our brains like wax 'egg-mazes' that you can imprint on, but over time the wax hardens more and more, and although it becomes easier to find your way around the hardened wax-maze after many years of it slowing down and not changing as much (becoming more efficient, like old people), the ability to rapidly change decreases in potential. So, for absolutely outstanding memory - train yourself to get in the habit early on, or more importantly, do it for your kids (for instance, first encourage them to memorize a new word and it's definition everyday, then to memorize a sentence, then a paragraph, a page, a 2d drawing sketch, a 3d sketch, a colored 2d sketch and where the colors go, then a 3d colored drawing, then bigger drawings, two pages, on and on. Even though hardly anyone (probably proportional to waidieters-vs non-waidieters) does this for their children it is one of the single most important skills that will help them for the rest of their lives. The only other skill that compares is social skills, speaking, dictation, and communication. Together with these two skills to an extreme level the kid won't ever have any worries financially or socially. Math, physics, history, English, other languages, you name it -- it's fundamental challenge is solely memory. The more you can remember, the better you are at other skills too - like creative problem solving - because you remember the solutions to more problems and have a more vast bank to draw upon for ideas and inspiration. This is just the tip of the iceberg of memory benefits.
The second most important key besides making it a habit early on (and making it a subconscious one - requiring no effort) is proper diet (waidiet, breastfed, etc). This simply increases the potential and level of comfortableness in increasing memory skills as well as maintaining them - keeping the child more stress free in other levels of life also aids in intricate complex ways, while it's hard to go too deep into, just remember that for adults and especially children diet helps in forming memory skills, and retaining them (sooner the more impact, like a parabola). And by diet I also mean avoidance of toxins, and poor health habits.
Third most important is infrastructure, and the development of mental memory 'tricks', or a system. While the human mind is almost always at a handicap to forget easily in order to adapt, unlike how computers are which are great at memory but not at forgetting and adapting at a rapid pace. The reason you would want to change this is if you know you have the right information to hold onto, and don't need to forget and refine it as much. Still, this brings in the third most important thing - to develop a system in your mind or the targets mind (will be easier for children) to forget wrong information and replace with the right. This leads us to the core of infrastructure, as well as for forming memory and refining it; and that is to use all of the senses and aspects of imagination you can, in a logical order. Everyone has their own subconcious system, although 95% of peoples are really quite sad, including mine. Think about it, do you have a system for remembering someones name, perhaps you remember their face, perhaps you remember something crazy they did, and attach their personality to their name, perhaps you remember a special memory with them to associate with the name, perhaps you don't think names are important and do none of these things, perhaps you do a mixture. The idea behind creating a good infrastructure to where it becomes habitual and subconscious (no effort) is to encompass as many aspects in to remembering things of importance as possible. For example, to remember someone, you could exaggerate their features, Bob Miller might have a mole on his chin, so you'd make it a mile long in your imagination, it would bend downwards for gravity, including physics, to make it more memorable, and it would be hard to forget Bob Miller, this kind of thought can happen in .5 seconds in someones mind while looking at bob miller as he introduces himself, but that's just one aspect - you could do that for every unique feature about bob miller, including his personality, how he touches things, how he moves, if he says certain phrases a lot, if hes tall or wide, if he has hairy arms you could imagine feeling them rub against your chest, disturbing but the more extreme imaginations are the longer they last in memory. The special trick here is to make remembering things a habit as well as effortless - no one can remember strings of boring numbers or bland names on paper without some sensory input to 'spark' the memories back to the front of the conscious mind. Even magical mathematicians who do complex calculations in their mind have logical systems, and the best ones include sensory input, like certain numbers are larger in their mind, imagine a bigger 'font', or a 'red font style' for a certain kind of formula or problem, or perhaps an equation with vines coming out of it in their imagination, it makes things easier to remember. Even sometimes people will 'feel' equations affect them. For instance, we all can remember what happens when a baseball hits us in the stomach traveling fast can't we? it doesn't take much effort to remember the experience because it affected us sensory-ally(sp?), much in the same way we can make, for instance, special-case math problems 'hurt' us in our imagination, so that we remember them and don't get caught by the tricky questions that can't be beat by logical systems alone.
Again this is only three things out of hundreds, and I could write forever so I'll have to continue later. And I haven't even gotten to the misconceptions/lies yet. One of the most common is that repetition is all important - it's not. People can remember punch lines in jokes easily the first time (if it's funny to them) better than many of their times tables (like 6 times 7), which they've done many times (the multiplication) rather than hearing the joke which they've heard once, even if its a joke including numbers or about a math problem. Repetition of things to remember isn't the most important, it's only part of the equation (although repetition of a memory SYSTEM is the most important part however). It's like saying eating oranges will give you great health, well no it won't if you pig out on double bacon cheeseburgers from fast food joints twice a night. However, this isn't to be confused with what I said first - making remembering things a habit (in a logical order/system) is the most important thing (but not the entire equation). The best way to understand this is to realize that if you repeat a sentence you need for a speech many times over you might remember it after X amount of tries, but that amount of tries needed to remember that sentence will always be rather ridiculously high, whereas making a system to remember anything effectively will bring the X amount of tries needed down, as well as the Y amount of tries needed to remember say, phone numbers, or the amount of tries needed to remember shopping lists, or the amount of tries needed to remember almost anything else. Of course the infrastructure can almost always be improved, a mnemonic system is only good for numbers and lists, that's not a good system - the best kind is a full sensory system with mnemonics included (visual,audio,kinesthetic,taste,smell,logic,emotional,egotistical,etc).
The most essential part of the memory equation, assuming all other areas are decent (not malnourished for instance, not suffering from a brain deformity, etc) is to make it a habit early on. You can think of our brains like wax 'egg-mazes' that you can imprint on, but over time the wax hardens more and more, and although it becomes easier to find your way around the hardened wax-maze after many years of it slowing down and not changing as much (becoming more efficient, like old people), the ability to rapidly change decreases in potential. So, for absolutely outstanding memory - train yourself to get in the habit early on, or more importantly, do it for your kids (for instance, first encourage them to memorize a new word and it's definition everyday, then to memorize a sentence, then a paragraph, a page, a 2d drawing sketch, a 3d sketch, a colored 2d sketch and where the colors go, then a 3d colored drawing, then bigger drawings, two pages, on and on. Even though hardly anyone (probably proportional to waidieters-vs non-waidieters) does this for their children it is one of the single most important skills that will help them for the rest of their lives. The only other skill that compares is social skills, speaking, dictation, and communication. Together with these two skills to an extreme level the kid won't ever have any worries financially or socially. Math, physics, history, English, other languages, you name it -- it's fundamental challenge is solely memory. The more you can remember, the better you are at other skills too - like creative problem solving - because you remember the solutions to more problems and have a more vast bank to draw upon for ideas and inspiration. This is just the tip of the iceberg of memory benefits.
The second most important key besides making it a habit early on (and making it a subconscious one - requiring no effort) is proper diet (waidiet, breastfed, etc). This simply increases the potential and level of comfortableness in increasing memory skills as well as maintaining them - keeping the child more stress free in other levels of life also aids in intricate complex ways, while it's hard to go too deep into, just remember that for adults and especially children diet helps in forming memory skills, and retaining them (sooner the more impact, like a parabola). And by diet I also mean avoidance of toxins, and poor health habits.
Third most important is infrastructure, and the development of mental memory 'tricks', or a system. While the human mind is almost always at a handicap to forget easily in order to adapt, unlike how computers are which are great at memory but not at forgetting and adapting at a rapid pace. The reason you would want to change this is if you know you have the right information to hold onto, and don't need to forget and refine it as much. Still, this brings in the third most important thing - to develop a system in your mind or the targets mind (will be easier for children) to forget wrong information and replace with the right. This leads us to the core of infrastructure, as well as for forming memory and refining it; and that is to use all of the senses and aspects of imagination you can, in a logical order. Everyone has their own subconcious system, although 95% of peoples are really quite sad, including mine. Think about it, do you have a system for remembering someones name, perhaps you remember their face, perhaps you remember something crazy they did, and attach their personality to their name, perhaps you remember a special memory with them to associate with the name, perhaps you don't think names are important and do none of these things, perhaps you do a mixture. The idea behind creating a good infrastructure to where it becomes habitual and subconscious (no effort) is to encompass as many aspects in to remembering things of importance as possible. For example, to remember someone, you could exaggerate their features, Bob Miller might have a mole on his chin, so you'd make it a mile long in your imagination, it would bend downwards for gravity, including physics, to make it more memorable, and it would be hard to forget Bob Miller, this kind of thought can happen in .5 seconds in someones mind while looking at bob miller as he introduces himself, but that's just one aspect - you could do that for every unique feature about bob miller, including his personality, how he touches things, how he moves, if he says certain phrases a lot, if hes tall or wide, if he has hairy arms you could imagine feeling them rub against your chest, disturbing but the more extreme imaginations are the longer they last in memory. The special trick here is to make remembering things a habit as well as effortless - no one can remember strings of boring numbers or bland names on paper without some sensory input to 'spark' the memories back to the front of the conscious mind. Even magical mathematicians who do complex calculations in their mind have logical systems, and the best ones include sensory input, like certain numbers are larger in their mind, imagine a bigger 'font', or a 'red font style' for a certain kind of formula or problem, or perhaps an equation with vines coming out of it in their imagination, it makes things easier to remember. Even sometimes people will 'feel' equations affect them. For instance, we all can remember what happens when a baseball hits us in the stomach traveling fast can't we? it doesn't take much effort to remember the experience because it affected us sensory-ally(sp?), much in the same way we can make, for instance, special-case math problems 'hurt' us in our imagination, so that we remember them and don't get caught by the tricky questions that can't be beat by logical systems alone.
Again this is only three things out of hundreds, and I could write forever so I'll have to continue later. And I haven't even gotten to the misconceptions/lies yet. One of the most common is that repetition is all important - it's not. People can remember punch lines in jokes easily the first time (if it's funny to them) better than many of their times tables (like 6 times 7), which they've done many times (the multiplication) rather than hearing the joke which they've heard once, even if its a joke including numbers or about a math problem. Repetition of things to remember isn't the most important, it's only part of the equation (although repetition of a memory SYSTEM is the most important part however). It's like saying eating oranges will give you great health, well no it won't if you pig out on double bacon cheeseburgers from fast food joints twice a night. However, this isn't to be confused with what I said first - making remembering things a habit (in a logical order/system) is the most important thing (but not the entire equation). The best way to understand this is to realize that if you repeat a sentence you need for a speech many times over you might remember it after X amount of tries, but that amount of tries needed to remember that sentence will always be rather ridiculously high, whereas making a system to remember anything effectively will bring the X amount of tries needed down, as well as the Y amount of tries needed to remember say, phone numbers, or the amount of tries needed to remember shopping lists, or the amount of tries needed to remember almost anything else. Of course the infrastructure can almost always be improved, a mnemonic system is only good for numbers and lists, that's not a good system - the best kind is a full sensory system with mnemonics included (visual,audio,kinesthetic,taste,smell,logic,emotional,egotistical,etc).
Re: Memory
Thanks panacea
So if I meet someone named Oliver, and I imagine a baseball hitting me in the stomach when I think 'Oliver', that'll help me remember his name? And than when I meet Cole I think of getting hit in the Ankle? If I used the same feeling / smell / taste / sound for more than one memory, would they get mixed up? Wouldn't I eventually run out of sensations?
Is there anything I can just sit down and practice? It sounds like I should just practice memorizing things. What about the theory that your brain can 'fill up' with information?
So if I meet someone named Oliver, and I imagine a baseball hitting me in the stomach when I think 'Oliver', that'll help me remember his name? And than when I meet Cole I think of getting hit in the Ankle? If I used the same feeling / smell / taste / sound for more than one memory, would they get mixed up? Wouldn't I eventually run out of sensations?
Is there anything I can just sit down and practice? It sounds like I should just practice memorizing things. What about the theory that your brain can 'fill up' with information?
Re: Memory
No there is an infinite amount of sensations man
just like you can feel a basketball, and it feels different than a baseball, the basketball is larger and rougher, or even a softball vs a baseball, obviously the bigger the difference the easier to distinguish, and there has to be a logical system. However in order for this to really be of any benefit for you, you would have to really get after it, and do it constantly to try and work it into your subconscious. It's easier if you start with a sole subject, like say you want to learn Spanish, then for every spanish word, instead of just trying to 'remember' it, visualize it, say the word is table (whatever the spanish word for table is maybe mesa) and then imagine a huge table with a bunch of spanish people sitting around it, with their Mexican food aromas affecting you, and the sound of Mexican banjo music with maybe a giant sombrero on the banjo music guys head sitting in the center of the table, and out of the banjo comes some 'musical notes' that spell 'mesa' (if that's the word), and the letters are transparent see-through green perhaps, and the letters get larger as they float out higher above the table like smoke does, then taste the smokey letters 'mesa' on your tongue, etc etc. Once you get a system down for one word, it's easy to repeat it for other words, once the infrastructure is laid down for words, then you can move on to sentences and ideas, and then your infrastructure will be on the subconscious level, and it's how you will understand the 'Spanish' literal world.
However, for adults, the most immediate and easy way to enhance memory I would say is adopt the wai diet %100, avoid the toxins, and actively engage your brain. There's dozens of tricks that are easy to implement for adults I haven't had the time to post yet (that whole page was only 3 things) but I'll keep adding more. One for instance is if you turn on the faucet with your right hand - try with your left, do everything the opposite every other day. This exercises your memory in order to 'remember' to switch everyday, and also tones your body to be more adept with both hands, in case you break an arm someday
Another thing you could do which really helped me since I was a mouth-breather, was to constantly remind myself for about two days straight to breathe through my nose, not my mouth. The health benefits are great and it's a very daunting task - since you breathe constantly and if you do it wrong it's the perfect way to make a constant 'memory-trigger'. Now every time I breathe out of my mouth even for good reasons (like when running - it's necessary, or like when sick) I'm 'reminded' of my accomplishment and all that 'training' to myself being brought to the front of my mind makes it a lot easier to 'train' to do other things.
The reason diet helps so much is it also fights the inherent laziness in us when we are dowsed by junk foods, and enables us to actually want to do all this. It's only the first part that's hard, it might be hard to believe but when you really adopt a habit like this it becomes effortless and rewarding. Although I must admit, trying to encapsulate it in everything you do, like you could train a child to do relatively easily, would be near impossible because you already have habits for figuring out the world in the way you uniquely do already - that's why it's so rare that 'dummies' become 'geniuses' overnight (not saying you are lol, just pointing out that we get caught up in our habits). It would be like trying to go back and revise all those things you learned - about gravity, about how to eat, about how to act socially, about how to think about yourself (ego), etc, in a totally alien way. It just doesn't work that well for adults, but it would work for a completely new learning environment, like a new language, or a completely new subject like marine biology if you've never learned anything about that.
Also I would like to stress, that if you half-ass it the first time, and just say ok, his name is Oliver, I'll imagine a baseball hitting me in the stomach, and then you do so, but you don't make it real - you just 'see' it, and don't 'buy' into it and actually feel the pain, smell the air you would have to breathe in to gasp to recover from the hit, hear the 'impact' of Oliver hitting you in the stomach (Oliver is transformed into the name of the basketball), and then everytime you see a basketball you picture it turning into Olivers head, it's not going to 'break' through to your mind to get you started. It takes effort the first few weeks (roughly). The secret is making it as easy as possible (with knowledge, correct diet, effort, self discipline, etc). The natural memory geniuses all stumble on similar ways to 'make sense of the world around them'. The only difference between the smart people and the not so smart, besides inherent brain chemistry differences, diet differences, and environmental (MIT vs HighSchool Dropout) differences is that method, it's the single most important category, and in that category the most important thing is to make it habit (rather than elongate the 'imagination' to be minutes long, it shouldn't be); you shouldn't be planning what you're going to do when the next persons name comes up, you should be planning that when it does, you will try hard to creatively remember it, whether it be Sasha (let's pretend she has a cute dress, even if shes not cute, I would put it on a cute girl in my mind and rip it off, yeah you wouldn't wanna tell anybody but there's nothing wrong using your sex drive to aid memory, it's not like you're going to 'get off' in a .5 second imagination brainstorm) or Oliver or Oscar or Panacea. Then diet, then environmental which you can't really control so might as well not bother listing it, nor the brain chemistry.
All in all though, the more effort you initially put into it, the easier it will be to remember things. It's the same with math textbooks, they're freaking huge, and it might take you 8 hours to really understand the first chapter. It might take you 7.5 hours to get the second. But by the 13th chapter (usually there's like 26 total), you're flying through it like the speed of light because you put in intense initial effort. 99% of students of course don't do this, they might try and get discouraged because they don't understand the initial effort-parabola-squared (I made that up) concept. It's the same in memory as it is in 'understanding' (like a textbook), by the way 'understanding' and memory go hand in hand, like the male and female of knowledge.
just like you can feel a basketball, and it feels different than a baseball, the basketball is larger and rougher, or even a softball vs a baseball, obviously the bigger the difference the easier to distinguish, and there has to be a logical system. However in order for this to really be of any benefit for you, you would have to really get after it, and do it constantly to try and work it into your subconscious. It's easier if you start with a sole subject, like say you want to learn Spanish, then for every spanish word, instead of just trying to 'remember' it, visualize it, say the word is table (whatever the spanish word for table is maybe mesa) and then imagine a huge table with a bunch of spanish people sitting around it, with their Mexican food aromas affecting you, and the sound of Mexican banjo music with maybe a giant sombrero on the banjo music guys head sitting in the center of the table, and out of the banjo comes some 'musical notes' that spell 'mesa' (if that's the word), and the letters are transparent see-through green perhaps, and the letters get larger as they float out higher above the table like smoke does, then taste the smokey letters 'mesa' on your tongue, etc etc. Once you get a system down for one word, it's easy to repeat it for other words, once the infrastructure is laid down for words, then you can move on to sentences and ideas, and then your infrastructure will be on the subconscious level, and it's how you will understand the 'Spanish' literal world.
However, for adults, the most immediate and easy way to enhance memory I would say is adopt the wai diet %100, avoid the toxins, and actively engage your brain. There's dozens of tricks that are easy to implement for adults I haven't had the time to post yet (that whole page was only 3 things) but I'll keep adding more. One for instance is if you turn on the faucet with your right hand - try with your left, do everything the opposite every other day. This exercises your memory in order to 'remember' to switch everyday, and also tones your body to be more adept with both hands, in case you break an arm someday
Another thing you could do which really helped me since I was a mouth-breather, was to constantly remind myself for about two days straight to breathe through my nose, not my mouth. The health benefits are great and it's a very daunting task - since you breathe constantly and if you do it wrong it's the perfect way to make a constant 'memory-trigger'. Now every time I breathe out of my mouth even for good reasons (like when running - it's necessary, or like when sick) I'm 'reminded' of my accomplishment and all that 'training' to myself being brought to the front of my mind makes it a lot easier to 'train' to do other things.
The reason diet helps so much is it also fights the inherent laziness in us when we are dowsed by junk foods, and enables us to actually want to do all this. It's only the first part that's hard, it might be hard to believe but when you really adopt a habit like this it becomes effortless and rewarding. Although I must admit, trying to encapsulate it in everything you do, like you could train a child to do relatively easily, would be near impossible because you already have habits for figuring out the world in the way you uniquely do already - that's why it's so rare that 'dummies' become 'geniuses' overnight (not saying you are lol, just pointing out that we get caught up in our habits). It would be like trying to go back and revise all those things you learned - about gravity, about how to eat, about how to act socially, about how to think about yourself (ego), etc, in a totally alien way. It just doesn't work that well for adults, but it would work for a completely new learning environment, like a new language, or a completely new subject like marine biology if you've never learned anything about that.
Also I would like to stress, that if you half-ass it the first time, and just say ok, his name is Oliver, I'll imagine a baseball hitting me in the stomach, and then you do so, but you don't make it real - you just 'see' it, and don't 'buy' into it and actually feel the pain, smell the air you would have to breathe in to gasp to recover from the hit, hear the 'impact' of Oliver hitting you in the stomach (Oliver is transformed into the name of the basketball), and then everytime you see a basketball you picture it turning into Olivers head, it's not going to 'break' through to your mind to get you started. It takes effort the first few weeks (roughly). The secret is making it as easy as possible (with knowledge, correct diet, effort, self discipline, etc). The natural memory geniuses all stumble on similar ways to 'make sense of the world around them'. The only difference between the smart people and the not so smart, besides inherent brain chemistry differences, diet differences, and environmental (MIT vs HighSchool Dropout) differences is that method, it's the single most important category, and in that category the most important thing is to make it habit (rather than elongate the 'imagination' to be minutes long, it shouldn't be); you shouldn't be planning what you're going to do when the next persons name comes up, you should be planning that when it does, you will try hard to creatively remember it, whether it be Sasha (let's pretend she has a cute dress, even if shes not cute, I would put it on a cute girl in my mind and rip it off, yeah you wouldn't wanna tell anybody but there's nothing wrong using your sex drive to aid memory, it's not like you're going to 'get off' in a .5 second imagination brainstorm) or Oliver or Oscar or Panacea
. Then diet, then environmental which you can't really control so might as well not bother listing it, nor the brain chemistry.All in all though, the more effort you initially put into it, the easier it will be to remember things. It's the same with math textbooks, they're freaking huge, and it might take you 8 hours to really understand the first chapter. It might take you 7.5 hours to get the second. But by the 13th chapter (usually there's like 26 total), you're flying through it like the speed of light because you put in intense initial effort. 99% of students of course don't do this, they might try and get discouraged because they don't understand the initial effort-parabola-squared (I made that up) concept. It's the same in memory as it is in 'understanding' (like a textbook), by the way 'understanding' and memory go hand in hand, like the male and female of knowledge.
Re: Memory
So my impression here is that the goal is to have as much sensory input for every memory I make as I can. Is that the idea?
And thanks for all this. The more information the better, I really want to improve my memory, although what you're describing does actually sounds really tough. It actually makes me want to have a kid even more because I could teach him to be so much better than I am.
And thanks for all this. The more information the better, I really want to improve my memory, although what you're describing does actually sounds really tough. It actually makes me want to have a kid even more because I could teach him to be so much better than I am.
Re: Memory
yes but in a short period of time - it's supposed to happen fast and intense, not slow and drawn out. or else it won't be feasible. that's where the initial effort comes in. yes good memory development is tough, but it's really half of civilized survivals equation so it should be expected. once you have good memory down almost everything else is easy, so it makes sense that it's tough.