Moonwalking With Einstein Flashcards
Original Use of Mnemonics
“The techniques existed not just to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards, but also to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.
Brains of Mental Athletes
engaging several regions of the brain known to be involved in two specific tasks: visual memory and spatial navigation, including the same right posterior hippocampal region that the London cabbies had enlarged with all their daily way-finding.”
“consciously converting the information they were being asked to memorize into images, and distributing those images along familiar spatial journeys. ”
Experts vs Nonexperts
Experts see the world differently. They notice things that nonexperts don’t see. They home in on the information that matters most, and have an almost automatic sense of what to do with it. And most important, experts process the enormous amounts of information flowing through their senses in more sophisticated ways. They can overcome one of the brain’s most fundamental constraints: the magical number seven.
Memory as Expertise
“ He argued that expertise in “the field of shoemaking, painting, building, [or] confectionary” is the result of the same accumulation of “experiential linkings.” According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just “vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain.” In other words, a great memory isn’t just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.”
Memory as Experience of life
“Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time.
As memories are activated again
as memories age, their complexion changes. Each time we think about a memory, we integrate it more deeply into our web of other memories, and therefore make it more stable and less likely to be dislodged.”
Basic Principle of Memory Techniques
change whatever boring thing is being inputted into your memory into something that is so colorful, so exciting, and so different from anything you’ve seen before that you can’t possibly forget it,”
Ancient Esteem of Memory
“A strong memory was seen as the greatest virtue since it represented the internalization of a universe of external knowledge. ”
Inanimate vs Animate
Animate Objects tend to be more memorable than inanimate
Deep Processing of a Memory
“It’s important that you deeply process that image, so you give it as much attention as possible,” Ed continued. “Things that grab our attention are more memorable, and attention is not something you can simply will. It has to be pulled in by the details. By laying down elaborate, engaging, vivid images in your mind, it more or less guarantees that your brain is going to end up storing a robust, dependable memory.”
Why it’s better to get vulgar and outrageous
When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them, because the mind is not being stirred by anything novel or marvelous. But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.”
Building A stockpile of Palaces
“My first assignment was to begin collecting architecture. Before I could embark on any serious degree of memory training, I first needed a stockpile of memory palaces at my disposal. ”
The goal was to know these places so thoroughly to have such a rich and textured set of associations with every corner of every room, that i could speed through the places scattering images as quickly as i could sketch them in. The better i knew the buildings the easier it would be to reconstruct them.
How to picture Memories
The author instructs his readers to create images of “exceptional beauty or singular ugliness,” to put them into motion, and to ornament them in ways that render them more distinct. One could “disfigure them, as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint,” or else proceed by “assigning certain comic effects to our images.”
Some keys to Easy Memorization
Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity.
Brains as Pattern Seeking Machines
Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.